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One of the banks we use brought in a very complicated online security system a year or so ago. They sent us what looks like a little number pad with the left and right bottom buttons being yellow and green respectively. There's a tiny screen. When you go to the bank's site now, you have to first put in your code number - one we've had for a few years already. This takes you to a screen where you're required to put in the answer to a question only you should know, and having done that you then go to the bottom of the screen. Here you have to put in yet another number, this one given to you by the little number pad. It's a different number every time you use it. You press down the green key, put in your four digit pin number, and then receive a six-figure number which you transfer onto the computer screen. Finally you get into your account...if you haven't done something stupid in the process.
The potential for this little number pad to get lost or damaged seems considerable to me. So far we've been fortunate that it's stayed in the same place in my computer drawer, but I can see the day coming when I go to find it and someone's decided it's a worthless piece of junk because it doesn't do anything like a calculator should, and has tossed it out.
While I appreciate the security measures, I must say that this particular process seems extreme. Three numbers and an answer are required. My other bank requires a username and code, which I can put in via my RoboForm program. And then you have to put in two letters out of an answer to one of three questions: when I think about this, it's also rather extreme, though it's nowhere near as fiddly to do as the measures required by the first bank.
The other problem with the first bank's measures is that if you're accessing your bank info from your phone or iPad, then it's very possible you won't have the little number pad device with you. And that makes it impossible to get into your account. The second bank has an app for accessing the account on iPhones and iPads, but the security measure on that is surprisingly weak compared to their online version.
It seems that PayPal is sick to death of passwords and security words and numbers and is heading in the direction of no such things being needed at all. Quite what they're going to replace them with isn't yet quite so clear. They have some possibilities in mind - fingerprints or eye scans - neither of which grab me as essentially more secure (I mean, we've all seen Minority Report, haven't we?)
I'm sure someone can come up with a better approach than either straight passwords, numbers or the daunting security measures these two banks use. We need simplification rather than complexity when we're trying to access information that's ours in the first place. PayPal has started the conversation, certainly, but I'm not sure that they have the means to complete it as yet.
Backing up your computer has become a much bigger issue than it was in the past. I can remember a time when we backed up nothing (way back in our Amiga days), and it never seemed to matter. Computers didn't crash the way they're prone to these days (often from being overloaded with stuff, or from having endless updates confusing various programmes), and there weren't hackers around doing nasty things to private computers. The only thing was that we discovered, after we'd onsold the Amiga, that there was stuff we no longer had access to. One important story I'd written went into oblivion as a result. But you can live with the loss of one short story.
It's strange to hear that people still don't back up material in any consistent way. Backing it up to your own computer is a process that's dead in the water, as an editor acquaintance who had his lap-top stolen recently discovered. And not backing files up at all is extraordinary. Hard drives have a habit of dying when you least expect it, as an author found when his hard drive became corrupted and his entire novel, which was due at the publisher's within days, vanished. He was fortunate that an able technician managed to find the files in the corrupted hard drive. Otherwise he would have been starting from scratch.
I'm not as obsessive about backing up as the writer of the ezine, The Passive Voice is - he and his wife back up everything continually to about a half a dozen different places, and sync things left, right and centre. But I'm certainly more conscious of it than in the past. These days I use JustCloud as my offline, cloud backup system. Overall they've been very satisfactory, although once or twice I've noticed that some particular file just refuses to back up in the normal daily run. That may be an issue with my computer rather than JustCloud. We also have at least two external hard-drives that we back up to fairly regularly, though certianly not as regularly as the Passive Guy does.
And I use Evernote to keep hold of the hundreds (actually, thousands) of articles, notes, pictures and other such that I once would have put on the computer itself. Evernote is superb, very searchable, syncs every few minutes or so, and keeps everything off my computer as well as on, so I don't have a problem with worrying about whether I'll lose all those things I've saved...for some rainy day.
So there are ways to avoid losing your entire month's edits of your magazine, or your entire novel (or even your long-lost story). Whatever you do, don't rely on fate to keep you safe from loss of precious files!
A couple of delightful quotes from early stories by Charles Dickens. First, from Chapter 1 of 'The Boarding House.'
'It's rather singular,' continued Mrs Tibbs, with what was meant for a most bewitching smile, 'that we have a gentleman now with us, who is in a very delicate state of health - a Mr Gobler. His apartment is the back drawing-room.'
'The next room?' inquired Mrs Bloss.
'The next room,' repeated the hostess.
'How very promiscuous!' ejaculated the widow.
'He hardly ever gets up,' said Mrs Tibbs in a whisper.
'Lor!' cried Mrs Bloss, in an equally low tone.
'And when he gets up,' said Mrs Tibbs, 'we never can persuade him to go to bed again.'
'Dear me!' said the astonished Mrs Bloss, drawing her chair nearer Mrs Tibbs. 'What is his complaint?'
'Why, the fact is,' replied Mrs Tibbs, with a most communicative air, 'he has no stomach whatsoever.'
'No what?' inquired Mrs Bloss, with a look of the most indescribable alarm.
'No stomach,' repeated Mrs Tibbs, with a shake of her head.
'Lord bless us! What an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it necessary to board anywhere.
And secondly, from Chapter 5 of Horatio Sparkins.
'Pray, what is your opinion of woman, Mr Sparkins?' inquired Mrs Malderton. The young ladies simpered.
'Man,' replied Horatio, 'man, whether he ranged the bright, gay, flowery plains of a second Eden, or the more sterile, barren, and I may say, commonplace regions, to which we are compelled to accustom ourselves, in times such as these, man, under any circumstances, or in any place - whether he were bending beneath the withering blasts of the frigid zone, or scorching under the rays of a vertical suin - man, without woman, would be - alone.'
And finally, from Chapter 8 of The Great Winglebury Duel.
'You are the upper-boots, I think?' inquired Mr Trott.
'Yes, I am the upper-boots,' replied a voice from inside a velveteen case, with mother-of-pearl buttons - 'that is, I'm the boots as b'longs to the house; the other man's my man, as goes errands and does odd jobs. Top-boots and half-boots, I calls us.'
'You're from London?' inquired Mr Trott.
'Driv a cab once,' was the laconic reply.
'Why don't you drive it now?' asked Mr Trott.
Over-driv the cab and driv over a 'ooman,' replied the top-boots, with brevity.
Some interesting quotes from the works of Vladimir Nabokov, in which there's a distinct sense of his having a much greater spiritual life than some would have thought. Including me.
Firstly from a letter he wrote to his mother, after his father had been killed (accidentally) by an assassin.
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I used to use Google Reader a lot at my last job, where I was required to find material to pass onto various readers of our own blog. The Reader was integrated with Outlook in some way, which meant I didn't have to go to Google Reader at all, but could just get emails sent to me telling me what was going on. Anything I was interested in I could link through to from Outlook.
When I retired, I stopped using the Reader approach, because I didn't need to chase up the material anymore, and because I just didn't have time to spend the day catching up on everything that came through. These days I get most updates of information via Twitter, or, less often, from Facebook
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My mother played cricket. She was even in the provincial women's cricket team way back in the thirties. I don't play cricket. My try-out with the school team resulted in hitting nothing and being sent home again. Very disheartening at the time.
On the other hand, I've never been hit by a cricket ball (unlike the poor English spectator who got hit on the head yesterday when Rutherfod hit a six. I've never had a cricket ball leap up and nobble me in the groin, nor have I ever had cramp after striking a ball - as Mark Richardson did once when playing. It's on You Tube
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Another extract from Dorothy L Sayers' Clouds of Witness showing the Dowager Duchess (Lord Peter's mother) in full flight. They are discussing Mr Goyles, who proves to be a most unsuitable suitor for Mary, Lord Peter's sister.
'He said what he thought,' said Mary. 'Of course, Lord Mountweazle, poor dear, doesn't understnad that the present generation is accustomed to discuss things with its elders, not just kow-tow to them. When George gave his opinion, he thought he was just contradicting
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Everybody's had that experience when using the predictive text on a mobile phone where you send off a message and realise straight afterwards that it has a very wrong word in it. My two sons used to send each other texts done predictively: they always left whatever the phone suggested as the correct word. Then the recipient had to guess what the sender had intended to say...
I just read about an Andoid app called SwiftKey Keyboard which is so good at guessing what you intend to write that it almost invariably gets the message correct the first time
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The following quotations are from the second in the Wimsey series, Cloud of Witness, by Dorothy L Sayers. Sayers, being a Christian,
packs her books with references to Christian matters - along with a great deal of other matter, some of which was well-known at the time of writing, but perhaps is no longer understood. The title of the book itself comes from chapter 12 of the Book of Romans.
Here's a short piece from chapter 3 where Wimsey and the police detective, Parker, are tracking down footprints:
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A short extract from Whose Body, by Dorothy L Sayers, chapter seven. Parker is a Scotland Yard detective and close friend of Lord Peter Wimsey.
Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages
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on The Reason for Cleaning
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