Tuesday, February 19, 2013

FW: Old Soviet military hangar now a tropical resort

Old Soviet military hangar now a tropical resort[Wagner, Gregg A.] how cool is this or should I say Hawt!!

http://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/travel/destinations/2013/02/18/old-military-hangar-houses-a-tropical-resort/1927543/

Sent from Alfonsos's

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Password pet peeve

There is so much concern over identity theft and hacking but many large institutions have very poor login procedures for getting into their systems.  The standard the mouse uses is listed below.  This is bare minimum requirement.  As more deviants cause issues there will be more companies going to 2-factor logins which will be a pain but a necessary evil.  My advice to any web development team is to beef up your login requirements now to avoid immediate problems.  Two major financial intuitions, not going to name any names, that manages my retirement monies have the weakest login credentials.  One site actually limits the username to six characters and password to 8 characters. This site also disallows Non-alphanumeric symbols.   Really gets my goat, since my employer chooses the firm I can only complain and not move to another company!     

 

 

Tips for Creating a New Password

·         Username must be at least six (8) characters long

·         Passwords must be at least eight (8) characters long.

·         Passwords must contain characters from at least three (3) of the following four (4) classes:


    Description Examples:

o    English Upper Case Letters A, B, C, ... Z

o    English Lower Case Letters a, b, c, ... z

o    Westernized Arabic Numerals 0, 1, 2, ... 9

o    Non-alphanumeric ("Special characters") e.g., punctuation symbols.

Passwords should not contain your user name or any part of your full name.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Brighthouse is not really your friend




 I had a terrible experience with BrightHouse networks in Orlando.  Our cable box was flaking out and was getting worse each day.  It took BrightHouse thirteen days, countless phone calls and at least five visits before a rookie technician solved our issue.  I would not wish this problem on my worst nemesis. 

On the BrighHouse website is a form page that is for the office of the president.  I copied and pasted my history of the issue into the online form and pressed enter.  I sent a direct Tweet to their social team with the letter attached. 

This was one reply:
Greetings from Bright House Networks!

We have received your message to the Office of the President of Bright House Networks. A member of the Customer Care team will contact you within two business days to help resolve your issue. The reference number for your message is MB2013N9LAA10. Please reference this ID if you need to contact our office.

Thank you for choosing Bright House Networks

Social team wanting to see letter:

 

Here is the link to the letter that finally got attention of the Social Media team and the presidents office.  Letter to Brighthouse regarding DVR box not functioning.

In the end the Presidents office called, a SVP from social media called.  The technician that walked into the house had no information other than it was a repeat visit and after me reciting my letter he replaced our DVR with a different brand DVR and the issue went away.  He left after 15 minutes but three other trucks full of supervisors soon setup camp in front of my house.  It was comical as they were doing an internal audit to uncover the issue. With no more issue they moved on; as for us we are working on a plan to get off cable before the end of 2013.  A prediction I made a long time ago in another post.