Pneumonochrome

Today was our last day on vacation. We’re in the airport as I write this, waiting to board our flight, though this post won’t be made until we get home because I have no internet connection here. We had to check out of the hotel at Noon, but don’t fly out until about 7:00pm, so we had a fair amount of time between the two, and decided to head back to Sea World. When we were there on Tuesday, there were a few exhibits we wanted to see that were closed. The Polar Bear exhibit and Shark exhibits were both closed, and we didn’t manage to see the Bat Rays and Moray Eels on Tuesday, though they were open. So we checked those things out today, and they were pretty cool. Both Messy and I got to pet Bat Rays, their skin felt like the stuff those little animals that you put in water and then they swell up really big are made of. The Eels were extremely ugly, and vicious looking. I guess they aren’t really all that scary, though. The plaques around them said they are quite shy, and avoid human contact.

We also saw the Dolphin and Shamu shows again, which was cool, because this time around both shows used different animals, including a mother Dolphin and a mother Whale, and their babies. It was really, really fun to see the little baby dolphin and killer whale and the behaviors they’d already learned and to watch them perform.

We’re about to start boarding now, so I’ll wrap this up, but it was a great vacation, and hopeully we’ll have an uneventful trip home.

So, today we’re at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.  This is a pretty cool place, it’s like a zoo with huge animal pens.  We spent all day walking around looking at different animals and got to see a number of cool animals.  We saw Cheetahs, White Rhinos, Hippos, Lions, Tigers, Buzzards, Macaws, Andean Condors, Okapi, Giant Elands, Dik-Diks, Duikers, Meerkats, Hawks, Harpy Eagles, Eagle Owls, Bald Eagles, and we finished off the day by visiting the California Condors.  These animals have a really cool history, and were a fun way to end the day.

Messy likes to take pictures, lots of pictures, so I understand wanting pictures, especially of an animal that was almost extinct 20 years ago.  So, anyhow, we got there and there was this woman standing there with her camera in one hand, talking to the Condor in this kind of high-pitched voice that just grated on my nerves anyway, saying things like, “Come on, man, turn around.”

She was saying this because the bird was sitting on a branch 6 feet from the balcony we were on, facing to our left, with his head tucked behind his body, preening the outside of that wing, and taking his sweet time about it.

The woman kept whining at the bird, and snapping her fingers over and over and over and over until I wanted to take her camera and throw it off the balcony just to get her to shut up.

Messy, on the other hand just stood there, patiently holding her camera up, and occasionally taking a picture anyway.

Finally, after 15 or 20 minutes of the snap-whine fest, the Condor pulled his head around to the other side of his wing, and we all shot pictures really quick.  I said, “Nice, what a good picture.”

And this lady says, “I’ve been waiting for so long to get that picture!”

And the Condor takes a rather forceful dook, shooting a stream of bird dung feet behind it as soon as she had finished talking.

And Messy, without missing a beat, says to this lady, “Did you get a picture of that?”

I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud.

We are visiting San Diego right now, Benjie is with his grandparents, and we’ve got a week to relax. Today we visited Old Town, and among other things, we visited El Camp Santo, the historic cemetery there. I guess that it became quite an expansive cemetery, but the town grew inward, encroaching on it, so they moved the wall of the cemetery inward, without relocating all the graves. They discovered graves under the street and sidewalk that pass next to the city using ground penetrating radar, and have started putting markers where the are. We noticed them as we walked down the sidewalk and took some pictures. I’d post them, but we forgot to bring the cable to pull the pictures off the camera, so it’s going to have to wait until we get home. It was kind of cool to see, though.

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I bet it’s out there somewhere. We live in a world where the average computer user probably has at least 5 different “accounts” that require that user to have a password. I’d be willing to bet that most of them have between 10 and 20 such accounts. Some of these accounts are going to require the user to occasionally change that password, no two accounts, it seems, do this at the same time.  I think there are laws against it.  These laws were developed by people who hate sanity and happiness.

So we’re left in a situation where a person could potentially have to remember 20 different passwords at the same time.  The best security, of course, would be to have a different password for each different account, each of which follows the conventional rules of password security, and all of which are changed on a regular basis.   But for the user who has 20 different accounts, that means remembering 20 apparently random strings of 8 or more characters, and is beyond the abilities of most people I know.

Have you ever sat at a website, trying to log in, but unable to remember what your password was?  I know I have.

Most people get around this problem in one of the following ways, or a combination of both:

1)They use weak passwords.  Weak passwords, such as dictionary words or names, are easier to remember than strong passwords that resemble something like this Jlw#s2Ml&.

2)When the mandatory password changes come around, they cycle through a short list of passwords, and do their best to change all their passwords whenever they have to change one, keeping all accounts on the same password, and cycling through 4-6 strong passwords.

This second method is, in my mind, the better way of doing it.  Ultimately, if you use a strong password, the second way should be fairly sufficient.  Unfortunately, some organizations require you to use a unique password each time you change it, keeping a history of old passwords.  These organizations also tend to be the ones that require password changes the most frequently, as much as every 2 or 3 months.

I happen to have an account with such an organization, and to be honest, it’s one of the biggest pains in my butt ever.  To reduce the craziness that would ensue from changing 50 or so passwords every 3 months, I don’t keep that account in sync with other accounts, but because of this, I have to keep the password recorded somewhere to reduce the number of times I have to call the stupid helpdesk to have the password reset, thereby reducing the security of my account.

It seems that by being so draconian regarding the creation and changing of passwords, they are being counter productive, resulting in poorer security than there would be if they relaxed a little bit.  If they allowed passwords to be reused after a certain amount of time, or a certain number of uses, for example, I’d be able to treat this account like every other account I have, and I wouldn’t need to write the password down in order to make sure I knew what it was.

Today is one of those days, so far, where I keep finding myself looking for “meaning.”  I look for something in my life worth journaling, something worth contemplating, something that makes this day different from every other, and that makes my experiences today different from other experiences.

I keep looking because I’m not finding it.  I’m not unhappy, I don’t think, but it is interesting to notice that things seem to feel a bit… empty, today.  It’s also interesting to note that that “empty” feeling isn’t necessarily a down feeling.  It’s kind of empty of itself, actually.  It seems to be me taking notice of a complete lack of other feelings.  In a way, it kind of feels restful.  I’m not unhappy, but I’m not noticeably happy, either.  I’m having a hard time pinning an adjective, or a few of them, to my experiences today.

The problem with days like this, I suppose, is that as I think back on other days when I’ve felt this way, I tend to get upset or irritated much more easily, because I’ve got this big, empty, emotional stage, and the door is open for the first group of emotions that walks by to come in and start acting something out.  Often, probably due the difficult nature of many of my daily activities, those emotions end up being frustration, irritability, or anger.

But I’m not any of those things right now, I’m just… here.  I wish I could describe it better, because it’s an interesting phenomenon, I think, but I just can’t seem to find the words to describe it well.  So maybe I’ll just call it the empties