What it was like when I scraped my knee

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Happened all the time. Skating, climbing trees, those deadly playground implements of destruction. And depending on what was in mom’s medicine cabinet (or even worse, if I was visiting my cousins in the country,) the cure was often worse than the injury.

Mom used Mercurochrome, until I begged her to start using Bactine™ (“Psst! Goes the Bactine™, and down go the mean old germs,” said the TV commercial, and I was all over anything that was pain-free.)

But Aunt June, for all her sweet kindness, was a closet sadist: she used merthiolate in her home, and woe unto the child who came in with a cut.

The chart below shows my impressions as a child of what various remedies were like; the pain scale images are from the inimitable Hyperbole and a Half.

Nowadays, I just wash an owie with soap and water (yeah, it stings a bit, but suck it up), slather on some Neosporin™ or other antibiotic cream, and call it good. But as a kid, my pain threshold was  lot lower. Sucks to be a kid.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

On occasion I stumble across things on Facebook or reddit or elsewhere that are relevant and which deserve to be shared. Here is one such example:

Alternate Pain Scale 1

The Old Wolf has edited.

Gargoyles of Notre Dame

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Photos taken at Notre Dame in Paris, while bumming around Europe as a student in 1971.

I loved this little guy and the city scene next to him. I was captivated by the fine detail in the stone work.

Notre Dame: “Nothing ever happens around here.”

Notre Dame: Watching over the city

All photos ©1971-2012 Old Wolf Enterprises

Note: These are not gargoyles proper, as they don’t act as rainspouts (or hot lead dispensers, if you’re in Hollywood.) The term comes from “gargouiller,” a French verb describing the gurgling sound they made when water was flowing from their mouths. These would more properly be called “grotesques.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Images of Villach

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I lived in Austria for almost two years, between 1975 and 1976. It has a picturesque beauty comparable to that of Switzerland, and I was privileged to live in this beautiful land and get to know these good people.

In October of 2002, I had the chance of returning again – not the first time I had been back, but I took some pictures of Villach during that trip, the first city I lived in. I share them here for your gratuitous enjoyment.

Villacher Hauptplatz – 10/22/2002

Gasthof Hofwirt – Villach Main Square. Our church had a meeting place on the second floor in the 70’s.

Hot chestnut vendor in the middle of the main square.

Sankt Nikolai Church

Autumn Colors

Villach on the Drau – Autumn colors on the river

This is a 1975 view of the main square from the Hofwirt building shown above, but from the other way – the St. Nikolai church in the background. The square used to be a traffic thoroughfare before it was turned into a pedestrian space – a great improvement, in my opinion.

Villach Square, March 1975, showing traffic lanes.

Town square during Villach Kirchtag (harvest festival). It’s called “church day,” but it’s more of a week-long thanksgiving event, held in the summer. This year it begins on July 29th. Music, traditional costumes, and drinking appear to be the major activities.

All images ©1975-2012 Old Wolf Enterprises

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Albanian Currency

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Several trips to Albania between 1992 and 2001 gave me the opportunity to eat a lot of burek (*belch*) and Gjirokaster cheese (*gogësimë*), among other things, and pay for them with Albanian Lek. What they’re using today is quite different, but these are the notes and coins that I was familiar with.

At the time, it was about 100 Lek to the dollar. That made dinner on the street supremely cheap. Wish I could go back – I miss a lot of people there.

 

 

No idea

Use Strong Passwords!

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The incidence of email hijacking is on the rise – spammers have discovered that many email accounts are child’s play to get into. Once done, the victim’s entire address book is scarfed up and used to send out spam, phishing solicitations or malware.

First of all, I hope these wastes of human cytoplasm find themselves buried beneath 7 kilometers of burning camel ejecta in Bolgia 11 of the Eighth Circle of Hell (also called Malebolge, reserved for those who perpetrate fraud.) Students of Dante will remind me that there are only 10 Bolgias. I just created a new one for cybercriminals, so there.

Now that I have that off my chest…

Use strong passwords!

Eset.com published a list of the 25 most common passwords, which I reproduce below:

  1. password
  2. 123456
  3. 12345678
  4. 1234
  5. qwerty
  6. 12345
  7. dragon
  8. pussy
  9. baseball
  10. football
  11. letmein
  12. monkey
  13. 696969
  14. abc123
  15. mustang
  16. michael
  17. shadow
  18. master
  19. jennifer
  20. 111111
  21. 2000
  22. jordan
  23. superman
  24. harley
  25. 1234567

I won’t go into a Freudian analysis of this list, although that topic would be rife with opportunities for sarcasm; however, each of these passwords would be cracked instantly by the average scammer.

Simply adding a few numbers or special characters changes the landscape radically; below is a table of variations on “password”, along with the time required for the average desktop PC to crack it1:

password instantly
password1234 37 years
Password1234 25,000 years
password 1234 333,000 years
Password!1234 26 million years
 Password 1234 51 million years
P@ssword 1234  465 million years
 This Password Is Mine  5 sextillion years

So here are some simple rules about creating passwords that you can use to keep your private accounts safe from hackers:

  • Never use a dictionary word
  • Capital letters are good
  • Special characters are good2.
  • Combinations of capital letters are even better
  • Adding spaces is best of all (see footnote). A sequence of random words, such as “wolf aardvark tapioca wellsfargo” would take 633 decillion years to crack (that’s 633,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.)

So use some common sense with passwords. Try the most secure option within the limitations of whatever website or application you are using, and you’ll most likely be safe from even the most determined of hackers.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Edit: Related article – 10,000 Top Passwords

1 These figures are calculated over at “How Secure is my Password“. Check it out – it will tell you instantly how strong your password is.
2 If allowed – some system administrators – even financial institutions, if you can believe it – only allow letters and numbers, which insanity irritates me beyond measure.

A Token Effort

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Inspired by a post over at Teresa Burritt’s Frog Blog about “token sucking,” I remembered that I had a few of these floating around in my drawers:

Top Row, Left to Right: NYC Small, NYC Large, NYC non-perforate, Salt Lake City Lines Large, Pasadena City Lines
Bottom Row, Left to Right: Philadelphia, Conestoga Transport Co., Toronto Transport Commission, Salt Lake ULATCO token (dug this one up with a metal detector in the 70’s)