April 15, 2014

There were 3 posts published on April 15, 2014 (this is page 1 of 1).

Loving the new job

Raleigh_Team
Thursday marks my second week at the new job and, boy, what a difference it is from my last job! I actually have fun at work. No one micromanages me, no stupid mind games are being played. People don’t come into work seemingly to delight in making someone else’s day miserable. Night and day.

Two weeks into my job and I’ve already earned the trust of my colleagues. I’ve already jumped in and begun solving problems. I’ve even offered house-hunting advice to those new to Raleigh. It feels awesome to work someplace that appreciates my contributions.

Above is a photo I took of my team last week. Looks like a fun group, doesn’t it?

Your Clever Password Tricks Aren’t Protecting You from Today’s Hackers

Good password-choosing advice from Lifehacker. Bottom line: if you can remember your password it isn’t good enough.

Our passwords are much less secure than they were just a few years ago, thanks to faster hardware and new techniques used by password crackers. Ars Technica explains that inexpensive graphics processors enable password-cracking programs to try billions of password combinations in a second; what would have taken years to crack now may take only months or maybe days.

Making matters much worse is hackers know a lot more about our passwords than they used to. All the recent password leaks have helped hackers identify the patterns we use when creating passwords, so hackers can now use rules and algorithms to crack passwords more quickly than they could through simple common-word attacks.

via Your Clever Password Tricks Aren't Protecting You from Today's Hackers.

N&O runs dedication story a week late

In about ten minutes, a group of people will converge on the entrance to the Walnut Creek Greenway near the Worthdale Community Center. They will wait around in the rain until they become bored for a dedication ceremony that has come and gone, and sloppy editing on the part of the News and Observer is to blame.

Sunday’s Midtown Raleigh News carried a front-page story on the greenway dedication, stating the ceremony would occur Tuesday at 4 PM. The problem is that the ceremony took place last week. The story was correct when it ran a week earlier in the N&O but somehow it landed in Sunday’s Midtown edition without being updated to show the ceremony already took place.

I love the N&O’s spotlight of Raleigh’s parks. I called for more coverage in the past and still think Raleigh citizens value their parks highly enough (and they have invested enough in them ) for parks to merit media coverage. That said, inaccurate coverage might do more harm than no coverage at all.

I wish the N&O would work just a little bit harder on fact-checking its local coverage.