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Gray Body Text Is Non-Optimum, Try This:

A number of developers and designers have gotten the idea that having dim text is the way to go. And I can see for a number of youth that stares on the screen all day long it might be annoying, even infringing. Especially if you sit in a dimly lit room where the only light comes from the monitor(s).

May I make the suggestion that black on white is not my first choice either, but rather than making it hard to read for a good percentage of people, use a different color, for example, a blue.

Blue would immediately change the impact to those with sensitive eyes. Not to say that dimming the monitor would create the same effect across the board.

It appears that too many developers are not fully considering who their public might be. Which of course also applies to any designers that use the same.

Now, I’m not at all totally against using gray to separate a section of text, or copy for marketing people. It does not require much change to stand out either, as you saw there.

How about a site function where you can store the color value in a cookie ensuring everyone can read it the way they like! Much like we can often choose different languages. Which is very handy when traveling to a country with a language you are not fluent in.

Point being making websites available for as many as possible is the goal for most websites wanting maximum return on investment, by attracting people with all kinds of eyesight on normal monitors. I’ve yet to try this out on the new 4K monitors, but I’d bet it is still true.

We have come a long way in making the web a universal tool that everyone can use, lets not go backwards by making it hard for a good swath of the population.

What Is Food Sustainability?

Yes, what is food sustainability?

There are things that can and does continue on and on, they simply never stop. The reason it continues is that it is workable, it does not cause problems along the way which later ends up working against it.

Simple examples to make the point would be if you throw wrapping paper and anything else you discard on the street rather than in a proper location such as a dumpster, others would need to clean up after you or the street would end up a mess. Which would eventually lead to attracting rats and other vermin. It would attract more garbage and causing ever more problems.

Or, if you always offered a friendly and helping hand to your community whenever you could, that would lead to goodwill and others helping you when you needed it. It would set a good example and other would follow.

The first example is clearly not a sustainable way, whereas the second is.

When an activity is in harmony with everything else and it is in turn helped by the environment you could say it is contributing to the survival of the environment.

Growing tropical plants in a cold environment would be another example of not being sustainable. They require a hot humid climate which without it, would make it very hard or impossible to grow.

Nature has a wonderful design that when left alone will survive just fine by itself.

We on the other hand wish to conquer our environment, make it just the way we like it to be. Which does not have to be wrong, it’s actually very good to be in control of ones environment. But what does that mean?

Being in control does not necessarily mean you bend things backwards and eventually stress it beyond it’s capability of bending, thereby breaking it. Requiring more and more work to just to keep up.

There is good control and bad control.

Yelling at people who are already listening is normally bad control as force is only needed to get their attention, once you have it you back off. You communicate with a person on their level of reality which would allow you to have positive control. For example, martial arts are mostly based on utilizing the existing momentum and to simply redirect it, not directly stopping it head on. That is an example of good control.

Growing things which naturally grow in that environment makes it easier. But there are more to the equation. When you only consider one very localized thing and ignore everything else it tends to end up not very successful in the long term. In other words something is missing. When things are not working out as intended you can say that there is a lie there, the lie being one or more missing datum. If you had all the data needed and how to do it, it would work, would it not?

So how much is needed?

When we engage upon an activity it is handy to see how that fits into the overall picture. By understanding how the activity does or does not fit, we can predict the success rate of our activity.

When talking about, for example, growing food we have a number of factors that immediately comes to play. As a starter we have climate with temperature, humidity, the soil, it’s pH value, wind, and the directions, animals and insects not to mention other humans and then change and rate of change on each of the above. They can each play a vital role on the outcome of growing food. If the food is an animal then even more factors come into play.

Food sustainable means it can go on and on forever. To reach that type of success you will do well to consider how it affects everything in your immediate environment, the environment beyond that and then on the whole grand scheme of the planet as it will in turn affect you. If all are ignoring others we do it at our own peril as it does come back to bite us.

Are you using something that is not natural part of life? Such as chemicals to help food grow? What is the short and long term impact of those chemicals on your immediate environment and the larger picture? Where does it go when you spray or pour it? What does it affect, maybe your soil, the ground water, other living things? What changes are you actually making when applying those changes?

Thinking very locally, such as just yourself or the tree you are growing is likely to create other longer term problems, as we have seen with things such as DDT, a chemical thought to be very helpful but is now banned due to the high toxic content. It is not usually easy to be aware of, never mind understand all these factors. But they do come into play!

We like to think of ourselves as being more valuable than destructive. We help our neighbors and maybe that stranger who dropped something. However it requires a bit more understanding of how things work than simply following others lead as that will end up with people who don’t know or understand leading others afoul. Kind of like the lemmings that follow each other off the cliff. Neither knowing what is actually going on, but continuing in some direction because everyone else does. Trust me doing something because others do it is not a safe way to go as many can and often definitely are wrong at the expense of their own success and survival.

We need to have a better grasp about how creating and supporting sustainable methods will improve life conditions and avoid following clueless, and maybe unintentional, leaders off the proverbial cliff. Educate our self, be in control of our own future and survival.

Fortunately one such piece of technology is in existence and is called Permaculture, from permanent culture. A way of growing that is based on coexisting with the natural environment that surrounds us.

Go to growpermaculture.com and get in control of your food supply!

Google Suggests Reporting Their Charges as Fraud

In short I tried to cancel a commercial app service for my business but they claim unable to do so.

We had an account with Google which provided a few apps for us. Then that same functionality was moved in house and the use dropped to zero. The account sat there for about two years collecting the monthly charge with no use.

At one point I decided to cancel the service, which is when it got interesting. First I screwed up on how I canceled the service and in effect only killed the admin account. Then forgot about the whole thing while busy with some new and exciting things. After a while I did notice that the charge was still coming through from Google so I attempted to have them close it.

However they told me that the only way I could stop them from taking my money each month would be to login as that admin. Problem is I have a lot of different accounts and that one was cleaned up and deleted, a long time ago. There’s no way for me to recover that information.

However Google obviously have records of transactions and should be able to ask questions that would verify my identity and then stop taking my money for the service I don’t use. Not so, even after escalation to a supervisor, they still said they could not cancel the service.

Google does have a pretty good security record and maybe they only allow a very select few access to data that could authenticate me. But the idea that a company could not stop putting through a charge for a service I’m not using is, let’s be nice and call it odd.

In the end I was told to go to my bank and tell them the charges are fraudulent so the bank would no longer pay Google. That is supposed to lead to the account being suspended and stop the charges. Of course once I told the bank they simply don’t accept the charge anymore, solving my problem. I found the whole thing is pretty unusual. There must be a ton of people that made the same mistake and could not get out of it in a simpler way.

Ideal Gender Equality

I see a lot of attempts to have more females in computer technologies such as programming.

I hold a firm view that whoever does the job they should be equally paid. To me that does not mean I expect to see a drive to get more females in what are traditionally more dangerous jobs or physically tough.

Why? We are not built the same. We don’t have the same basic drives, which is a good thing! The genetic build shows that males are more densely made, look at the muscle mass. Makes us better at handling cold weather for example. Carrying heavy things etc.

Females are typically more interested in things that provides a stable environment for rearing children. While males are more interested in, well getting into trouble. From an early age we throw our bodies around and brag about who beat it up the most.

Obviously it’s a generalization but the point is the game of life clearly has different designs for the two sexes. My observation has been that women are better at having order inside but are poor at external directions and males the opposite.

The most important job anyone can have is rearing our children to become able and responsible adults. That responsibility is to create a good home and females usually does a better job of it. Males provide the energy (money for example) and raw material to build the physical structure.

Now why is it important to have more women in various jobs, does it make them more equally worth? No, they are already probably more valuable than men. But the idea that males bring home the money so it belongs to them is a bunch of single minded bull!

For those of you who live together, but don’t share everything – something is out. One or both of you are only thinking of self. Once you got together and became a couple you need to work and act as one. One spouse does something bad like driving into the fence, you then don’t yell at that person but simply get the fence fixed, acting as it was you who did it, because it was. Remember, you are One. If backing into the fence continues then help practicing backing up.

The joy of going to a workplace and performing a job is valuable and key, but if you raise a family you’d better make sure your offspring are properly cared for. Which means sitting down and do your financial planning together. Work as the team you supposedly are and stop putting self first. In the long run you will be a lot happier.

Life requires a stable base to operate from. When the base is unshakable you can really create success. Actions with long term pro-survival effects are those most valuable.

Then the “equality” of the work space might solve itself.

WorldVentures ventures where the world should not go

Today I ran into an interesting article by Ken White, an attorney who often blogs on legal thuggery, as he calls it. The blog is called Popehat. As he puts it:

It’s time for the Popehat Signal — the call for pro bono assistance for a blogger threatened with frivolous and censorious litigation. This time the victim in need of help is Stephanie Yoder of www.twenty-somethingtravel.com. She needs your help to face a thoroughly bogus and repugnant threat by multi-level marketing scheme “WorldVentures.”

 

My thought is that it’s quote possibly attorneys like the ones used by WorldMisadventures who gives attorneys a bad name. One likes think that an officer of the court would be a person of strong integrity, but of course that’s not always the case.

Though it surprises me each time I see a person who managed to get through the bar exam and then operates as if he thought he could not do an honest day’s work by doing this kind of, in my eyes, despicable work. I’ve been a student of life for many decades. I know that people who fester on other’s weaknesses have their own skeletons in their closets. It’s those past transgressions which bears down on an individual and makes them cry out for help by hoping someone will handle what they are not able to handle. Namely themselves.

Mess After Duke Energy Fixed Downed Wires

Of little interest to anyone but me and my neighbors was how electricity was cut on Thursday around midnight. A cracking sound not unlike a transformer failure was followed by the light and sound of nothing as all things electrical went dead.

When the outside temperature has dropped to around 45 degrees (F) it is not an optimum time to be without electricity. 🙂 My neighbors and I each called in and were all told nobody had reported any issues and that each one of us were the first to do so.

Around 5 am I was awoken by the sound of a chainsaw and went to investigate. The crew had shown up and were shining lights up my neighbor’s tree trunk to where the top part of it was hanging on the electrical cables.

Someplace around 8 am on Friday morning the first crew had cut down the trunk hanging on the cables and been replaced by a new crew who in turn had replaced the wires between the poles. Electricity was back on.

Seven days later I’m wondering why I’m left with my neighbor’s tree trunks on my lawn. Is there a third crew who are supposed to come by and clean up after the first, or did they just leave it for me?

I can understand how their messaging system reported first-to-call to each of us, which is not really a problem. But why did not somebody leave a simple message on my door explaining what’s going on? Why is the trunk and all the branches off it still on my lawn?

It was a windy night but not any worse than not being able to tear away my pool tarp. Plus the tree is looks to be in pretty poor condition. I can’t imagine there being so many other emergencies that they could not clean up after themselves. And even so leaving a message would have been good manners. Something like “Sorry we have not picked up everything but we’ll return on such and such a date.”

This is not the first time I’ve been faced with this from Duke Energy. Last time they came out and decided to work off my lawn I had to run down a foreman to get them to come back onto my backyard and clean up.

I find that for Duke Energy to be so sloppy is plenty reason to complain as they are far to experienced to be so unprofessional.

They eventually came out and said that the “brush is due to non-preventative tree failure. Duke will not pick up.”

The fact that Duke brought my neighbors tree onto my lawn and then left it is poor to say the least.

Interestingly they also say that “All pruning is conducted with consideration for the health of the tree while allowing for proper electrical line clearance.” and “Our pruning program adopts the latest standards of the American National Standards Institute and pruning recommendations of the National Arborist Association.”

Looking at the damage they left I cannot imagine how ANSI and NAA have such poor standards as to leave this gaping wound:

IMG_20140106_125050-top

Again this is moot since it was Duke that dragged the trunk onto my property. If it had simply fallen straight down it would have landed either in the right of way or my neighbor’s side. Which is the whole contention here. I let them in to access the tree from my property thinking they would act responsibly

OSDial.com

We have joined the two domains osdial.com and osdial.org and made it the primary site for OSDial with a new interface. This is part of the overhaul of OSDial and focus on the brand name OSDial represents.

This will place all resources on the same web site including some new capabilities that will make it easier to track both development as well as support issues.

You are always welcome to give us your thoughts and considerations, which is available under Feedback at http://osdial.com/contact/. See you there!

How To Give Away Your Bank Accounts To Criminals

Sherri Davidoff, Author of “Network Forensics: Tracking Hackers Through Cyberspace” has documented a real life example of someone giving away all their credentials which means someone else now have the same access to your identity and subsequently, money, that you have.

It is a very effective demonstration of what not to do, share it with others!

And not necessarily very hard to protect yourself from. The best is of course to never accept and use links in emails, IM, etc. Which can be hard when you think it is from your friend or family member, or in the above case, your bank.

A safer method would be to use a LiveCD (a CD which you boot and run programs from) which does not have the ability to be altered. Which means each time you boot it – it is completely untouched by any virus. But it means booting into it each time you want to visit your bank, or other sensitive websites.

Joanna Rutkowska is a Polish security researcher who released a modified Operating System called Qubes OS which I think is a great compromise, and the best I have seen. It accomplishes that by setting up virtual environments in a particularly nifty way. First the whole O/S have been modified to be hard to break into, then it uses dedicated virtual computers for each sensitive website (all according to your preference).

I created one environment for each bank, Paypal etc. Then I ONLY visited that one website using that virtual environment. In other words if you have Paypal you would use the Paypal virtual environment to only visit Paypal. And so on.

Now it requires that the banks website gets infected with the malware needed to infect my virtual computer but only for that bank. Not for any other. It is also particularly easy to fix. Remove it and add a new one.

Another virtual environment is used for casual browsing. Another for business, email etc.

This means an infected email cannot corrupt your other environments and you have a very effective tool against online malware.

Security is about balancing security and work-ability. Too secure and nothing can get done. Too easy and you’ve given easy access for criminals. You need to strike a balance. It took very little to get used to and is about the safest and best balance I’ve seen anywhere.

As you can see at the bottom of the above article LMG Security offers workshops and her book is a very good read.

Make the extra effort to be security aware and avoid being a victim while at the same time not being the tool used to wreck someone else’s life.

OSDial 3.0 Released!

Call Center Service Group has released the much awaited upgrade!
OSDial has been taken to a new level with all the functionality of a big dialer; featuring Asterisk 11, a freshly updated interface, mouse-over help, etc, etc.

From the Feature page: “Our aim with 3.0 was to make OSDial easier and friendlier to use than ever before.” If I do say so myself this is a great release which will raise the bar.

With seamless upgrades and a new all time high capacity of calls – this is the dialer to beat!

Step over to callcentersg.com and find out for yourself!

Men, Freedom and Happiness

Growing up and seeing different social, political and geographical environments, never mind travelling all over, have been a great learning experience. For a young boy the world can be a huge adventure waiting for him to conquer it.

In my case I grew a certain moral aptitude and ineptness at the same time. Maybe it’s a normal thing with youth to feel superior to the foolish older generation, whom I felt were responsible for all the wrongs not yet resolved. Which, much to my surprise, few really seemed to care about. Maybe because they appeared stagnated due to no longer reaching to right the world, or whatnot. For me that brought the urge to go out and face the unknown and improve conditions.

Time does offer the opportunity to see the errors of ones way, if one is willing to look, and see the steadfast viewpoint which in the long run turned out not to be pro-survival. And if one, like me, had grown up with the certainty that I was mostly right in my decisions, I could easily afford seeing when I was wrong and adopt a new view.

In my mind the greatest lesson have been realizing that we are all here together on this small planet and most of us want to do right but sometimes lack the proper know how. We all have, at least at some point, dreams we wish to fulfill. One of them is to right the wrongs in the world.

The methods of how to go about righting the wrongs of the world varies drastically. For some individuals it means ample use of force. As in genocide, or just making others know how powerful you are by placing as many barriers for others as is possible.

For some it means suppressing the views of others as they might bring change, not caring what change it is, just to ensure no change is approaching. The fear of facing the unknown is just too much in a world where you are mostly a victim.

Regardless of what we dream of, big or small, we have this dream of pursuing what makes us happy. It just should not be at the expense of others. Yet how do we accomplish our goals in a world where others dream of the opposite?

I found some basic ideas that serve me well:

  • Do not create an effect on others that you are not willing to experience yourself
  • Take actions that help as many as possible and hurt as few as possible
  • Consider the effects of your action into the future
  • Be responsible for your immediate environment, which is limited to what you feel is Your environment

The latter part about responsibility I know is a no-no. The R word is a huge mistake and should be removed. But the fact of the matter is that one is actually only as successful as one assumes responsibility. And the success only lasts as long as it is helping as many as possible and hurt as few as possible.

Responsibility means that one does not wait for that unknown person to set things right, one does it simply because one knows about it, or suspects it and investigates and acts accordingly.

There seldom is someone else who will correct the thing you see wrong in life. If I’ve learned one thing in life that is that most wrong things are wrong because of that assumption. Oh, I know! It’s not always pleasant, in fact it can be a huge interruption to your lifestyle!

But that’s no valid excuse to let things stay wrong! Get off your butt and do something about it!

Oh, once you start putting in order in your environment the first thing that will happen is that all those things which run counter to your order will make themselves known. Screaming and crying, those who oppose order will complain. Often loudly!

That then is a good sign that you are putting in order. Because if there is no noise after a while, you are not putting in much order.

Whatever you do, don’t stop, simply continue putting in order and sooner or later you will see how things calm down.

When you put in that order make sure you consider what is helping as many as possible and stopping as few as possible.

The best decisions comes from a mind that is at great peace. One filled with compassion for his fellow man. A man at war is not compassionate, or he’s a fool thinking that violence solves anything. It never has. Education is the greatest tool ever to walk this earth. Always be of a mindset to learn every day. Allocate time to learn about your fellow man. Discover the real why someone is fiercely disagreeing or opposes you.

In all of that discover who you really are and be true to yourself, and you will find that personal freedom and happiness is possible.