Author: Andrew Huey

Mac ransomware

I panicked a bit when I read about the ransomware that was attached to a recent version of Transmission, a Mac BitTorrent client. Thankfully, I hadn’t updated (or even launched) Transmission on my Mac in a while, so I’m not affected. I only use BitTorrent occasionally, usually to download a Linux ISO or books/comics from a Humble Bundle.

After realizing that I wasn’t affected, and calming down a bit, I started thinking about what I can do to prevent being affected by one of these things, both on my Mac and my PCs. Ransomware is a big problem, and has affected many individuals, companies, and even hospitals. As long as even a handful of people pay up, the bad guys will keep putting this horrible stuff out there.

For this specific Mac issue, there’s really not much I would have been able to do to prevent it. It wouldn’t have been detected by any Mac malware scanner initially, and it was signed by a valid Apple developer key. Transmission is an above-board, well-respected open source program that’s used by many people, so it’s not like I was using some sketchy adware-infested BitTorrent client.

Probably the worst-case scenario here would have been if the ransomware had scrambled all the stuff I had on OneDrive, and then the contents had replicated from my Mac to my two PCs. (And let’s also assume that the ransomware had scrambled my Time Machine backups too.) That could have left me with a lot of lost files. I should probably figure out a good way to make offline backups of my OneDrive files on a regular basis. (I miss the days when I could back up all my key files to a single 100 MB Zip disk.) And this also reminds me that I haven’t done a full backup of my new desktop PC yet.

Antibiotic Resistance – NY Times

I don’t know why I read articles like this. There’s not much that I can do, personally, about antibiotic resistance. I’m not a doctor, researcher, farmer, or politician. And I really don’t need the extra stress of worrying about this stuff.

Well, I guess I can vote for folks who recognize that this is a problem and that vaccination is a good thing and doesn’t cause autism. And I can try to buy meat and dairy products that come from animals that haven’t been fed loads of antibiotics.

The best outcome is preventing infections through vaccination or public health measures so that we improve human health without increasing resistance to antibiotics.

Source: We’re Losing the Race Against Antibiotic Resistance, but There’s Also Reason for Hope – The New York Times

closer to paperless

I blogged back in December about how I’m taking a few more baby steps towards going paperless. I had switched my Merrill statements over to email, and that’s gone reasonably well. I’m downloading those statements pretty regularly, and I’m also keeping up with the other random statements that were already coming in via email.

One side note: the standard for paperless bills and statements is almost always PDF (which is fine). On my new desktop PC, I’d decided to skip installing Acrobat Reader in favor of Foxit. I thought that was working out OK, but I started having trouble with Foxit crashing randomly, so I had to give up on it and switch back to Acrobat. I’m not that fond of all the bells and whistles that Adobe keeps adding to Acrobat Reader, to try to suck you into their “document cloud” or whatever else they’re pushing at any given time. But at least it doesn’t crash. Maybe I’ll try Sumatra or one of the other third-party PDF readers at some point, but for now I’ll stick with Adobe’s bloatware.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, getting rid of paper. For a number of years, I’ve been paying most of my bills electronically through my bank’s web site. It’s got a reasonably good interface, and has always worked well. Except when I screw up, which I’ve done twice recently. The interface shows an alphabetical list of all the payees you’ve set up, and you just type in the amount you want to pay in a text box next to the payee name. Well, twice recently I’ve accidentally typed into the wrong box, paying a bill for company “A” to company “B” instead. The first time, I caught it in time to cancel the incorrect payment and entered the correct one. But, this month, I paid my cable company instead of my credit card company, and didn’t catch it until the cable bill showed up in the mail with a really big credit on it. So I figured out what I’d done, but maybe a little too late. I paid the credit card bill as soon as I realized what I’d done, but I’m not sure it made it in before the due date, so I might get dinged with a late fee.

So that’s convinced me to try a feature on the bank’s bill payment site that I’ve been ignoring up to now. For several companies, you can request e-bills to be delivered directly via the bank’s web site. So you can just review and pay them right there. I’ve always been a bit leery of this, but it seems like it would be a good way to prevent the problem of accidentally paying the wrong company. And I’ll be able to download the PDF e-bills for multiple companies all through a single web site, instead of a different one for each company.

I signed up for e-bills for my two major credit card accounts. I’ll probably add my other credit card account and my phone bill later, if the first two e-bill setups work out. So pretty soon, I may be down to just one or two paper bills / statements per month, and I can probably get rid of those too.

This is all good, and it will cut down on the amount of useless paper that I have to file away in my file cabinet, then occasionally purge and shred. It’s starting to bother me, though, that I don’t get much mail anymore. So I’m thinking about subscribing to a printed weekly magazine again, like the New Yorker or the Economist, just so I’ll have something showing up in my mailbox regularly. But I know I won’t have time to read either of those. So, maybe TV Guide?

MoMA PLASTIC

I’ve visited MoMA twice recently; both were pretty short visits. There’s not much major going on right now. But the PLASTIC thing is kind of weird and funny. I wasn’t aware of it, initially, and I had thought that someone had maybe passed out on the stairs, and I was wondering why no one was doing anything about it. But I figured out that it was probably art by the time I reached the top of the stairs.

Someone posted a photo from that on reddit recently, and the comments turned into an interesting back and forth on modern art. Well, ok, lots of it is the usual reddit silliness, but there are a few actually insightful comments in there.

a new owner for Quicken

I’ve been using Quicken since the early nineties, I think, originally using the DOS version. I’ve been tempted to switch to something else quite often, but I keep sticking with Quicken. Intuit announced a while ago that they wanted to sell off Quicken, and they just announced that they’ve found a buyer.

I was expecting the buyer to be an existing software company or financial company, but instead it’s a private equity company I’ve never heard of. I guess that could be a good thing. If it had been bought out by a financial company, they would likely have used it to push their own services and cut back on compatibility with competing financial institutions. And, now that I think of it, there really aren’t any existing software companies where it would have made sense for them to buy Quicken. Maybe Microsoft, but there’s a lot of history there, which eventually resulted in Microsoft giving up on their own MS Money software and exiting that niche, so I could see where they wouldn’t want to dive back into personal finance software.

So I guess I’ll keep using Quicken for the time being, and see what the new owner does with them. I’m not too optimistic, but I’ll give it a chance. (Especially since I only recently upgraded to Quicken 2016.)

Scott Kelly’s Year in Space

On Tuesday, Scott J. Kelly is scheduled to return from the International Space Station, completing the longest stay in space for a NASA astronaut. Here are some ways to measure his mission.

Source: Scott Kelly’s Year in Space – The New York Times

This is a fun article, with some great photos. You really have to respect someone who uses up some of his weight allowance for personal items to bring a gorilla suit into space.

a little more on Starbucks Rewards

The NY Times has chimed in on the Starbucks Rewards program changes, so I thought I’d post a link to that as a follow-up to my earlier post. They raise a few interesting points, such as how the “we like seeing you” philosophy of the current program, based on visits rather than dollars, doesn’t really make sense, since corporations aren’t people and don’t have emotions.

And, no, I’m not going to start going to Dunkin Donuts instead. Their dark roast actually isn’t that bad, but it’s still not as good as Starbucks.

 

Not !Important

I’m currently working on a SharePoint project that’s going to involve a number of fairly kludgy bits, mostly because… SharePoint. I think I may be able to get a few mildly amusing blog posts out of this project. Today’s one is about the !important directive in CSS.

This article titled “When Using !important is The Right Choice” should probably be one word long: never. Understanding specificity in CSS is important, and there are occasions where it’s appropriate to use !important, but only a few. Using it in a site-wide template for a SharePoint site is not one of them, under most circumstances. I had to write a little JavaScript (using jQuery) to hide part of a SharePoint page, and that task was made more difficult than it needed to be due to overuse of !important in the site template.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know nearly as much about CSS as I should, but I know enough to know when I’m looking at a careful design, and when I’m looking at “let’s just try random stuff until this looks right.” Heck, I probably shouldn’t criticize; the base CSS on a SharePoint site is probably already pretty bad, so someone designing a custom template likely has an uphill battle getting his or her own CSS to work well within the framework provided by Microsoft. SharePoint is old enough that it’s supporting a lot of dead weight from old versions, most of which probably can’t be trashed without breaking too much stuff.

Starbucks rewards

When I decided to lose some weight a few years back, one of the big things I did was to stop going out to lunch every day. Now, I usually bring a modest lunch and eat it in the office. But that uses up only about 10 minutes of my lunch hour, and doesn’t get me out of the office, so I usually follow that with a trip to the local Starbucks for a cup of coffee.

So, previously, consuming too many calories at lunch time was a problem. Now, consuming too much caffeine and spending too much at Starbucks is a problem. Really, it’s not a big problem. If I feel like I’m consuming too much caffeine, I’ll switch to decaf for awhile, and I frequently get only a $2 tall coffee, which isn’t going to bankrupt me.

I’m a member of the Starbucks Reward program, too, so I get a free drink after every twelve, which isn’t much, but it’s something. Well, now they’re changing the program so it’ll be more like one free drink for every thirty. The details on the new program are here, and one (of many) media articles about the change can be found here. The new program will be pretty much the same for people spending around $5 per store visit, but for cheapskates like me who usually just buy a $2 coffee, it’ll take about 30 of those to get a free drink. There’s more about this over at Consumerist.

I do realize that this is a classic first-world problem, and the fact that I make enough money to spend $2 a day on halfway-decent coffee is something I should be thankful for. And I am. And I appreciate that Starbucks doesn’t have to give me any free coffee, so I should be happy regardless. But I am also an old man who likes grousing about how much money he’s spending at Starbucks, and how they’re making plenty of money, and they could really afford to give me a lot more free coffee.