I had a Visa card issued by Elan Financial Services branded through my bank (Eastern Bank). Elan is consistently mediocre. Their web site looks and works like it was built 20 years ago. Their monthly statements tell you how much “bonus” cash back you earned but don’t tell you which transactions fall into which bonus… Read More »
The open-source package Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme, or “ssss” for short, allows a relatively short secret, for example, a password or passphrase, to be split into a specified number of shares in a way that allows the entire secret to be reconstructed from only a subset of the shares. For example, you can split a… Read More »
Several comics have been added, changed, and removed recently in my comics aggregator. Here’s a round-up: Also, I’ve fixed the aggregator so that if a comic is removed in the future, the link you’ve saved to your comics in the aggregator will keep working and just display a warning about the missing comic that’s in… Read More »
I’ve worked almost entirely for startups for the past 30+ years. It’s what I love, but switching jobs a lot comes with the territory. One of the problems I face with each switch is how to take with me outside contacts I’ve made, without compromising my soon-to-be-ex-employer’s intellectual property. Sure, I’ve added some of them… Read More »
There is one problem that every single information security / governance / risk / compliance (GRC) organization at every company has to deal with, and that’s keeping track of all the recurring tasks that you need to do to maintain your security and compliance and ensuring that they are done on time. I’m sure that… Read More »
I’ve done a pretty deep dive comparing the features of various password managers, but one feature I didn’t cover in that analysis was backup for business customers. What commitments does the vendor make in terms of backup/restore? Do they promise to be able to restore data that is accidentally or maliciously modified or deleted by… Read More »
After a four-day outage, GoComics.com is finally back up and therefore once again available in my comics aggregator.
Today, I removed the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine” by Stephan Pastis from my comics aggregator. Here’s why… Over the years, Pastis has run many strips whose basic theme can be summarized as “Both sides in American politics are the same.” He ran one like that just a few weeks ago. Then, yesterday, he ran… Read More »
I recently booked a stay at a motel through hotels.com. The night I checked in, hotels.com sent me email asking me to rate my check-in (literally, the subject line said, “How was your check-in, Jonathan K?” and the body of the email said “How’s your trip going, Jonathan Kamens? Rate your check-in experience.”). Thinking that’s… Read More »
GoComics.com is down, with no word about why or when it will be back up. Any comics in the aggregator—and there are a ton of them—will be unavailable until it comes back up.