• 08May

  Hotel Key Cards… – Useful Tip

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  Ever wonder what is on your magnetic key card?

  Answer:

  A. Customer’s name
  B. Customer’s partial home address
  C. Hotel room number
  D. Check-in date and check-out dates
  E. Customer’s credit card number and expiration date!

  When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a handful of cards home and, using a scanning device, transfer the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense. Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically overwritten on the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process. But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it is usually kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!

  The bottom line is: If you have a small magnet, pass it across the magnetic strip several times. Then try it in the door, it will not work. It erases everything on the card.

  Or…..

  Keep the cards, take them home with you and destroy them. NEVER leave them behind in the room or room wastebasket, and NEVER turn them into the front desk when you check-out of a room without erasing the information. They will not charge you for the card (it’s illegal) and you’ll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable, personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader. For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up, especially through the electronic information strip!.

• 27Apr

  Living in Farmville

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  I have been on facebook for about a year now… I joined facebook, at my husband’s urging, you have probably heard the the conversation it goes like this…
  Honey, you will like this facebook thing, you can keep in touch with friends, find old friends, communicate with others, keep in touch, and see what everyone is up to..its great, try it ……So I tried facebook, and I do have fun, I have several people that I razz and others that I reach out to every so often to just say hi…It has replaced email for me in most cases….you can even IM people who are on facebook…However here is my demon….A very nice lady from church sent me an invite to Farmville, now I had several other invites in the past and just turned it down, I was not interested, however I felt obligated when the person from church sent the invite…I don’t usually get swayed that way, just because the church lady is doing means I have to do it…but I decided to accept….

  Here is where the demon comes in ….once you join you have to go to your farm daily and plow and plant and harvest, and then take care of the animals, then you have to have a place for the animals, then you of course have to have a place for your imaginary farm person to live… And as you acquire things the more work you have to do…..So for those of you who play farmville let me tell you where I stand : I am at level 33, I own 3 cottages,1 farmhouse, 1 estate, 1 barn, 1 chicken coop, 2 dairy farms, 3 silo, and horse barn, and a nursey barn for the foals, a Maison(I don’t even know what that is, but I have one), 8 sheep, 16 goat, 9 bulls, 62 chicken, 35 cows, 18 baby cows, 6 deer, 6 rabbit, 2 turkeys, 5 penquins, 2 dogs, 5 cats, 1 turtle, 1 goose, 2 swans, 15 ducks, and a fruit stand, a flower stand,1 tractor, 1 harvester, and many other small things….so after taking care of everything you have on your farm, you then go and visit your friends farms to gain xtra points and to find special goodies….All of this of course takes time and you are also scanning your friends post to see if they are giving away goodies for your farm like gas and animals, and points…all of this is very time consuming…I have over 30 neighbors…

  So to get back to my reason for this post…1st the person that invited me does not even play…..2nd my husband who said facebook would be fun, had no idea what he was starting….and last, all of the nice things I have on my site, and how I have it layed out is like a real farm, it can get kinda depressing….like is there anyway I can live in farmville, things just seem so much easier there. You need food click on it, you need things harvested click on it….If only real life could be more like farmville….

  Tags: facebook, Farmvillle

• 22Feb

  Bloom Box – Should power companies sell these things?

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  As far as energy goes, the Holy Grail is a power source that’s inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.

  You’ll generate your own electricity with the box and it’ll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.

  Two boxes can power the average high-consumption home and one box can power the average low-consumption home, at least that’s the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on the 60 Minutes show on CBS. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that has been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell.

  Bloom’s design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green “ink” on one side and a black “ink” on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities – a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.

  Now get this, skeptics: there are already several corporate customers using refrigerator-sized Bloom Boxes. The corporate-sized cells cost $700,000 to $800,000 and are installed at 20 customers you’ve already heard of including FedEx and Wal-mart – Google was first to join this green energy party, using its Bloom Boxes to power a data center for the last 18 months. Ebay has installed its boxes on the front lawn of its San Jose location. It estimates to receive almost 15% of its energy needs from Bloom, saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago – an estimate we assume doesn’t factor in the millions Ebay paid for the boxes themselves. Bloom makes about one box a day at the moment and believes that within 5 to 10 years it can drive down the cost to about $3,000 to make it suitable for home use, which sounds awfully expensive. Nevertheless, Bloom Energy will go public with details on the 24th of February.

  Via: Engadget

• 11Nov

  The 11th Hour: The Date Behind Veterans Day – Yahoo! Buzz

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  The 11th Hour: The Date Behind Veterans Day

  by Claudine Zap

  While most know that Veterans Day honors those who have served in the military, the meaning behind its exact date (November 11) may not be so familiar. Here’s the backstory:

  Back in 1918, in the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, a stop to hostilities was declared, ending World War I. An armistice to cease the fighting on the Western Front was signed by the Allied powers and Germany.

  President Woodrow Wilson immediately proclaimed the day “Armistice Day,” kicking off the annual commemoration on November 11. But over the years, with veterans returning from World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became Veterans Day — a day reserved to honor veterans returning from all wars. But 11/11 still represented the end of the Great War in the public’s mind, and the date stuck.

  In 1921, unidentified dead from the war were buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., Westminster Abbey in London, and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The tradition to honor those killed in the war but never identified continues every year in the U.S. The ceremony is held at 11 a.m. at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Congress designated Veterans Day as a legal holiday in 1938, and since then, most Americans have come to know it as a day for store sales and parades. Yahoo! Searches on the holiday have already surged on the Web. People want to know “veterans day history,” “veterans day closings,” veterans day sales,” and “veterans day free meals.”

  via The Buzz Log – The 11th Hour: The Date Behind Veterans Day – Yahoo! Buzz.

  Tags: 11 11, armistice day, november 11, origin, veteran, veterans day

• 16Oct

  Obama Seeks Power to Shut Down the Internet

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  Senator Democrats are attempting to pass legislation which will give President Obama the authority to shut down the Internet and seize private networks.

  On CNET News, Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), stated “As soon as you’re saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it’s going to be a really big issue.”

  The bill, misleadingly titled “The Cybersecurity Act of 2009″, allows Obama to declare an emergency based upon no hard criteria. Once he declares this emergency, he can effectively shut down free speech on the Internet.

  Jay Rockefeller, the bill’s sponsor, said “I know the threats we face. Our enemies are real. They are sophisticated, they are determined and they will not rest.” Unfortunately, it looks like the threat which Jay is most worried about is free speech from Americans who do not approve of Obama’s plans to impose national socialism upon the citizens of the United States.

  In addition, the bill will require government licenses of any individual who seeks employment as a “cybersecurity professional”, effectively giving the Democratic party authority to prevent their political opponents from being involved in protecting either government or private networks from attack.

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