2018 Goals Update

Wow, the month of January 2018 has flown by! I cannot believe it's Feb 1 already! But I will say I've been pretty happy with the progress of keeping my goals for the 2018 year!

Here's what I've kept to thus far:

1. Recite the Optimist Creed every morning (well at least during work days)

2. No more Mountain Dew in the morning

3. I've learned PHP and in the progress of learning C# and ASP.net (progress is good!)

4. I'm almost finished reading Soft Skills by John Sonmez (trying to read 1 book per Quarter)

5. Family vacation to Disney has been booked!

6. Blog has been started!

Comments

Alexa Is Listening, Recording, and Sending!

Check out this story where a couple in Oregon was having a private conversation and Alexa recorded and sent the conversation to one of their contacts! They were not aware until the contact contacted them about what had happened. The couple contacted Amazon and they verified the series of events. But what's even more bizarre is the couple wanted to return their Amazon home devices but Amazon has not agreed to return the costs for the devices! Check out the article here by Bruce Brown on Digital Trends

Cybersecurity

I went to a Cybersecurity conference last week hosted by Data Connectors and I want to give kudos for the job well done in running the conference. First of all they held the conference in a very nice Westin downtown, so the facility was great! The Vendors were very informative and the presentations were very good as well! There was a good mix of breaks so we could talk with the Vendors and learn more about their products. The lunch and snacks were good too! Always a plus! But back to the subject of Cybersecurity. It's truly amazing all the cyber attacks made against companies, websites, home owners, smart phones, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers, but at the time they presented them, I was amazed how high it is, and how high it's going to be. Everything on the web is exposed and most people don't realize the bad exposure that's out there. Yes, bigger companies are spending lots of money to protect their data but the ...

My Twitter Followers Have Gone Down!

If you're a Twitter user you might have heard or seen on your account the number of followers go down. For some of us, those numbers might be minimal. I have a Twitter account @NKYSports which I use in connection with one of my High School sports website NKYSports.com. Last week I had about 6,070 followers. That number today is down about 100. But I have heard users who have followers over 50K, 100K, etc. losing thousands and thousands of "so-called" followers. So what happened? Twitter has started cleaning accounts due to fake news scandals and data privacy. That equates to about 1 million accounts the past quarter (2nd Q of 2018). Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says improving the health of the platform is critical for future growth. Twitter has been a great tool for my website, but I also like getting updates sent directly to my phone to get the latest news, sports, weather, etc. I know what to believe and not to believe as well!...

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