Reality Me

This picture and caption are a perfect example of the stronghanded, Orwellian tactics that the Bush supporters wish to see implemented throughout our country. They are insecure submissives that lack control of their own lives and would happily give up their freedoms to have someone impose control on them. By George [pun] I’ve figured it out! Pro-Busher’s need therapy!!

Amy is such a big girl now. It’s fun to watch her as she makes decisions. She is eatting her first cheese toast (that I know of) and she goes to her table and pulls her chair out all without a thought never moving her eyes from Dora. Then a big yawn!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the same thing about each of the children but the older ones often engage me more while they are doing their wonders and I don’t get the pleasure of writing about them.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be staring at your last roll of toilet paper unsure of what you will do when it is gone? Counting down to the last diaper? Wondering if you should be watering down the milk and apple juice? Intentionally skipping meals to make sure that your children do not go without? Calculating how many miles the car can go before you run out of gas and pondering how many interviews that will get you and if you get a job how many work days you will make before having to tell the boss you don’t have transportation? Knowing that you could take the bus but recognizing that the bus requires money that you don’t have? Wondering how resumes will get submitted and jobs found for an IT person without an Internet connection?

It’s not much fun.

I scavenged enough gas from the lawn mower can to get Cathy to her luncheon meeting and back today.

Now to program for an hour.

The temp agency called to tell me that the client is still reviewing resumes. I’m going to be reviewed into living under a bridge!

I have so much to do that I am often overwhelmed. I will go to my grave with so much undone that I will certainly become histories most restless soul.

I am still using the Covey system of time management (see: “First Things First” by Stephen R Covey) but I am complimenting it with note cards. Each task is written on a note card so that I can only see (and think about) one task at a time. Each task gets a minimum of one very focused hour and then has the option of returning to the bottom of the stack. The tasks do not have to be done in order. Upon completion, the card may be burned.

  

A New Day!

Let’s start the day off with a PayPal donation link:

This Morning

I guess my body needed some sleep; my priorities and my mind certainly did not desire it. To bed at 12:30am and up at 6:15am.

Must make miracles today.

Spent part of the evening getting 4 domains transferred including confirming the setup of the email accounts, transfer of files, backup of logfiles (that was tedious), creation of ftp accounts, etc. This was a task I’ve majorly procrastinated on. Felt great to get it done!

Finish the game!

Blogger did a great job with removing that horrid ad banner and replacing it with a fun, functional, and sleek toolbar. The search feature for searching a single blog is a fantastic addition (albeit Soople has reminded us of Google’s shortcut for this for some time). The best thing is obvious the “next blog” random blog hit. I’ve looked at my stats and some others and for the past two days they have been filled with “wierdness” as referrers have inexplicably come from completely unrelated blogs. Everyone’s hits are up! Of course, our metrics for judging how we are promoting our sites are completely thrown off now!

Obviously the blogsphere is enjoying this feature quite a bit! Thanks Blogger.

So I know that I code with some bad habits. Some of the things that I teach people not to do still turn up in my code. So when is the correct time to break these habits? Breaking habits takes time. Time is money so when money is low it leads us to believe this is not the time to break the bad habits. However, if we can strive to break one or two as we go its better than not trying at all.

It is time to review my authentication method for securing my websites as I move into the login process of my overseas project. I anticipate that I will find that my methods are still up-to-date and secure. Macromedia provides a good read on the topic with “Building Secure Applications with ColdFusion MX 6.1”.

Ah! “In ColdFusion 5 and earlier, the application developer would write all of the code necessary to manage whether or not a user is logged in, validate a user’s identity and credentials against an authorization store, and so forth. In ColdFusion MX, a framework of tags and functions are provided to handle much of the authentication tasks” Sure enough… My techniques are out of date.

This is key! With web server authentication if not using SSL then the username and password are sent as a “base64-encoded string with each request” so without SSL the web server authentication is very weak.

Hmm. That article turned out to be a bit of a let down. In summary, it was a configuration document for configuring RDS on a CFMX box. The only other insigth was that MM has provided builtin tags to replace all the hard work I did on my authentication scripts and roles based security custom tags. So much for all my cool points. See: cflogin, cfloginuser, cflogout, GetAuthUser, IsUserInRole, and the docs on Securing Applications.

Master: I demand 1 hour undivided programming.

Student: So shall it be.