Did You Know That Lemonade Has Lemon in It

It was a lovely warm day and I was sitting drinking a glass of generic brand diet lemonade. My mind started to wander, as it does, and my eyes happened to rest upon the bottle sitting on the table. I notice the label that said "Diet Lemonade” with a subtext, “Made with Lemon Juice.”

I wondered why such a statement should need to have been made. What would you expect to have been a drink that was called lemonade? Chocolate bananas? Aardvark mucus? ‘Come on guys,’ I said to myself, ‘why would you feel it necessary to qualify fact that lemonade has lemon in it?

The label, therefore, warranted closer inspection.

This 'Lemonade' contained:

Carbonated water

Lemon juice from concentrate (1%)

Citric Acid

Flavouring

Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrates)

Preservatives (Sodium Benzoate, Potassium Sorbate)

Sweeteners (Aspartame Sodium Saccharine)

This had a final sub note of “Contains a source of Phenylalanine.”

Gee, what ARE all these chemicals? Man, this made it feel like a really healthy drink. So the manufacturer found it necessary to mention that there was Lemon juice in it, even though it constituted only 1%.

 Of course, the label had the traffic light system.

It was less than 1% calories (green), trace fat(green), trace saturates(green), less than 1 gram salt (green), and less than 1% trace sugars (green).

So the green ‘traffic lights’ across-the-board on the label made it look healthy.

But it also should have included another element in the traffic light system.

The one red light at the bottom of the list meaning “no nutritional value or any fucking flavour whatsoever.”

Funny True Story 3 - Canal Boat Holiday.

There was a guy I used to work with called Des. I don’t know whether it was short for Desmond or desperate. But that is only slightly relevant to the story. Des lived with his wife and his mother-in-law. Besides all the obvious and usual jokes, this was not an ideal situation for Des. He did not get on with his mother-in-law all that well and each day he used to come into work with various stories and horrors of his life at home.

Most of the time we took these with a pinch of salt but there is one happenstance I know to be true and maybe is indicative of life that Des had to live.

One day Des came into work and he actually looked happy for once. The reason for this sudden onset of enjoyment was that he had managed to book a holiday. OK, as well as for him and his wife, it also included his mother-in-law, being the only way to persuade his wife to allow him to book it. It was a bit of a victory for him as it was difficult and almost impossible to get his mother-in-law to go anywhere, let alone on a holiday.

He had booked a canal boat holiday on a traditional narrowboat. A real traditional narrowboat, as it was not diesel powered but horse-drawn in the same manner as when the canals were first built. A week of quiet meandering through the countryside just watching the world go silently by.

As the months turned to weeks Des’s anticipation remained constantly buoyant. His whole being, it seemed, was focused on this one single marvellous event in his life.

Then one day, a couple of weeks before the holiday was due to commence, he came into work with such a manner of sadness and anger it was a shock, even to us. Apparently, unbeknownst to him his mother-in-law had cancelled the holiday. The reason she gave was cruelty to animals. Apparently, she had failed to grasp what a going on a horse-drawn narrowboat entailed.

She thought it was cruel to make a horse swim and tow boats as well.

You couldn’t make this up.

How to EASILY create and remember secure passwords

Nearly every day someone on the media is banging on about insecure passwords and how the some reason it is OUR fault that the Internet is so insecure. Anyway, that seems to be the situation and the more and more sites demand us to make create more secure passwords. The trouble is, how to remember them?  Here are a few ideas which will help you make your passwords more secure and even better give you the tools to remember them.  Jak1234 is a poor password - I have seen worse, someone I knew had the password bobbydog named a dog they had pictures of on Facebook. No Really!

  Ibi!!atGr8woC is a good password as it had letters both uppercase and lowercase numbers and symbols. If you read this blog to the end you will be able to create and remember it.

But first some 'do's.'

Longer passwords are more secure than shorter ones. Most websites have a minimum and maximum length always aim more towards maximum.

Use different passwords on different systems- you can even customise the level of security depending on what application you're using if you want.

Change your passwords as often as you can. The ideal would be every month but we live in the real world and I know it can be a hassle to do this but I know some people have the same password for years. The longer it is in existence the greater the chance of it being hacked.

Use a combination of numbers, letters and if possible special characters. Note: you might need to check with various websites which characters are allowed and excluded. This is why  Ibi!!atGr8woC is such a good password as it uses all of the elements.

Over the years I have used and seen different techniques for remembering passwords. One method is to remember a combination from childhood that for some reason had got stuck in your memory. An old car registration number or place and telephone number for instance. I remembered the car registration of my grandfather's car was 1527pp, so GF1527pp was quite a good password as it is easy to remember. The prefix GF by the way stood the grandfather.

Another method is keyboard shapes. I am a visual person and I found this quite useful in the past. There are some obvious shapes and combinations. Avoid qwerty for obvious reasons. The same also applies for azerty which is the same thing but on a French keyboard.  Doing diagonals from a start letter is a possibility. For instance, something based on grncy which is a cross shape from the letter G as a starting point. Look at your keyboard and you'll see what I mean. Then add a numerical value  (I have used the year of the moon landing) and a capital to become Grncy69 or grncY69. This is not a bad choice and certainly better than using bobbydog!  Actually, when working with someone with learning difficulties I created a cardboard template that was placed over the keyboard to visibly give them shape to follow.

In the end, most of us find the use of mnemonics as a memory aid as one of the most useful tools. This is how I would remember the password.  Ibi!!atGr8woC.

What is it stand for?

I became ill at the great wall of China.

To make it more difficult I changed it to I became ill at the Gr8 wall of China.

This translated to (I) ( b)ecame ( ill)  (a)t ( t)he ( Gr8) ( W)all of (C)hina.

The final twist was to transpose the letter L in the word ill for two exclamation marks. This gives the password all the elements of a seemingly random sequence, a mix of upper and lowercase letters as well as special characters.

Try it. Make up a phrase that you can remember and manipulated in a similar manner. When you create it for yourself you will be surprised how easy it is to remember. In the end, you can never be 100% secure but adopting these good practices will certainly minimise the risk.

Keep safe.

Funny True Story - In the Bookshop

Over the years I've heard a number of stories, this one was related to me by a friend of mine who owned a bookshop. I have reproduced the conversation, as close as I can, from his original description. Sometimes the weirdness of reality far outmatches that of fiction! 

"Good morning Madam."

"I am looking for a book."

"Well, you have come to the right place."

"This is a book shop, right?"

The proprietor tries not to sweep his eyes around the copious shelves of books, and asks a safe question instead.

"What was the title of the book?"

"I don't know."

“No problem, I can look up the author on my computer and run a few titles by, if that's any help?”

"I don't know who it's by."

"Um, it is going to be a bit difficult to ascertain what book you are looking for. Are you sure you can't remember the title?"

"No, I know it was brown."

"The author?"

"No, the colour."

"Well, if you look at the shelves I've got an awful lot of brown books; in fact most of my books are brown."

"So you can't help me then?"

"Well, no, not without knowing the author or the title of the book."

"Can't you look?"

"For what?"

"The book I want!"

The book shop owner, running out of ideas has a moment of inspiration.

“What was it about?”

"I don't know, but my friend liked it."

"Can you find out from him or her?"

"He's dead."

"Oh"

"That's why I come here to buy the book.

"Well, as I said, Madam........"

"So you can't help me then?"

"Not really.”

"This has been by far the worst bookshop I have ever been in."

She storms out.

How to Sort Paperwork

Buried in a pile of paperwork? Would you rather visit the dentist than face the Herculean task of sorting it? This simply method might just help you get on top of it.

Firstly, we need to look at how you currently do it. I would wager that when you finally get around to trying to do something about it, you start by going through a heap and create an ever increasing number of piles for each subject area, such as bills receipts, letters, customer information or whatever.

After 10 minutes or half an hour (if really motivated!) you end up with a significant number of disparate piles spread over the desk and floor. At this point you lose the plot. At best, you might file one or two piles or you might shove a whole lot back in the box and go off and 'do' something more ‘interesting’.

There are only a few lucky people who are able to sort the paperwork in this way. For us poor dumb asses, frustration soon outweighs the need for organisation.

For us, we need a better method. The method I am about to describe has helped a number of people through my career, so I know it does work.

The way to do it is the way a computer performs tasks. Do it in sequence and perform one task at a time.

The first, and always the first task, is to go through the pile and chuck out the rubbish. So it will go something like chuck, chuck, keep, chuck, chuck, keep, keep, chuck, keep chuck -and so on. Once you've gone through the whole pile, the rubbish is put in the shredder or bin.

Congratulations-The pile is already reduced.

You can stop at this point and go and do something 'interesting'.  Or you can carry on. The point is that you have already made progress and you have control of the paperwork rather than the other way round.

The next step is to pick a task, it does not matter what, you will know roughly what was in the paperwork because you've just been through it. Let us take letters an example - you now go through the pile and you just take out letters and leave the rest. This keeps the tasks simple and requires very little concentration and minimises frustration.

Once you have the letters out if you're able to file them as one pile fine, if you have to sort them further, use the same method go through them over and over again and only do one task at a time.

You can stop at this point and do something 'interesting'

The point is, you have made even further progress and it also means that when you do decide to come back to the task it is easier to decide what single function you want to do - remember, if you have added to the pile in the interim - always do the keep and chuck rubbish method first.

That's about it. It might seem very simple but it is simply effective, and that is the point. Those who have adopted this method have found it a useful method of completing this onerous task.

Dumb Web Design

Amongst some of the annoyances you find on the Internet, over cluttered, over busy websites, can be as much an annoyance as unnecessary and continuous pop-ups. Personally, when undertaking a search I want to follow a thread not have the whole bloody sewing box shoved in my face.

I was going to highlight some of the websites I considered particularly awful but then thought of something more desirable.

All the search engines have a favourite and/or bookmark button. So why can’t these brilliant browser designers come up with an alternative button that basically says that this is a crappy website and I never want to see it again. Ideally, it would automatically block any access to that website either directly or by link. Don’t you think that would be useful? I would.

So,just for fun, I came up with the button above, which I called the Dumb Web Design button. When clicked it would not only block the website but send a message back to the company or organisation recognising the fact that someone disliked their site enough to use it.

Please note: THE ABOVE BUTTON DOES NOT WORK. I do not have the coding skills but I just designed something funny to get the point across.

This could start a whole new trend.  How about the, Clear Revolting Ads Please (CRAP) button or the This Website Is Terrible (TWIT) button? Maybe we could get some control back and send a message to the Webmasters our true feelings and save ourselves numerous unnecessary mouse clicks to boot.

Just a thought.

Medical Advice

I was working in a hospital or other medical type establishment recently, my work gets me around quite a bit and I can’t really remember where it was. Anyway, I needed a ‘comfort’ stop and on a poster above the urinal was a warning about dehydration and gave a sequence in the form of little boxes as to the colour level that your urine should be. It was all a bit stark and boring and while I was standing there with nothing much to do (except the obvious) I came up with this little ditty.

If your wee is plentiful and light

You are doing things just about right

If it’s scant and yellow

You are dehydrated, you silly fellow.

Just thought that it got the point across in a simpler, more fun and hopefully memorable way.