I am sure many people are tired of reading about Michael Jackson and his recent death. Rather than focus on all the tabloid-chunked news stories about Michael Jackson, such as those with his "supposed" 25-year-old illegitimate son who is a Norwegian rapper,or the supposed "fact" that Jackson was going bald since the 1984 burning accident while filming a Pepsi commercial or 5 Million kept by his financial advisors or even Jackson's much more sordid personal past. I would like to talk about one of my all time favorite songs by the Jacksons or Michael Jackson, the 1980 single Can you Feel it?.
I remember this song, not from 1980 as it was not a very big pop hit. From what I recall reading, the song barely entered the Billboard Hot 100. When Michael Jackson was at the height of his fame (Thriller, circa 1983), video channels of all sorts scrambled to find any Michael Jackson-related material to play. I was in middle school at the time and did not have access to cable and could only watch a local UHF channel that played music video (channel 69 in Atlanta). They played in heavy rotation Can you Feel it?, which was already a few years old by that time.
About 2 years ago, I pulled it up on YouTube. It is a well done video for its time. It probably was filmed in late 1979 judging by the looks of Michael and his brothers.
The video is a bit pretentious in looking back, but I still enjoy the song very much. I even bought a cassette of the Jacksons' album Triumph. I was just a bit too young to go to concerts, but the Jackson Victory tour in 1984 did sweep through Atlanta. I wish now I had begged to go, since there were few tours that Michael Jackson had done in the US. I was a big fan, but did not try to go, bummer. By 1985 or so, I had gone to a few big named concerts, but did not try to see the Jacksons or Culture Club, another band I really had liked at the time. Anyway, this song is a long time personal favorite of mine. Great song I wanted to share in case you were not familiar with it.
Troogleblog counter-tweetering apparent "false" Tweets about Google?
OK, I am blogging about Google today because I am curious about a few Tweets from Troogleblog who just created a Twitter account. I don't usually comment much about Google other than I like a few of their products like Google, GMail, YouTube and oh yea, Blogger.
I noticed this on Twitter: apparently from what little I can tell at best Google created @Troogleblog user so that people on twitter don't report tweet what they assert are reports about Google and its products.
These were the Tweets from Troogleblog from 6/16/09 that made me wonder:
@s0tet RT @flyinghamster: Tomorrow secret Google CEO in attendance @Bildenberg Hotel http://tinyurl.com/msqoy5 -#Troogle #Dasient #blacklist
"Former Google Employees Launch Web Malware Startup" http://bit.ly/HbxKl Web Anti-#Malware #Dasient #blacklist #Troogle
Apparently this article in Informationweek doesn't suit User Troogleblog: Former Google Employees Launch Web Malware Startup. Not sure if that is the case or not, since Troogleblog also retweeted what Twitter user @flyinghamster reported earlier in the day on June 16th, 2009.
I went to LinkedIN and looked up the 3 fellows mentioned in this article. Only Ameet Ranadive was not an employee of Google, but the other 2 fellows were, so Google takes issue with that perhaps? Shrug, curious, but that is the only thing I can think of.
I think my tin foil hat got too damp and I have to throw it away. I wonder if someone could fill in the blanks for me, a non-Google employee.
Many of us who work online stay busy. Casual surfing of news can be time consuming, so what better way than to use a customized portal at one of your favorite search engines. For the more well-known search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, one needs usually an ID associated with the search engine and to be logged in order to customize the pages to your liking.
For years, I had used Yahoo!'s customizations for my own portal page. I believe I started using it around 2003. Since that time, the onslaught of Web 2.0 infrastructure has vastly changed the landscape of a customized search engine portal page.
I am showing an screen capture of one of my Gmail accounts I use for infosecurity news, general news and spam related news. Being logged into my GMail account, and using Seamonkey as a browser, this allows me to customize your own iGoogle page. I munged my GMail account at the top. iGoogle works fine with the Firefox browser as well. You can also have your GMail inbox on the portal page showing the newest emails you have received. For this particular GMail account, I rarely use the email function as it is spam-ridden. I can pick out which ever news source you like best. On the top left of the graphic, I chose a great anti-spam blog called I Kill Spammers.
So you can add your favorite blogger blogs or probably most any other type of blog out there to your own customized portal page. You can easily drag and drop categories. At the top right, I have Slashdot stories. I am a nerd, so Slashdot is for me to read most days.
I have the weather on mine as well, but it is near the bottom, so it is not seen in that particular graphic. I pick out the weather from some different places just out of my own curiosity.
I believe the coding behind a lot of this is written in AJAX and is embedded into RSS feeds. Some people take their portal pages seriously, especially when Google makes occasional changes design-wise. I tend to keep mine somewhat simplified to where they almost look like a default Google page.
I haven't used Yahoo's portal page much in a while now, maybe I can go back and make it more to my liking. I don't think I have updated my Yahoo portal page in 2 years or so now. I would venture to guess Yahoo is probably trying to play catchup with Google, so maybe Yahoo's portal page deserves a second chance.
What are your favorite search engine portal pages? And if you use them, how do you customize yours?
Back in 2005, I was researching info online and found a book called Faces of Evil by Louis Gibson. I bought the book from Amazon and was intrigued after I read it quickly in one evening. Louis Gibson is a sketch artist for the Houston City Police Department. Her sketches have helped catch many criminals over the years.
I then enrolled in the Forensic Arts class that Louis Gibson teaches in Chicago. It was for 5 days and was very worth while. And I always enjoy going back to Chicago as it is one of my favorite large cities in the US. I had thought about becoming a sketch artist myself. I haven't really practiced much in a while. I had found out the jobs generally do not pay very well or not at all in some cases. The whole premise is police sketch artists are underutilized in solving crimes. I hope one day to pursue sketch artist work, assuming I can fit art into my busy schedule.
For the first time since it has been sponsored in Atlanta for about 3 years now, I was able to visit the FishNet Security Summit this week. I encourage others in other parts of the US to attend this FishNet seminar or one similar to it if you are near by. You can check out their Events listed here.
There I wanted to meet 2 Security Catalyst Community members (SCC) that I have gotten to know online, but not yet in person. Andy Willingham, one fellow SCC member, told me about this FishNet vendor presentation a while earlier, so I appreciate that and also getting to know Andy in person and for him letting me know about this conference. Another member, Martin Fisher another fellow SCC member, was one of the keynote speakers. I got to sit and talk to both Andy and Martin a while. I stayed for most of the presentations and enjoyed the freebies that FishNet and the other vendors gave out. I spoke to about 4 vendors, including Symantec. I then had to head back to work and finish up during a busy work week.
I really enjoyed getting to know and talking to both Andy Willingham and Martin Fisher from Security Catalysts forum. I hope one day to see them again soon. They gave me some great infosecurity tips, such as listening to more podcasts. I haven't yet set up to record podcasts to CD-R to listen to them in my car during long commutes.
Martin Fisher, another fellow SCC member, gave an excellent morning keynote speech. Martin spoke about the difficulties in leading the Incident Response team at Delta Airlines. Martin did a superb job of explaining how he has the manager of the Incident Response team has to make on-the-fly decisions during some very high stressful job situations in protecting the network security of Delta Airlines. Martin's personal stories make his presentation very lively and very worthwhile to listen to. I highly recommend Martin's presentations. You can learn more about Martin by following him on Twitter: Martin Fisher's twitter account is armorguy.
Twitter- randomly bragging about your own unexceptional life
Twouble with Twitters:
This is cartoon clip by SuperNews! hilarious. I think just about everyone would like this video from the Twitter-philes to the rabid Twit-haters. At the time I post this, this video has 56K views on YouTube since I watched it a few times. I watched some of SuperNews! other videos, but they were not quite as funny as this one about Twitter.
Here are a few Random quotes from the video I laughed at:
