Radiohead and Tom Petty are coming to SF.

Radiohead and Tom Petty are coming to San Francisco. I kind of like both of them, so I will definitely go to the Ouside Lands at Golden Gate Park this summer.

For more information, check this site:
http://www.sfoutsidelands.com/

Best of Runner's high. [weekly link post]

I like the suggestion described in Revellian Dot Com about how to be a good blogger.

Revellian Dot Com:

Create a list of your most valuable posts and put it in your side bar (I’m working on that). You may have already written your best posts. Let people know what they are and you’ll increase your chances of being read or linked to.

Therefore, I tried to create a list of the most valuable posts of this blog. This list should be keep changing, however at this point, these are my most favorite posts. Check them out.

Vegan stories

Blogging stories

My life stories

Favorite minor web pages

Cover of the Cranberries

Watch oil price to predict U.S. recession.

As I predicted, the U.S. economy steped down to a severe recession from the beginning of 2008. The U.S. lost 63,000 jobs in February (See this article).

It has been suggested that there is a tight correlation between crude oil price and U.S. economy trend. I think this point of view is useful to predict U.S. economy in the near future.

As this graph showing, U.S. economy usually experiences recessions soon after the oil price jumped. All of recent recessions (in 1981-1983, 1990-1991 and 2001-2002) were coincided with sudden rises of the oil price. Indeed, the longer the oil price stayed high, the longer U.S. economy continued recessions.

As you know, the oil price in the U.S. is now actually jumping up. Therefore, the important question is how long the oil price stay very high. If we carefully observe the crude oil price, we will be able to predict when U.S. economy will recover. Since the stock market will decline sharply in this and next quarters (I think), if we can see the bottom of the economic wave, we can make more money out from the stock market.

Picture of the day.

This picture is from flickr.

Favorite Web2.0 services. [weekly link post]

According to Wikipedia, web 2.0 is a trend in web technology which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing among users. Blog itself is a part of web 2.0 movements.

I like the web 2.0 workplace entry on UADDit (They visited web 2.0 companies and show pictures of companies' insides). I heavily use most of the web 2.0 companies' services they visited. These services are very famous, but in case you have not used them, I put links to the web 2.0 services (I am personally using following services) . Check them out.

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/

digg:
http://digg.com/

craigslist:
http://www.craigslist.org/

flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/

LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/

netvibes:
http://www.netvibes.com/

pandora:
http://www.pandora.com/

How to increase your blog traffic?

I wrote that I will open comments again when the blog traffic becomes more than 100 accesses per a day.

However, I found that getting 100 unique accesses per a day is very difficult. At this point, I usually get around 30 accesses per a day. The map is showing from where people accessed this blog yesterday (actually last 50 accesses).

I am thinking how I can increase the traffic. I do not have the answer yet but I will come back to the principle of this blog (Write things that no one else knows as everyone else can easily understand) and think more.

Security issues on the net.

I wrote that keep changing passwords does not increase network securities. The real security issue we must face at this point is that private companies such as Facebook, Apple or Google accumulated too much of our private information.

For instance, Gmail becomes my main mail-server. However as you already know, Gmail scans all messages I send or receive and adds most suitable advertisement on the side of each message. This means that Google knows almost all of my private life, including with who I am hanging out, with whom I am conflicting, where I will go next week and so on (I also believe that Google knows my bank accounts, my credit card numbers and my social security number).

Indeed, I use google documents to compose my professional scientific papers. I believe that my unpublished data deposited there are safe but who knows? In the near future, my competitors would scope our work from the unpublished google documents. They will pay a lot of money for these kinds of information.....

The point of this story is that we have to trust private companies too much at this point. The primary purpose of the private companies is to make more profit and we are not paying to most of them (Are you paying to Google or Facebook?). Therefore, they might find out the way to sell our privacies to make more money out of it. I think we need new laws and morals to face an upcoming network era.

Picture of the day.

Yellowstone National Park.

Changing passwords for security is a myth.

Today, my mail account at work was suspended because my password was expired. This is very ridiculous and not making sense that the system administrator of my work demands us to change the password every 6 months.

Look at the new password rules they defined.
Passwords

*Must contain at least 7 characters.

*Must contain characters from at least three of the following four categories:
English uppercase characters (A through Z);
English lowercase characters (a through z);
Base 10 digits (0 through 9);
Symbol characters (!, $, #, %).

*Changes will be required every 180 days.
You must wait for 8 password cycles to pass before re-using a password.

Do you think we can remember the password with these different characters? It will be changed every 6 months! This is the way too much. According to the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) website, it has been demonstrated that

"Forcing periodic password changes given today's resources is unlikely to significantly reduce the overall threat - unless the password is immediately changed after each use."

The system administrator at my work is inhibiting our work with no good reasons. Of course, network security is a very important issue, however changing login passwords every 6 months does not increase the security at all. They should do better work on this.

Favorite minor web page. 43 Things.

43 Things has been famous among particular people, but I did not know about this service until last month. I am now using this service for a month, and I really like it.

In the 43 Things, you will share your personal 43 goals (See my goals if you are interested). You will share all process toward the goals in the site with others. Then people will inspire you to encourage achieving the goals.

I like this service because the community is so kind and supportive. As 43 Things is getting more popular, the community could change in the near future (growth can attract evil people too). However, at this moment, most of people in the 43 Things are very heartwarming. You can try this service by yourself.

43 Things;
http://www.43things.com/