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Michael Vick is young, famous and until recently had more money than god. Who knows what lead him to dog torture for pleasure? Michael Jackson was not young, he was very famous and had more money than Michael Vick. Who knows what lead him to self torture? Is money the common denominator? Maybe. It certainly helped.

My west of the Missouri River thinking says reality is to blame. It says reality is a slippery slope. If I came face to face with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (other than willing myself into butter on an Iranian summer day) I would have nothing to say to him. He would have nothing to say to me either. Our realities are universes apart.

If I ran into Michael Vick and I told him I had a dog – half pit bull – that I love. My reality might allow me to ask, ‘Dude, you did what? Shocked them, beat them, starved them, isolated them?’ Bet your life, I wouldn’t understand his answers. He lives in another reality that made that ok.

So it goes with hackers, cracker and identity thieves. Folks, these guys make Michael Vick look like a saint. Heed these warnings:

• Don’t use the same password for everything. Twitter, the sparkling new go-to site just got hacked and embarrassed big time.
• Install security software and keep it up to date.
• Archive your email.
• Don’t be lulled into the, ‘I have nothing to hide’ mentality. You have a social security number, one or two or three bank accounts and an identity that is worth big bucks –valuable assets that deserve as much protection as the contents of your car when you park at the grocery store.

You see the folks who are in the business of cyber theft live in a different reality. Think about it! Just for a minute. Please.

Point is – protect your identity. Keep a password cheat sheet. But keep it private. Don’t be lazy. And please, be tolerant of pit bulls. They are the best dogs in the world.

What were you doing 40 years ago today when Apollo 11 made its historic landing on the moon?

My unscientific statistics-ometer assumes about half of you weren’t doing anything because you were still twinkling away in your mom and dad’s eyes. For many of us, at the time much younger, ‘boomers’ however it was one of our first opportunities to actually watch history in the making.

On July 12, 1969 a Lunar Module camera provided live television coverage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon’s surface at 8:56 pm MDT.

We were living on a wide shelf outcropping in a quonset hut at New Mexico’s Bandelier National Park along with several other employees who occupied similar shelf-plunked huts. The spacing was generous and the beauty was breathtaking It was primitive, isolated and as a result the small community of Bandelier workers was tight. Continue reading »

I don’t know why I was thinking about the election process but…

Back in 2006 a good friend of mine had the brilliant idea of setting up a website where regular citizens could ask local political candidates questions and those politicians, in turn, could respond. The idea was brilliant. No more canned questions with canned answers – rather a clear, clean way to find out what the politicians actually thought about our day to day concerns.

The problem was that it was too far down the election timeline to get it up and running. And, more importantly, there was only one politician who was interested in participating.

Fast forward – Twitter and Facebook – nuf said.