ICE Your Cell Phone

It is recommended that you mark entries in your cell phone with ICE (In Case of Emergency) for any contacts who should be called in an emergency. 

Emergency responders look through your cell phone for ICE contacts to reach if you are unable to respond.  These contacts should be people who have Medical Power of Attorney for you, or that can provide responders with medical information about you.

It might be wise to have two contacts in there and have one of them be a person who is not likely to be with you during an accident.


There are two ways you can do this. 

1. Create a contact in your cell phone with the name ICE and add the phone number(s) of the person/people that should be contacted in an emergency. 
2. Edit an existing entry and modify their name to begin with ICE (on some cell phones this may be their first name while others it may be their last.  The objective is to be able to alphabetically scroll through your contacts to an entry which reads ICE.) i.e., It might read "ICE Jack Spratt" or "ICE Spratt, Jack".

It is recommended that you place a sticker or marking on your phone that indicates that you have an ICE contact. Here is a link to a company that sells the stickers. 

Here is an article on WebMD regarding this topic ... and another article in Wikipedia.


Had you heard of this before?  Are you going to do it?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Maine's Gay Marriage Law

This November, Maine's Question 1 is worded as follows:

"Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?"

OK, so the law is written to allow same-sex couple to marry but it allows individuals and religious groups to discriminate? Should I vote yes, or vote no?  Yes and No (respectively).

This question is about retracting a recent law that allowed same-sex couples to marry.  I don't consider myself very political, and I don't really keep up to date on all that stuff, but this law hits home for me.  Because it is so important to me, I thought I would write this piece in hopes that it would help others understand my point of view.

It's important that people understand that this is not about religion, God and spirituality, it is about a legal right, like voting. It wasn't so long ago that women couldn't vote, African Americans couldn't drink from the same water fountain as a white person and interracial marriage was taboo. Looking back, we can see how ridiculous it was to have had prevented these basic human rights.  While there was a fierce battle to obtain these rights, we can now see that it was a fight worth fighting.

I hear statements like "Civil unions are OK, but I am not for gay marriage", "Marriage is between one man and one woman", "marriage is a biblical term and allowing same sex marriages is blasphemous" and "if we allow same sex couples to get married, then the next thing we will be doing is letting people marry animals". I hate to say it, but I just cringe when I hear these words.  I am not about preventing people from having their beliefs or opinions and I am certainly not anti-religion; I just think that there is a lot of confusion about what this law is all about.

This law is not about the ceremony of marriage (which typically takes place in a church with a minister) rather, it is about the law, the part that takes place at city hall, the licence ... the legal recognition that two people are, by the legal term, married. This is a critical distinction.  The term Marriage has a ceremonial, spiritual and personal meaning for people and the term Marriage also has a legal meaning.  When you complete your taxes, and the form asks if you are married, it is not asking if you are "ceremonially" married, it is asking if your are legally married.  Each terminology of married is independent of one another.  You can be married by the church, but that has nothing to do with LAW.  Likewise, you can be legally married (get your license at city hall) and you have all the legal benefits of being married ... without the church, without the ceremony in front of God, your family and friends.  Do you see the difference?

This law is about proving the same legal protections and benefits to same sex couples who choose to spend their life together.  For example, if I should be hospitalized and not able to direct my own healthcare, my partner could not make decisions about my healthcare (without a legal exception). There is also the issue of healthcare, retirement, and many other legal situations which are taken for granted when people get married.

This law is not about challenging the ceremonial process, it is about a legal right which should be available to all human beings.

OK, looks like I might be going on a bit of a rant, so I will wrap it up. I would love to hear your comments.

Thanks,

Tom

Learn more @ No on 1

Password Security

OK, so my Hotmail account has been hacked and used by spammers, my website has been hacked and redirected visitors to a porn site and my Twitter account was hacked and used by spammers … learn from me … don’t presume your password is secure enough.
Below are some suggestions on how to make your passwords secure and less likely to be cracked as well as some tips on what not to do and tips on how to remember your passwords.

UNDERSTANDING PASSWORDS
All you need to remember is that you want a strong password. A strong password is a password which is not found in a dictionary, it is not a name (human or pet), and it contains 3 of the following 4 characteristics:

• uppercase letters (A through Z)
• lowercase letters (a through z)
• numbers (0123456789)
• special characters (!@#$%^&*()_+{}|:”<>?[]\;’,./)

Truly strong passwords should be 12-14 characters, however many websites do not allow you that many characters. My experience has shown that 8 characters is the magic number for most every website.

CREATING PASSWORDS
First create 2 passwords and labels for your passwords:
My experience is that most all websites typically allow 8 characters in a password. Typically the more characters, the more secure the password. I label my passwords as follows: “Secure” and a “More Secure”. For example, my “More Secure” password might be 0ApR1fuL while my “More Secure” password would be 7o’c1dEC. I now only need to remember my two passwords, April Fools Day (0ApR1fuL) and 7 O’clock on December 1. These might look little confusing because they are foreign to you, but you can easily create a couple basic passwords which you use globally for all your sites.
An alternate way of creating passwords is to use common phrases and select characters from the phrase … such as “There’s a whole in the bucket” and the password might be T’saWiTb … this would be a strong password, but easy to remember.
When to use each password:
Whenever setting up a password, always use your “More Secure” password, particularly on a financial site. If it doesn’t work because of restrictions by the site, use your “Secure” password.

REMEMBERING/STORING PASSWORDS
We have a LOT of passwords to remember, I have more than 155 at home an additional 127 here at work. I find it easiest to maintain a spreadsheet where I store each site name, site address, the associated email address, username and password label; never enter your password with your username, use the label instead.

HERE'S WHAT NOT TO DO

• Don’t use anyone’s name or nickname.
• Don’t use your pets name
• Don’t use your car’s make, model, etc.
• Don’t use words found in the dictionary
• Don’t spell common words backwards
• Don’t end your passwords with numbers (some sites won’t even allow it)
• Don’t use the names of sport figures or teams
• Don’t use default passwords
• Don’t use your license plate number
• Don’t simply replace L’s with 1’s and O’s with 0’s, etc.
• Don’t use common sequences such as qwerty or 12345
• Don’t use your phone number, or any sequence of numbers alone
• Don’t use your Social Security Number
• Don’t use any part of your real name or user name in the password
• Don’t use your birthday, anniversary, etc.
• Don’t presume your password is secure