Yubikey Follow-Up

I have to say that this device, the Yubikey, looks pretty impressive. I think that it is being marketed more to the business/corporate world as a replacement for any secure login technologies they currently have in place. Of course, if a company is in need of a secure login technology this could be the way to go. I am, however, concerned that a person could end up with a ton of these things that are only good for one website. I am not sure that everyone would want to carry around one for each website that they want to log into. Maybe I am not understanding the concept, but it seems that each site would provide their Yubikey.

Add on:

The Yubikey does support OpenID.  So you could use it with any services that accept OpenID.

Yubikey

On Security Now episode 141, Steve Gibson talks about his finding of the Yubikey.  This thing is made in Sweden and appears to have some value as a security device.  From what I have seen it plugs into a USB port on your computer, which recognizes it as a USB keyboard.  You press the button on the Yubikey and it sends a secure password.  I need to do a little more digging as to how it works exactly.  Steve Gibson was estatic about the device.  The website states that you can buy a sample for 20 Euros and there is a subscription of some kind.  I’ll did a little more and post more info.

Chaos Theory

I was watching a news item this morning about how there is a shortage of basic food items.  Things like rice, beans, wheat, etc.  This is causing shortage of products in the United States.  Can you believe that?  I have developed my owns thoughts as to where this could end up.

The earth is a huge closed system for all intensive purposes and being a large system chaos theory applies.  One of the things that chaos theory tells us is that populations do not settle on a sustainable amount of people.  The population is either below or above the sustainable amount of people.  The consequence of being above the sustainable amount of people is a die off of a number of people to get the population below the sustainable amount.  Intelligent beings can make the total amount of people that can be sustainable people to increase.  So the population of the earth is increasing and increasing.  The rate of increase is alarming to me.  Science can not tell us just how many people the earth is capable of sustaining.  This amount increases as our technology level increases, but what happens when we have exceeded to total amount of people that are sustainable by the earth?

My prediction is that there will be a massive die off of people on the earth.  I’m not talking a few million, I’m talking about a billion or two billion.  Not having enough food to feed people could cause this to happen.  Something like 3/4 of the people on earth are sustained be rice and/or beans.  These things are prevalent in most of the major cultures on the plant.  They are just basis food items.  So Mother Natures reaction to having too many people could be to take out a large chunk of the population of the earth.

The US would not be immune to this die off.  We are actually contributing to the problem.  We get a lot of our food from foreign countries, because we have turned agricultural areas into residential, commercial and industrial areas.  Can the US grow enough food to sustain the current population without buying food from foreign countries?  If there are shortages of food, then these countries will not be selling it to anyone.  They will keep the food for themselves.

So, the rising cost of food is just the beginning of the problem.  Eventually there will just not be enough food to go around. And chaos ensues.

Did anyone see the truck that hit me?

I have been in the process of quiting a medication prescribed by my doctor.  it just wasn’t working out for me.  The bad part is that I feel as though a truck of some type hit me.  When I get up in the morning it’s at it’s worst.  I just feel awful.  I don’t know for sure that it is the medication that is doing the trick of if I am having dome kind of flare up.  I have to say that it has been quite a struggle to make it through the day.  Well, I will keep trucking along.

Lotus Symphony

I was not that impressed with the Lotus Symphony compared to OpenOffice.org.  I don’t really see any advantage to having Lotus Symphony.  I was a little upset that it basically took over all the files that we previously opened by OpenOffice.  I was not asked if I wanted this to happen, it just did it by itself.  The interface for Lotus Symphony makes your documents smaller on the screen by default.  The tools bars are also in different positions on the screen, which caused a little confusion at first.

All in all, I know it comes down to personal preference as to which one of these you will use.  I grew up on the MS office layout and OpenOffice makes the adjustment easy.  I will continue to use OpenOffice for the time being.

Not Much Sleep

Due to the bout with neuropathy last night I didn’t get much sleep.  I finally got to sleep sometime after 2:08am, as this was the last time I looked at the clock.  Wake up time came entirely too early and I am now feeling the effects of no sleep.  Not getting sleep has detrimental effects on you over-all attitude towards just about everything.  Needless to say, I have had a fun time trying to not say nasty things to everyone.

Neuropathy

This is one of those times when having neuropathy really sucks.  I should be in bed asleep right now, but I have that pins and needles feeling all over.  Laying still makes it that much worse.  In fact, the longer you lay still the more you want to jump out a window.  Unfortunalty, my window is not that far off the ground and I would only make it worse.  My wife is a real saint for putting up with my eradic behavior.  The Pope is coming to America, maybe I should mention her to him.  Ok, I think I will give it another try.  I do have to work tomorrow and I guess getting a little sleep helps your attitude at work.

OpenOffice.org and IBM Lotus Symphony

I have been using OpenOffice.org for some time now.  They recently updated to version 2.4 which so far I have not noticed any obvious differences.  I am pretty much an OpenOffice fan-boy.  I tell everyone who needs an office suite about this product.  Its free to download and easy to install.  Today I decided that I would try out IBM’s Lotus Symphony.  Well, I will tell you about the experience so far as I have not installed the product yet.  The website for Lotus Symphony was a little slow for me.  There were several long pauses between clicks to navigate the site.  IBM also wants your name and e-mail address for some reason.  The other problem is that one of the check boxes needs to checked, because it appears that they will use your info for something.  The download has finish and at this point I am waiting for a quiet time to try it out.

Medication Reaction

I was taking a drug called Lyrica to help with the symptoms of neuropathy. About 2 weeks ago I increase the dosage to 150mg 3 times a day. After a couple of days, I began to feel a little strange, but didn’t think anything of it. A few days ago, I started to feel paranoid and was really hyper. I got really anxious for no reason. I called my doctor who has decided that I shouldn’t take that much. No I have to stop it entirely in stages. I guess there may be a dosage that I can stand.

When I tried taking Cymbalta for neuropathy, I had a reaction that was a little different. The main thing that I remember was terrible hot flashes. Needless to say I stopped that medication also. The problem is I am running out of medications that I can take. This is compounded by the fact that every year this seems to get a little worse, possibly due to developing a tolerance to the Neurontin. I have a hard time keeping a positive attitude about this whole thing. It is very frustrating.

Update on EC

It is the end of week 2 and my father-in-law seems to be doing rather well.  He has developed some trouble with swallowing, which is a concern.  He needs to keep his weight up and not being able to swallow well does hinder this situation.  He has been receiving wonderful care from his doctors and the various other medical personnel at the treatment location, so these problems are addressed immediately.

Last weekend, he did have a little problem when he didn’t realize that he had been receiving anti-nausea medication in his chemo treatments.  Since he has a chemo pump he was still getting the chemo, but evidently in order to get enough medication in the pump for the weekend it did not include the anti-nausea meds.  He was to take these in pill form and he waited until he felt sick.  This was the wrong plan.  He was very, very sick.  Oh well, lesson learned.