I’ll be away a bit for the Eid holiday, so Eid Mubarak everyone!
Author Archive for Brian Wesolowski
The question should really be why would you not blog? Watch the short video below to hear from marketing gurus Seth Godin and Tom Peters on why they blog – and why everyone else should.
I must admit, when my boss decided she wanted to start a blog and I found out that I would be doing the bulk of the writing, I was a bit skeptical (and not excited about the increased work load). But, honestly, writing Digital Qatar is now one of the favorite parts of my job – and dare I say I don’t even really consider it work…but don’t tell my boss that. It certainly has exposed me to new ideas, provided me with a creative platform and helped me think about technology in a completely new way.
So start blogging if you aren’t already – whether for your job or about something that personally interests you. I’m pretty sure you’ll find it to be rewarding, and who knows, people may even start turning to you for insight.
(Special thanks to Gerd Leonhard, our Connected Speaker for December, for posting this video on his blog.)
She is my travel idol!
Like many people in Doha I love to travel. While Doha has some nice things to offer, an escape to blue skies, greenery, nature and historical sites is always welcome a diversion for me. And thanks to our generous leave – and my very understanding boss – I have become quite a travel pro (or so I would like to think!). So what’s my favorite travel site when planning a trip: Wikitravel.
Wikitravel is the Wikipedia of travel guides. Like any wiki, it is user generated content that can be updated and refined by anyone. And just like Wikipedia, the content is proving to be accurate, timely and very reliable. The site has over 23,000 destination guides already – and growing.
I generally start any trip planning with a visit to Wikitravel. It offers information on countries, cities and even regions in general. Most destinations include really useful information on visa requirements and also a list of airlines that fly into a particular location. This was incredibly helpful when I was planning a visit to Lesotho (I didn’t even know where it was until a friend moved there) and exploring possible trips to Madagascar and Mongolia – they have yet to happen.
Wikitravel also has great recommendations on things to do while on your holiday, including culture destinations, shopping information, restaurants and hotels. I find the tips on things to do useful, but am not a huge fan of the restaurant listings or hotels. I prefer TripAdvisor (my second most important travel site) for these because it allows user ratings and commenting, helping me make a more informed choice.
More valuable features that are often included for destinations include popular tourist scams, weather information, travel alerts and possible daytrips and excursions. There is also content available in various other languages, but English is by far the most populated.
So for those of you still trying to figure out your Eid plans, check out Wikitravel for some ideas and valuable trip planning resources. And if you discover something new, then be sure to update the Wikitravel guide.
If you are like me, you probably have about 3-4 different passwords that you use for you multiple online accounts. You use any variation of these for you your Gmail, Facebook, online baking, Twitter or news website subscriptions. Sometimes you forget which of your passwords you entered for a particular site, but if you work through your 3-4 options you can usually figure it out. And, if you are like me, you think you are quite clever with all your variations with letters and numbers. But really, how strong is your password?
After reading about research done by the Georgia Institute of Technology where they used very basic technology to try to crack people’s passwords, I realized just how weak mine were – al off them! The researchers found that they could easily crack a cluster of eight character passwords within 2 hours. When they increased the characters to twelve, they calculated that it would take 17,134 years to crack all the passwords in a cluster. That is a big difference. Let’s just say I promptly changed all may major passwords to be at least 12 characters.
Their calculations were based on the assumption that a sophisticated hacker could try 1 trillion password combinations a second. Um- wow.
So what else makes a password strong besides the number of characters? The article I read cited many different sources with advice, including Microsoft which recommended not using real words to avoid a “dictionary attack,” while Carnegie Mellon recommend using a full sentence as a password, including punctuation. A bit contradictory. Of course the strongest password would be a complete jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols, such as #%$*45&*(knfasf^^^”, however that does not seem practical to remember. And of course most sites do have limits on password length and characters that can be used.
Regardless of what you use, you should at least be thinking security when you create passwords for major online accounts. Think both in terms of number of characters and types of characters, but certainly be sure you can remember it! And if you want to check the strength of your password,try out Microsoft’s Password Checker. Mine are now rated as strong!
