Brad Barrish

My good friend Missy (and fellow Kansan) sent me a cool write up about Lawrence, Kansas. What a town it is. I lived there for about 5 years before packing it up and moving to Los Angeles. There's a lot to miss.

When I'm sitting around thinking about the fact that I am never satisfied with what I am doing in life (which is pretty often), I dream about all kinds of things I want to do for a living. It's not really any different than when you were a kid. You just have more choices now. Or rather you are aware of so many things that people make a living doing. One of the recurring jobs I think about is being a photographer. Next to music, it's the one thing I can sit down with and forget about all of the other junk in my head.

If you've not explored flickr, you must. I was checkout out the flickr blog this afternoon and it pointed me to one of the most fantastically creative sets of photos I have ever seen. I was in awe and looked at them over and over again. I am blown away by the creativity of some people. I love it.

Reading over some news, I came across a pretty fantastic quote from CIA Director, Porter Goss:

"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists," Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Umm, no shit. What angers me to a large degree is that it takes someone like Goss to bring this issue out into the open. And that doesn't even mean it will be discussed. I suppose it's among the many costs of doing war, but that doesn't mean we should just let it go.

When I read stuff like that, I can't help but get angry. I always have more to say than I'm actually writing. Unfortunately, we'll be the ones that reap what Bush sows.

I love Google. It really all comes down to that. If you haven't read about the buzz surrounding Google Maps, then you owe it to yourself to check it out. Make sure you're using Firefox though or you won't be able to see all of the goodness. I also just received an email from Google inviting me to Gmail, which could be an indicator that they are about to finally take it out of beta. Does it matter at this point though? Who doesn't have a Gmail account by now?

marv on record shows you how to download 252 80-minute CD's worth of music from Napster (and keep it). I have to imagine with all of the press this is getting, the people at Napster are hard at work to close up the holes. I might be tempted, if only I were a PC user and had three spare computers laying around. This is the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with the internets all over again.

The web's favorite funny man (or at least mine) made a little movie for Valentine's Day. It will most definitely make you laugh.

This gets a bit confusing, so just read through the entire thing before throwing in your $.02. I have a domain that is currently parked with Go Daddy (Host 1). I would like to actually use this domain now. I was thinking about going with DreamHost (Host 2) for the web site and FastMail.FM (Host 3) for the email. I would like to keep Host 1 as the domain host because of their extensive DNS controls and don't trust Host 2 with this. I will get a static IP with Host 2 and just change the MX record to Host 3 for email. Now, here's my question: Can I just change the A record with Host 1 to reflect the IP of my site with Host 2 without running into problems? Go Daddy seems to think I can do this by changing the IP address in the A record to the static IP I get from Host 2.

I realize I could solve all of this by just sticking with one host, but I would prefer to do it this way unless it's going to cause problems. Maybe I'm just crazy (or don't fully understand how networks function).

UPDATE: I went ahead and did everything this afternoon and it all works just fine.

Howard Dean is good news for the democrats. This morning he was elected chairman of the DNC and this means the party will likely regroup and reorganize. I always liked Dean during the primaries and thought he had a really good chance at being a presidential candidate. He knew how to work in the trenches, he knew how to organize and most of all he knew how to rally the troops. He always came from the heart and seemed to be his own man. I'm looking forward to a better party over the coming years.

The Pazz & Jop Critics Poll has finally been posted. And to think I was tired of reading people's top lists for 2004.

Last night I happened upon a well-written article on why and how to secure your email over a wireless network using SSH tunneling. I set it up immediately on my machine. I was also paging through the latest issue of Macworld and they had a fantastic feature on security. It never ceases to amaze me that people are so unaware of just how simple it is to secure stuff on your Mac (I'm not talking about PCs because I don't deal with them very often). I would venture to guess that 90% of my clients don't even know there is a built-in firewall in OS X. I was at a new client this afternoon and I went to make sure her firewall was on and sure enough, it wasn't (Apple turns it off by default). She said, "I have a firewall?? How cool!" Apple's built-in firewall is easy to use and there's no excuse for not using it unless you have router. A few other easy tips that I try and implement when clients are open to them:

1. Set up your security preferences so that a password is required to wake from sleep or screen saver. You can set this up under the Security pane in System Preferences under OS X 10.3.x.
2. Use a good password for your system. By good, I mean difficult to guess and one that contains numbers and letters.
3. Use a separate password for your keychain. By default OS X uses the same password that you specified for the system. The easiest way for someone to get your passwords is to look in your keychain.