Charlie Lehardy

This is going to be fairly short, but it’s too long and important to be relegated to a status update.

Social media has come a long way in the last couple of years, mostly due to the smart phones that have become so popular, even I bought one (and am writing this post with it). However, with the rapid advances, security has been pushed to the wayside most of the time, or at least only given a passing glance.

This is apparent when you look at the phishing attacks.that keep happening on Twitter, and sites like http://pleaserobme.com/ cropping up. With so many sites dedicated to tracking your every move and people passing their personal info around like it’s candy (how many of those “I’ve lost my phone and need contacts” groups have you seen on Facebook?), I expect we will be seeing more and more criminals that take advantage of the info we publish without a thought.

In the case of location checkins via services like FourSquare, I think PleaseRobMe.com has it right. Whenever we post this info, it’s telling people that we’re not at home and plenty of people will start taking advantage of that.

Secondly, with services like Facebook, we can post all our contact info for all our friends to see. I don’t know about you, but my “friend” list on Facebook is MASSIVE. Far more than I’m actually friends with. But yet, I’ve got my address, phone number, email address, birthday, employer and much more, all available to these “friends”. Not that I’m saying I don’t trust them, but who’s to say someone I DON’T trust gets access to their account?

Then there’s multiple account access. Services like OpenID are great, but what happens if someone gets your login info? Also, do you really trust 3rd party services with keeping your Twitter or Google (more on them later) password safe?

So what should be done? First, I think I’ll be removing all that contact info from Facebook and avoiding checkins like the plague. But I’d also like to see services like Twitter give the ability to easily restrict some updates to people that are following you (or even better, to a list of people). This way we can continue to keep most updates public, but have some that are private.

I’d also like to see API keys used more so I don’t have to five out my Twitter password to integrate with a 3rd party. And as for things like posting updates, Facebook, Twitter and the like should time sessions out after a short time. Still allow the user to browse info, but not allow posting until the password is verified again. Until that time though, I’m just not going to have the sites remember me which will keep rogue posts to a min.

And with that, I’m tired and going to sleep. I’ll. Next talk about Google and what needs to happen there.

First off, this blog post has been in the works for a while, so some of the “news” could be a little old, but that doesn’t mean that it’s outdated, it’s just taken me a while to write this post is all

I’m not one of those people that really trusts most scientists. I mean, they’re really smart people and know a lot more about their fields than I do. But it seems that most scientists have blinders on, they don’t look beyond their lab and don’t care so much about the end results, just that they get their results.

Obviously, this isn’t the case for a lot of scientists, there’s many out there that are not only good at their jobs, but they pay attention to the world as a whole and make sure that their findings actually make sense in the “real world”, not just the laboratory. But in the world of Global Warm(cool)ing, the sad fact is that the scientists that just don’t care about the big picture are not the ones getting the attention. Rather, it’s the ones that are claiming that there’s more global warming (or cooling, depends upon the week) and that we have to stop flying, driving, manufacturing and whatever else, so that we can save the Earth.

Now, before you get the wrong picture (or to correct your view of me if you already have…), I have a healthy respect for the Earth and am all for policies and changes in our society to make it so that we don’t pollute so much. We need cleaner ways to create electricity and whatever that is is great to me provided that it doesn’t cost more than we’re paying now. Plug-in electric, hydrogen, solar, nuclear, wind, wave, etc… They’re all great and I’m glad the money is being spent to develop the technologies further. I’m especially a fan of solar power since, well, there’s a lot of that, but the whole wave power thing that’s being worked on is great too.

However, I think the Japanese and French have it right with Nuclear power. We really need to invest more in that right now because, well, it works, it’s cleaner than anything else we have and it’s dirt cheap. Plus, it’d reduce our reliance on coal, oil and hydro-electric dams, among other things. But I’m getting off-topic here. We’re talking about Global Warming and the industry it’s becoming.

With all the hype these days about global warming and what it’s allegedly doing to our environment, there’s a lot of companies out there trying to make a buck (or ten) selling consulting services, CO2 credits and anything else they can think of. For instance, back in January, some research was done by a fellow named Alex Wissner-Gross. He alleges that two searches with Google produce about 7g of CO2, or the same amount as boiling a kettle of water for tea (he’s English). Of course, this assumes that you do multiple queries per search and depends upon how in-depth it is.

Of course, it’s not mentioned until much later in the article that Mr Alex Wissner-Gross has started his own company called CO2Stats. Their purpose is as follows:

“CO2Stats is the only service that automatically calculates your website’s total energy consumption, helps to make it more energy efficient, and then purchases audited renewable energy from wind and solar farms to neutralize its carbon footprint — all for a flat, affordable monthly fee.”

Of course, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that he’s at the same time come out with this “research” about Google’s CO2 production for searches. But really, who can put a price on saving the world? ESPECIALLY when you can advertise to everybody who visits your site that it’s “green” with their nifty logo.

OK, so there’s one “scientist” that’s trying to make a quick buck, but who can blame him anyway? I mean, he’s just doing what everybody else would do and try to make a little money, right? Well, actually, yes, that seems to be the case. At least, if you really mean “everybody”.  Take the Climate Change Committee (CCC). They are a group in the UK that recently advised Parliament on CO2 emissions and advised that they should work to have emissions in the UK reduced by 80% by 2050. A noble goal to be sure, but might there be other motives there too?

According to an article by The Register, there are… To start off, there’s big money to be made in the carbon credit market. To quote the article:

“The group has its eyes on the carbon market, which it says “grew from $10bn to $34bn between 2005 and 2006″, and projects to be worth well over $100bn in the future.”

And of course, there’s many companies that are involved in this whole thing. There was a recent conference for those companies entitled ‘Cashing in on Carbon’ and again, according to the article:

“Amongst these bean-counters-turned-Gaia-botherers were representatives from IDEAcarbon, which offers carbon market intelligence, ratings and advice to governments, organisations and companies. Climate Change Committee member, Samuel Fankhauser, a former climate change economist for the World Bank, is the company’s managing director, strategic advice.”

Conflict of interest? Perhaps so since IDEACarbon’s whole purpose is to provide advice and counsel to it’s clients about climate change and CO2 credits.

Anyway, all this is to say that the next time you hear people talking about new “research”, “studies”, or “advice” on Global Warming or CO2 production, why not take a look at who it is that’s talking and see if they might have a secondary motive? Because call me a cynic if you want, but so far, all this hysteria seems to just be a way to make more money and promote their own products.

Yep, I finally finished reading all the XKCD comics through to the beginning and found a few more of my favorites. Really, they’re just awesome!

Movie Seating

Guilty! I’m always worried about this when going to the theater with large groups of people. It’s just never optimal…

Paths

The only problem with the shortest path is that then you’re generally walking on the grass and NOT the sidewalks, so then you’re making ugly dirt paths by taking the most optimal path. Seriously, this is a problem! So, the real question is this, what’s worse? Helping to make ugly paths OR not taking the most optimal path. The jury is still out on that one.

Family Circus

Spoiler Alert

Rosebud…

Pointers

Yes, I’m a geek and yes, I find this funny. You got a problem with that?

Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth is my hero. But yeah, I’ve got one of his books and got scared reading it, have not tried since. Perhaps they’re onto something here…

Turn Signals

I really hate it when my turn signal isn’t in rhythm with the people’s in front of me…

Misusing Slang

It’s ALREADY proving to be a fun thing to mess with the youngsters…

Again, make sure you read the alt text (hold your mouse over the images), it’s usually SO much better that way! Oh and uh, what’s YOUR favorite XKCD comics?

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news that terrorists have attacked various places in Bombay, India. If not, what rock have YOU been living under?

Anyway, I also read from the Times Online that terrorists “seized mobile phones and BlackBerries from their hostages and used them to contact each other and monitor world reaction.” Which reminds me of some stories I read a number of months ago about RIM and the Indian government.

In March of this year, the Indian government threatened to shut down the entire Indian Blackberry network of almost 400,000 if RIM didn’t give the government access to the security keys required to decrypt all wireless data. RIM balked, but then gave in on May 22nd of this year. However, they backtracked on that promise a bit and promised to keep things secure on the 27th of May.

Now, considering the reports that the terrorists were using Blackberries to communicate with eachother and keep an eye on the outside world, I’m a bit worried. Why? Well, I’m sure that people in the Indian government (and RIM themselves) are wondering what they might have been able to do differently if they had been able to see what the terrorists were saying to eachother.

Just watch and see, it’ll be just another week or two and the Indian government will be calling for monitoring of RIM’s Blackberry network in India and they won’t be put off so easily this time. Next it will be the English government (they’re already implementing CCTV “crime prediction” cameras) and then the rest of the governments that we the people answer to. All in the name of security.

This isn’t to say that I know exactly what I think of this. I mean, on one side, it’ll truly help in the war on terror and allow our governments to more effectively protect us, their citizens. However, it will also give a LOT more power and with that comes abuses. The movie V for Vendetta comes to mind and that rather scares me. But that’s where we’re collectively heading, you can see the writing on the walls. So, what do you think?

OK, so maybe it doesn’t quite define me, but I was going through the comics the other night and found a number that represent some of my character traits well (for good or bad), so… here they are:

Do make sure you read the alt text (hold your mouse over the images), it’s usually SO much better that way! Oh, and last but not least, I SERIOUSLY need to make something like this!

I need your help. Well, when I say “I”, I really mean refugees here in Tucson. THEY need your help. Here’s the short version. I just got back from visiting a few refugee families that have come into Tucson in the last 45 days and there’s a LOT of needs for them, I’ll post more about all the needs later, but the critical need right now is school registration.

You see, these families have kids that are old enough to be in school when that starts (August 11th!), but they don’t know English very well (if at all) and they certainly don’t understand the school system. So, they need someone to go with them to get their kids registered for school. That’s a very important thing for them and so I’m going to help out as much as possible.

However, there’s 7 kids and 4 adults that need to get registered and my car only seats 5. So, someone else (or two someones, even better) needs to help out in getting the kids and parents to the schools and help them get registered so they can start school on Monday! So, do you have time during the day (9am to 4pm lets say…) this week to help out? It should only take a couple hours and will mean a LOT to these refugees.

There’s a lot of other needs of course too, but this is the most critical one and the easiest to solve. So, can you help? If so, PLEASE get in touch with me via the form at the bottom of this message. I’ll post more later about how this goes and what else the families need, but for now, this should be enough

Thanks!
Charlie

That’s something I like to say a lot. That I learn something new every day. The other part is that I tend to forget 4 or 5 things, but that’s another story…

However, this past week I think I’ve learned at least 20 new things each day. With this new diabetes thing I get to work with, I have all KINDS of things to learn. How to check my blood sugar level (I’m getting really good at that since I’m doing it 4-7 times a day , how to give myself insulin shots (only done that 5 times so far, so I’m not as good yet) and what kinds of things I can (and can’t) eat.

For that eating thing, lets just say I’m finding more foods that I CAN’T eat, than I can so far Actually, that’s not really true, there’s a lot of food that I can eat, I’ve just gotta be fairly careful. See, I’m trying to avoid carbs since diabetes (for those that may not know) is a condition where your body doesn’t make enough insulin (or no insulin at all). Insulin is used by your body to break down sugars and of course, carbs are sugars (complex or no, they all break down to sugar eventually).

From what the doctors can tell so far, I’m obviously not making enough insulin, but I am making some. What this means is that my body has a hard time breaking down sugars and making them usable to me. And THAT makes my blood-sugar level go up. Right now it’s hovering around the 200-350 range, depending upon what I eat and such. So, I’m taking insulin to help my body out some and get that level lower. Exercise will drop it more, so I’ll be starting on some sort of a routine soon (I hope) too.

But, I’m also having to watch what I eat and try and get things more under control that way too. Mostly I’m trying to keep the carb intake to a minimum, so bread, potatoes, rice, most fruits and anything sugary is all “bad”. Obviously this rather limits my diet a bit, and I’m supposed to have some of that to keep a healthy diet, so there’s lots of experimentation going on too.

For instance, pizza isn’t bad at all as long as I don’t eat the crust because there’s not too much bread. Well, that’s the theory anyway. The reality is that Papa John’s pizza isn’t very good for me, at least no the hand-tossed crust. Thin might, but we’ll have to see. However, most canned soups are just fine because there’s very few carbs, but there’s tons of sodium, so I’ve gotta be careful of that (never good to have tons of sodium in your diet).

Anyway, the main thing is that I’m doing MUCH better. I have energy, I’m able to work again, getting my diet worked on and this is all treatable. The insulin is annoying, but do-able and it may not be for that long anyway, it just depends upon how my body does with this as we go on.

Lastly, I do want to thank everybody for your prayers and notes. It’s been great to know you guys are out there, praying for me. I know that God kept me safe on Monday when I was doing so badly and I know he’ll keep me safe as we go on. So thank you.

But I figure it’s about time for me to write again, especially considering what has been going on with me the last couple weeks and culminated yesterday. For the last couple weeks, my mouth and eyes have been very dry and as time has gone on, it was getting worse. I also was urinating a LOT (6-10 times per day), but because of my dry mouth, I was also drinking a lot so I figured that’s all that was.

Well, I found out I was wrong. On Sunday, I realized that I’d lost a bit of weight lately (15 lbs or so), which is not good. I had a doctor’s appointment set for Tuesday (today) at 9:40 AM, but I was feeling pretty bad on Monday (couldn’t eat much and was very weak) so I called my doctor and asked to get in Monday if possible, which they agreed to after hearing what I said I was feeling like.

I left work at 1:00 PM because I was feeling so bad and went to the doctor at 4:30 (after sleeping some) and after they asked some questions, they decided I probably had diabetes. So they ran some blood-work on me and gave me a quick test for diabetes (one of those little portable machines). The machine just came back saying my blood-sugar level was high, but wouldn’t give a number. But from that, the doctor knew I had diabetes and so now things have been going quickly to get me stabalized.

Apparently the weight loss was from losing fluids and me drinking juice (orange juice) didn’t help because it’s so high in sugar (VERY bad for a diabetic). So in the end it turns out that my blood sugar level was 949. Basically, 150 and higher means you’re probably diabetic. Over 400 isn’t very good and 949 means you’re in VERY bad shape (maybe even hospitalized).

But now I’m in fairly good shape, I’m working on a diet to help things get more stabalized and am now taking insulin once a day. I’ve also gotten my blood sugar level reduced by half or so (460 vs 949). Plus, I’m taking a lot of sodium to help me retain water better. So yeah, things are doing better now, but obviously not great. I was in such bad shape that it’ll take a while to get this taken care of.

So, what’s what’s been up with me these last couple weeks. Great fun! Certainly something new that I’ve never had to deal with before, but the good news is that I’m OK now and am getting better.

I’ve been reading this stuff on Saddam Hussein and how he was sentenced to death. Great, wonderful, he deserves to die in my opinion. However, I’m now reading about people in the Middle East, Europe and even here in the US who are OUTRAGED that he was sentenced to die and are now complaining about the trial, procedures, etc, etc.

First of all, any of you remember how everybody had a FIT about the possibility that the trial would be held here in the US? Remember that? Everybody said “no… I can’t be held in the US, we need it held in Iraq. It’s better to be held there.” So, we did that and this is the outcome. But now that we had THIS as the outcome, oh my gosh! We can’t kill him, no… that’d be wrong!!

Ok, explain this wise guy? How is killing a man who had a fair trial (despite his countless attempts to taint it and make it grind to a halt) and killed hundreds himself wrong, when going to war with (for instance) al-Qaeda is not? Are we not killing members of al-Qaeda for even less than what Saddam Hussein was just convicted of?

Yes, many people are against the war too, but many are not. For instance, Tony Blair, constant friend of the White House, has now decided that capital punishment is wrong and that you can’t put someone, even Saddam Hussein to death. Despite the fact that he condones the war in Iraq. Oh, and what about the other countries that have troops in Iraq, members of NATO, etc, etc? They certainly don’t think that killing someone while at war is wrong, but after a fair trial determines that someone deserves to die, THEN we’ve got a problem with it.

So, you might ask, “Well, what would Europe do about this problem instead? Surely they can’t just let him go…” No, you’re right, they wouldn’t. Spain has the perfect solution instead of killing the convict outright: Madrid: 38,000-year jail terms sought. 38,000 YEARS??? Ok, how is that different than capital punishment? Really, I would like to know. I mean seriously, isn’t that even worse than capital punishment since they have to spend the rest of their lives in prison? Why not just kill them and be done with it?

Anyway, I’m not sure I understand, and not sure I ever will. But if you’ve got some insight, I’d love to hear it.

No, not really for me, my weekend was fine. But for Christians, it was certainly a sad weekend. In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, I’m talking about Ted Haggard and the allegations against him that came up on Wednesday of last week. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say allegations since Ted Haggard confirmed a good portion of what Mike Jones was claiming he did.

However, I’m not really wanting to talk about that. Obviously Ted Haggard did stuff he shouldn’t have done and there’s going to be a lot of fallout from that. What’s more to talk about? What I DO care about though is how we, as Christians, handle this situation and the blow that’s been dealt to the Christian Church.

This is the time to realize that our Christian leaders are people, just like we are. They make mistakes, just like we do and sometimes, like now, those mistakes are revealed to the general public. But really, can you say that what Ted Haggard did is any worse than anything you’ve done? I know I can’t. Yes, it affects a LOT more people and yes, it’s a lot more public. And sure, you’ve probably never done the things that Ted Haggard has done. But when you really get down to it, how much worse is Ted Haggard’s sin in the eyes of God than ours?

I’d say it’s no worse. I’d also say that our own sins are no worse than Ted Haggard’s. In God’s eyes, we’re equal, assuming we’ve all accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior anyway. We’re ALL sinners, and that means that we all deserve death. But oh my gosh, Ted Haggard broke the big one. He had relations with another man. SO WHAT?? It’s still a sin, like everything else. Even more interesting to me are the people who are shocked by it. That they never would have expected it.

Well, ok, I guess I never would have expected it myself. I had the opportunity to help on the back-end of some of Ted Haggard’s ministries (World Prayer Team and his personal site) by helping create those sites years ago and helping with the administration of them. During that time, I saw the passion that Ted Haggard had, the leader he was and the plans that he had for God’s people. He’s a great man and truly loves God and wants to do what God wants of him. But because of that position, the influence he’s had in the Christian Church, the influence over Christians, he’s also been attacked over and over and over.

And so it doesn’t really surprise me that Ted Haggard fell because he IS just a human. He’s not perfect. Even less surprising is the manner in which he fell. He’s been a huge proponent against homosexuals and so it makes perfect sense that THAT’S the way he’s brought down. But what I know, and I hope others know, is that he doesn’t have to be out for the count. He CAN rise again and I will be praying that he will. Because Satan didn’t win the war, he just won this one, tiny, little battle.

Think about it this way… Peter denied Christ THREE TIMES, just as Christ predicted he would. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty bad. Or even worse, David had Bathsheba’s husband killed so he could cover the fact that he had an affair with her. Even worse. However, in both cases, they were forgiven and rose again to be even greater. I will be praying that the same will be true of Ted Haggard and I hope you’ll do the same.

Because really, he’s done nothing worse than what I do every day, or what you do every day. And if we can’t forgive his sin and help him move on and grow in strength from it, then who can?