Things that make you go “Hmmmm…”

Why did the blog preview place these words with my blog preview?

Heart disease and obesity are bad enough, but Chevrolet? Yikes…

Minneapolis is our state capitol now

If the Wisconsin Campaign Finance System shows it, it must be true!

(h/t Patrick Marley at JSO.)

Also: Dan Cody has more on this here, and here.

That new Facebook sure is homely, ain’t it?

Yeah, Facebook’s new look+feel just rubs me wrong.

Make your Gmail more safer

If you have a Google Mail account, there’s a very quick+easy way to run it through an encrypted SSL connection. If you don’t know what this is, trust me that you do want to do this. According to Slashdot,

“A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so, as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool, is planning to release it in two weeks.”

So then. Using the SSL-protected Gmail is as simple as going to https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox. The ’s’ in ‘https’ indicates that it’s on a secure connection. I feel more confident running it that way than over an unprotected connection. Although it’s possible to break an SSL wrapper, it’s a lot of work. I’d rather lock my front door than leave it wide open while I’m not at home. And this lets you do that with Gmail. Doing this doesn’t slow Gmail down at all, so you won’t notice any change in performance.

Also: A Slashdot comment noted that Gmail always uses SSL for logins, but it then drops back to unsecure http. Aapparently now you can set it to always use SSL regardless of the URL you visit it from, but my rudimentary search hasn’t turned that up just yet. That’s why I’m using the direct route.

Also deux, there’s good discussion of this matter over at governmentsecurity.org.

Finally: Found it. Go to Settings, and down at the very bottom of the page is “Browser connection.” Click on the radio button for “Always use https,” and then click Save Changes. It will not save it unless you do that last step.

Howdy from the megachurch Apple Store on Fifth Avenue

Yup, we descended down the glassy stairs of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in Manhattan just so I could make this post.

 

Mayfair + Bayshore Apple Store: “church”

Chicago Magnificent Mile Apple Store: “cathedral”

The glass cube Manhattan Apple Store: “megachurch”

 

which would make 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino the Vatican?

 

hmm. If you add the above to the fact that The Church and Ministry are my two favorite bands in the world, what does that tell you?

So I made a Milwaukee group on this bicycling website…

Indeed, there is now a Milwaukee group on the GasFreeCommute.com. As of 9:00 on Wednesday night, our five members have logged a total of 124 miles. What’s cool about this is that all of us found the site through an article over on OnMilwaukee.com, and the other four members joined since I posted a comment to that article. Thanks, guys! And mad props to Julie Lawrence for writing the article!

GasFreeCommute.com does seem to have just shed the “under construction” animated GIFs. So far we can’t add fractional (decimal) distances, and the Group function is limited solely to being able to create and/or join a group. But there’s no way to communicate with the other group members. I can’t do that even as group creator. If we wanted to organize a group ride or some other function, that will have to happen through different channels. Hopefully they’ll get that added soon.

Earlier tonight, my daughter and I biked to Bella’s on KK for dinner, and then were about to bike over to our community garden plot to do a harvest. Coming out of Bella’s, we discovered that my bike had a flat tire! Thanksfully, the garden was less than a mile away, and Stacie came to our rescue and drove both daughter and 10+ pound harvest home in safety. I managed to limp back on the flat tire, and made it home all right. It’s almost ironic that we biked to dinner, biked to the garden to harvest the food we had grown (cue the angels and Al Gore singing), but the automobile played a vital role in the end. Life’s like that.