random bits

It's entertaining when malware distributors are both bold and stupid, like with this email I got today: "Dear customer, we have disabled your email account because we believe it has been compromised. To restore, run the attached executable and use the following password: 12345". (Yes, it was sent in the clear.) How many things are wrong with that ploy? Sheesh.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

writing circle: Psalm 23

My congregation recently started a writers' circle. This isn't the type where everyone submits stuff for critique in advance; rather, the group gets together, the leader assigns writing prompts, we write for (usually) 15 minutes or so, and then those who want to share what they wrote. It's an exercise in introspection as much as, if not more than, an exercise in writing.

At a meeting this week we read Psalm 23 in traditional and contemporary translations. (The latter was from Mishkan T'filah and I didn't find it online.) The leader asked us to react to it in any way we chose. After a little bit of clean-up, here is what I wrote:

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