Clearsite Multimedia

If I strung together all the time I spent organizing, resetting, writing, and searching for login, user, and password words and phrases, it would amount to a few months—at least. Do you realize what you could accomplish with that time? When the company was relatively small and we had one local server, a couple of mailboxes and a handful of computers, we used one password. It was a weird one that didn’t make any sense, but everyone could remember it and we used it for everything. Then word came down from the highest sources warning us of our bad practice. We also had a PC doctor tell us to change our login names and our user names. “Make them long, make them clever, make them hack-proof!” And so we did.

I can say, with absolutely no hesitation, that it has been a complete headache and a waste of time. Well, maybe not in the beginning… I mean the “cleverness” of it all. We were young and so were the hackers. Everyone has gotten wiser and smarter. Hackers are relentless, sophisticated, and increasingly knowledgeable. There isn’t much in the way of “cleverness” that a mediocre hacker can’t get around.

It’s best to go into your dashboards, your preferences, and your DNS set ups to “check” and choose filters, blockers, and tools (oh, so many great tools!) to make your websites, mailboxes, and servers more protected. Let the experts help you. Save your time and reduce the headaches of creating complicated lists of logins and passwords. I’m not saying reduce your list to your first pet’s name. You just don’t need to come up with a puzzle, word system, and diagram.

More importantly, than any system that you may come up with for keeping track of your logins, users, and passwords, is who has the ability to choose, change, and access them. Designate a trusted person to dub as the admin, always keeping yourself in the loop. Organize and guard anything you store for reference.

I’m not going to chastise everyone for the overuse of water and put forth data like how an average American uses 114 liters a day (30 gallons) showering, or that our planet is covered with 70 percent water and we’ll never run out of it, but moving fresh sanitized water is economically unfeasible and virtually inaccessible into more than 35 percent of the world’s populated areas, or that several people in developing nations (”developing”: Tuh! That’s a misnomer.) die every second from water-born illness and disease.

I’m not going to say how ignorant people are in washing their own cars, washing dishes by hand, brushing their teeth while letting gallons of water run down the drains, cleaning their beautiful cement driveways with the hose, and not replacing their toilets with more efficient mechanisms that save 60 percent more water with each flush than older toilets.

And what about our American standard of luxury: water parks, water shows (especially the Las Vegas kind), water falls and fountains in both business parks and homes. It pains me to see a party of 5 people sit at a dining establishment and not take one sip of their 12 oz. water with ice cubes. Multiply that out!

No. All I’m going to say is, think a little more about this resource that we can not recreate or substitute. Amazingly the water you use today has been around since the creation of life on this planet. Appreciate the sound and site of a body of water whether it’s in a fountain or in your bath tub.

Be conscientious, be aware, be grateful.

MAKING FOLK ART FROM ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR?

In the midst of a diversity campaign, I was shooting some art at a Mexican restaurant chalk full of chotchkies (that’s Spanish for “chotchkies”), aluminum stampings, painted ceramic sea animal sculptures and window-box. ‘Love this kind of art because you don’t have to figure out what it is. You just enjoy it. I’ve always liked folk art—unschooled, simple and naive. But that doesn’t take the technique, charm and artistry away. Click to Continue »

How sad that it’s become common practice to start emails without a proper salutation and to end it with a trailing history of forwards and spam text. (Clean up your forwarded email, man!) That, I can accept just for knowing that we are all in a hurry and it’s so easy to hit reply and shoot out some answer especially if it’s been an ongoing conversation. So now that we agree that email is easy, we can also label non-reply as quite rude, downright lazy, and extremely bad business. Click to Continue »

Hey, did you know there’s a whirl pool in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is almost 1500 miles wide? Not a big deal except it’s filled with tons of plastic that washes out into the ocean. It’s a sludge of rotating plastic particles entering our sea life and finding it’s way into the food chain. So don’t forget to throw all those plastic utensils, bottle caps, water bottles, blister packages and stir straws into the recycle bin. Yah, I know they don’t have a rounded triangle with a number on it but they should! Oh, and think of all that plastic you throw into the regular trash from the bathroom. Plastic that holds cosmetics, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, underarm juice, on and on and on.