Email addresses and authentication of online accounts

Recently I've started thinking about the problems with the security of using "free" email addresses as the main method of personal authentication and control of important / sensitive online accounts. This all started because someone signed up for a match.com account with *my* "free" email address after also attempting to retrieve usernames and reset passwords for a few other accounts using the same email address over the course of two days. (Not including match.com, as I've never had an account there.) I logged in and changed my passwords to my more sensitive accounts, just in case... It didn't seem like a case of hacking, since the person also registered a new Toshiba laptop and was likely attempting to log in to things for the first time in awhile.

I've used the email address in question since at least 2006 as my main email address and have signed up for dozens of accounts with it over those years. The email address is based on my name without any numbers or any filler since I was the first one to get to it.

It appears that the person has a similar name (same first initial and same last name, at least) according to the info contained in the welcome email from match, but he (unfortunately) doesn't know what his email address is. Another thing that was VERY odd to me was that they (match.com) sent both the username and plain-text password for the new account in the initial welcome email. Not like it needs to be crazy-secure, but it's possible there's sensitive information that the user has entered there and then accidentally sent control of to someone else.

In researching how to get rid of my email address on the other person's account, without logging into it, it seems that their policy is to contact support to cancel the account. Which I did, via their website, when I received the welcome email. After 3 days with no response from support and continuing to get emails at least 1-2 times daily from them for three days, despite attempting to unsubscribe from those emails every time I received them, I decided to delete the account.

So, this morning I logged in with the plain-text username/password from the welcome email and deleted the account. Thanks for nothing, match.com support. I didn't want to have to do that, but I also don't want to see the all of the "matches" that he may be eagerly anticipating and not getting... and you probably don't have any way to contact him to actually correct his email address, since all he likely gave you was *my* email address instead of his.

I'm expecting to get another account welcome email today when the poor guy tries to log in again and finds his account deleted and builds another account. Maybe/hopefully he figured out his correct email address by now? If not, at least I know they'll send me the username/password and I can do it all over again.

I had a similar experience with Wells Fargo last year when someone signed up for online banking using my email address (because they forgot one character in their email address, based on their name). It took *me* multiple emails/phone calls to get that straightened out (for them). I'm not sure they had any idea they had entered it wrong and if they did, they didn't try to change it for awhile... Fortunately, that experience seemed a little more "secure" in that they didn't give me enough info to get it on my own directly, however (thinking back on it) I probably could have reset the password, since the confirmation likely would have come to my email address. I didn't want to have anything to do with messing with their bank account, though.

I'm feeling kind of fortunate that I don't have a common name.

I think it's time to take an inventory of all of the accounts I have signed up over the years and clean them up and then find more secure ways to control my own accounts so that I don't have to rely on a "free" email address from a large, for-profit corporation that I also don't trust completely with all of the power I've given them as the (in most cases) sole way to control access to the accounts I've signed up with it.

One more thing: MAKE SURE TO CHECK YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS BEFORE SIGNING UP FOR THINGS!

(Sorry for yelling!)

On life changes.

Long time, no post. To catch up, the past couple years have brought some life changes. I'm a year and nine months or so into a career change to what I actually went to college for. I'm actually somewhat of a computer programmer now. (My official title is Programmer / Analyst.) I spend a lot of my time doing user support and ad-hoc SQL queries to create or update one-off reports. I have done some program feature enhancements and bug fixes but nothing too crazy yet. I still work for the same company that I've been at for the past 11 and a half years or so.

I traded in my grey 2007 Subaru Legacy for a blue 2012 Subaru Impreza because the Legacy was approaching 100,000 miles, had a newly diagnosed but somewhat common leaky head gasket and the new Impreza was touting approximately 7 MPG more than I was getting in the Legacy.

Most recently, I've moved about an hour west of where I spent most of my life to an area I could actually see myself staying for awhile.

All of these things have me feeling like I'm growing up... (I know, I know, I should be mostly grown up already at the age of 33) but I seem to find myself becoming more and more restless.

Now that I'm actually paid to be a programmer, I find myself growing less interested in computers and technology. Sure my interest had already faded some in the 10 years since I finished college while I was occupied with other less technology related employment, but it feels like it's continued at a more accelerated pace lately. I haven't built a computer in a long time. I don't know what the best video card is anymore and don't really want to play any games that would need a good video card. To an extent, I still know what's going on in the consumer technology market but can't help but grumble when people ask what I think about things like iPads and the "cloud". I use off the shelf PC laptops and don't bother upgrading the hardware. I recently purchased a new laptop but only because it wouldn't be much cheaper to put a new battery, decent hard drive and some more memory in the old one and even if I did it probably weighed close to 8 pounds and wasn't very portable, so I didn't even like dragging it out to the couch. All I ever do on a computer at home is listen to music and surf the internet anyway. I probably should have just picked up a tablet and put my music on the "cloud" somewhere... but I hate typing on touchscreens.

My Impreza still has the stock 16" wheels and hasn't had it's first detailing and I've had it since May. What's happening to me?

Also, now that I've moved out of the apartment I've been for the past 5+ years (to a place other than the area I spent the better part of the last 3 decades), I want to actually find a house and spend time doing projects around it. I want to have some space around me, a garden and maybe a garage.

I've recently put some books about gardening and sustainable living on my Amazon wish list and thought about what it would take to grow all the ingredients needed to brew beer. I've debated opening a brew pub. I've had moments where I had a fleeting thought about quitting my job and being a landscaper.

Recently I've actually even caught myself daydreaming about becoming a farmer while driving past various farms on my commute to work. I don't actually think I want to be a farmer... I think I just want to do something different than what I'm doing now. I've been sitting in various office chairs for almost 12 years now and it's getting boring and feels less rewarding than when I first worked my way into the office world.

I don't actually dislike what I'm doing now. The actual programming is fun. The problem solving and analysis is interesting and rewarding but I'm still just keeping the wheels turning. I rarely work on anything new or exciting and when I do get to work on new things they're almost always rushed. I spend a majority of my time solving problems that could have been avoided if a little more care was put into the planning and getting everyone in the same boat before setting sail... but I don't have a say in that part, so I just sit in my chair and figure out how to undo what I was asked to do... but the "undo" has to happen more quickly than the "do" and the "do" was expected in less time than it should have really taken to get done. So it's a never-ending cycle of chasing my tail.

The problem is, I don't know what I'd rather do.

Thoughts About a Shrinking World

I have just finished reading The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman and SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kantner and noticed some trends that I felt like writing about.

The biggest point that I took from The World is Flat 3.0 is that the overall scale of the world is seemingly shrinking mostly due to the major influences that technology has played in linking different parts of the world together. The bigger the improvements and the greater the advances we make, particularly in the areas of communications, work flow planning, software, information storage and retrieval processes the more the world will seem to shrink.

Friedman calls the shrinking "flattening" which seems to be his way of saying that the proverbial "playing field" is being leveled. Areas of the world that don't have great amounts of natural resources to sell to the rest of the world (particularly oil) are using this technology to start other industries that can leverage their workforce into a competitive force to enable them to become a part of the global supply chain of goods and services.

This shrinking or "flattening" of the world can be used for good or bad. Most technologies are the same way. You can use a delivery van to make deliveries or you can back it through the window of a bank and rob it. You can use the internet to do research for a book report or you can create a "hate site". This is a problem with human nature and not with technology.

Friedman mentioned that terror, war and protectionism are reasons that might be used to put the walls back up and "unflatten" the world but he seems to feel that in most cases everyone involved benefits from a flat world. The benefits aren't limited to improved standard of living, stronger economies and better educational opportunities for countries that are taking on new responsibilities. There are also the benefits of cost reductions, redundant around the clock supply chains and new, large, eager sources of the exact level of labor required for a task for the companies doing the outsourcing.

SuperCorp pointed out many "vanguard" companies that are using their size and global influence to do good things in the world and that as we progress this will become more necessary and almost expected of them.

I can't say that I completely disagree with a lot of the points raised in either book, most of it kind of seems like "common sense" but I was left with a lot of questions about religion, politics and war, "haves versus have nots" and the responsibility of business in the world.

Is outsourcing ultimately good, bad or a shade of gray? Does outsourcing for cost savings really free up money to reinvest in new jobs or does it just go to the bottom line?

Investors always want to see a company that is making more profit than the previous year. At what point does this "growth" become unsustainable?

Are large corporations too powerful? Are they using this power responsibly?

Does human nature ruin everything?

Scented laptops?

Here's another product for the list of "Do we really need this?" products. ASUSTeK is rolling out a line of scented laptops.

Um... yeah. What will they think of next?

On capitalism and conspicuous consumption

I've said before that I dislike capitalism but I've never really clarified or elaborated on that general statement here. However, I've been thinking more about it lately (thanks mostly to my boss) and I've edited my "shit list" on the main page of my website today to say "conspicuous consumption." instead of "capitalism. (why do we make so many shiny, awesome things?)"

I think this better reflects my views on capitalism than to just say that I don't like it and the many awesome products that it produces. I think that, as far as economic systems go, capitalism tends to be one of the better ones in practice, compared to other major economic systems that have been attempted. Human nature tends to completely kill any notion of the various socialist or communist economic systems. People aspire to improve their status in life as well as to strive to appear better than or, at the very least, to differentiate themselves from everyone else. This is where the whole notion of "keeping up with the Joneses" (which is also known as conspicuous consumption) comes in. (There are other proposed/theorized systems out there such as Natural Capitalism but they also seem to be compromised by human nature, as well.)

Pure Laissez-faire capitalism is an amazing system where the people who purchase products and services determine what is available (and at what price) by either purchasing or not purchasing that product or service until it becomes attractive or advantageous to do so. Competition between different providers helps to bring prices down and quality up among everyone offering a particular good or service. In this system the government (or regulators of any sort) should only step in to protect consumers from harm. (This system, however, is also not without it's own major drawbacks or problems... but that's a subject for another time.)

Our present system, however, seems to be a bastardization of that system where huge mega-corporations (economies of scale), government regulations/subsidies/taxes, price-fixing, monopolization/mergers/buyouts and intense advertising and marketing all are thrown in with a million other factors and shuffled up leading to a system that is unbelievably complicated but still called "capitalism".

Take that mess and factor human nature and the notion of conspicuous consumption into the whole mix we end up with a slew of products that people are led to believe will make others think that they're of a higher status than everyone else which leads to much more expensive (and exclusive) products (of no better quality) so that there can be something better still.

It's a vicious cycle that no one wins aside from the giant companies who sell us the crappy products (with the trendy brand name of the day) that are made in countries where workers aren't paid a fair wage with materials that are probably barely, if at all, different from the crap that you can buy at Wal-Mart. The only difference is that the one with the brand name commands a huge premium over the generic because we have been convinced to pay more for it just because of that brand name.

That is (part of) the side of "capitalism" that I dislike. I know that I (somewhat hypocritically) play into the whole system even just by purchasing anything that goes above and beyond just meeting my basic needs of food, water and shelter. Maybe I am a hypocrite because there are people out there that aspire to buy the products that I have, or things that are better.

I don't expect (or want) us to shift to communism. I don't want to have exactly what everyone else has, no more or no less, based on my needs. I want to be able to purchase the best quality product that I can afford and have many choices when I am shopping for something. However, I don't want to be bombarded with advertisements constantly. I don't want people to look down on each other because they don't drive a BMW/Bentley/Ferrari/Porsche or live in the biggest house in the best zip code. I don't want us to continue to pillage the environment in the relentless pursuit of bigger and better products and higher and higher profits.

I'm not sure how we can change the economy, government and human nature to achieve this... or if it's even possible... but that's how I feel about "capitalism". It's better than many of the options out there but it's not without it's own set of problems. Human nature tends to make these flaws worse as we exploit the flaws in an effort to make more money and be better than the next guy...

Rosetta@home redux

In my last blog post I talked about past hobbies and I mentioned that one of my past hobbies was messing around with computers. I was always updating my PC and working on computers for friends and family. In turn, I always had spare hardware and hand me down computers from friends and family kicking around.

In the tail end of my switchover to Apple a few years ago I had my last personal PC running Ubuntu Linux and the only thing I was doing on it was running Rosetta@home. Eventually, though, I ended up parting out that PC and forgot about Rosetta. (I know I can run Rosetta@home on Apple computers, too, but I don't really like to run my main computers all the time and I weeded my computers down to my day to day laptop and my iTunes library computer.)

Last night my sister gave me her old Dell Dimension desktop since she upgraded to a new laptop so she could get rid of her large desk setup in what is now her son's play room.

I updated her old computer to XP Pro and put Rosetta on it. I think the research that Rosetta is doing is a worthy cause and I really don't know what else to do with the computer right now.

If anyone out there knows of other worthy projects that I can donate some distributed computing time to please send me your recommendations.

Strike two, myspace...

It seems that myspace is beginning a beta test of tracking software intended for parents to track what their kids are doing on myspace.

I'm going to lay out a few very rough ideas on why this isn't a very good idea which won't solve all that much. It's ridiculous to me that people would hand over permission for a huge corporation like News Corp. to have anything to do with tracking what they and even more worrisome, their kids, do online.

1) How many kids use their friend's computers? I know that when I was a kid most of the bad things I did were not at home where I knew my parents could catch me. Probably about 99% of the things I did that I shouldn't have done (including playing with firecrackers, lighting stuff on fire, smoking for the first time) were done while I was at friend's houses. What's stopping kids from just getting on myspace at their friend's house? Parents are better off telling their kids why they shouldn't do things than to just not say anything and then try to catch them doing something wrong. I can pretty much guarantee that they're doing a whole lot more than you can possibly even hope to catch. (Especially when it's computer-related. Many kids can outsmart their parents when it comes to anything on a computer.)

2) How do we know this program is not secretly tracking everything we do on our computers and reporting back to myspace's parent corporation News Corp.?

It has been reported that News Corp. was mainly interested in myspace to get information from its users in order to get better targeted ads in front of the primarily young audience that uses myspace but fast forwards commercials on their DVRs. See this quote from the article linked above:

"And most importantly, Myspace has detailed logs of its users' preferences, online behaviour and personal information.

That could help the company tailor what it does to the ever-more-discerning market which Mr Murdoch believes he has identified."

Now think about adding additional tracking information on top of all of the information that was already willingly given to them by myspace's users... scary!

3) When did we outsource the responsibilities of parenting? When did it become News Corp/myspace's responsibility to keep tabs on what your kids are doing online? What happened to sitting in the same room with your child on the computer and occasionally walking past? What happened to limiting time on the computer? What happened to telling your kids not to talk to strangers?

It's NOT ANYONE'S RESPONSIBILITY BUT THE PARENTS OF THE CHILDREN to keep track of what they're doing. People say "myspace is just giving them a tool to help" but when was the last time you gave that kind of power to someone who is trying to make money off of you?

*****************************************

I'm sure I could go on and on with reasons that this isn't the best idea I've ever heard... but I'm sure that people will still download it in an attempt to divert more blame and responsibility of parenting off onto entities that they can sue when something goes wrong...

Myspace... this is strike 2. I know you won't miss me as a user but I can only hope that I'm not the only one who doesn't agree with the direction you've taken.

I started to write a post...

... about the iPhone but I realized that what I was typing isn't really my blog's style. So I'm going to paraphrase it and then tell you how it ties into my life. ;)

I am amazed that the early reports are saying that 500,000+ iPhones have been sold in the past few days and I think I should have had more faith in Apple when I decided that the phone was way too over-hyped for what it is a couple months ago and sold my few shares of Apple stock when it went over $100 a share.

I still have no plans to purchase an iPhone since I'm happy with my new LG VX8600 (on Verizon) and have no desire at all to switch to AT&T. I haven't heard good things about their network or their customer service and I've been pretty happy with Verizon.

I do have to hand it to Apple (& maybe even AT&T), though, because activating the iPhone through iTunes sounds like a great idea that I wasn't expecting! When I bought my last phone it took about 30 to 45 minutes start to finish. I had to sign in and wait to talk with a salesperson. When the sales person called my name I had to tell them what phone I wanted and then wait while the cashier went in the back to get it, unpack it, activate it, print out the contract receipt to sign and make a test call. Then I had to bring the phone home and transfer my pictures, wallpapers, contacts and stuff off of it. The ringtones and stuff I downloaded wouldn't transfer to the new phone... It would be so much cooler to just be able to plug the phone into my computer and have it sync all of my stuff...

New cell phone... and the rest of the weekend.

I couldn't believe how nice the weather was this weekend. Saturday morning I had to bring my car into the dealer to get it's oil changed. (Free oil changes for 5 years!!!) It was so beautiful outside that I was excited to spend the rest of the day outside doing something. My girlfriend and I ended up driving up to Saratoga and hanging out downtown for a few hours. We wandered around and checked out some of the shops including a small sports card/estate jewelry shop that a friend works at, got some drinks at Uncommon Grounds (which doesn't seem to have a website that I can find) and then headed back towards home to run a few errands.

One of the errands was to pick something up at the mall and while we were there we stopped into the Verizon store to see if we were eligible to renew our contracts and get deals on new phones. We ended up getting LG VX8600's for free after a $50 rebate. I like mine a lot so far. It's much smaller and lighter than my previous Motorola e815. It has a lot more neat features and the contact list is much easier to enter and navigate through. Among other things, I REALLY hated the contact list on my e815, the antenna that stuck out and made the phone more bulky and the fact that when I plugged it in to charge sometimes it would start to charge and then sometime overnight it would drain the battery completely and shut off and I'd wake up to a COMPLETELY dead phone.

Hopefully this phone turns out to be better than the Motorola.

Sunday I woke up and messed around with the template for my new blog in progress on suburbicide. I wanted to just upgrade the template to this blog to match the new design for suburbicide and host it on my own site but I couldn't get that to work correctly so for now I just made a new blog with nothing in it aside from a couple test posts to check out the template. I'm still going back and forth on what to do with it because I can't seem to find a way to code the "tags" feature into the classic style template and it seems that you can't host your own blog if it doesn't have a classic style template.

For now I'm going to keep posting here while figuring out what to do with the new blog.

[05/20/2026: Removed dead cnet phone review link.]

My new camera came!

My Canon A640 digital camera that I mentioned in my last post came last night. I messed around with it for a little while last night and it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. I only had the 32MB SD card that came with it, though, and that holds about 8 pictures at "superfine" full resolution... and you can't really do too much messing around in 8 pictures. ;) I can't wait to get the 2GB SD cards that I ordered on eBay for $18 each (shipped) and get out and actually start taking some pictures with it. :)

I think this weekend I'm also going to take pictures of all of the stuff I have sitting around my apartment waiting to go on eBay... I'm probably going to put a bunch of it up on our local craigslist first and then what doesn't move in a week or so there will go to eBay.

I think my Best Motoring - American Touge 2 DVD (which I ordered on May 3rd) should have FINALLY come today, so I'll probably watch that tonight. I've also been reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg over the past few nights. I'm going to attempt to take another chunk out of that tonight, too. It's pretty good but I think it's appeal is very much limited to computer programmers, IT management and related "geeky" fields. I'm finding it very well written with great background information and research but I think it only really appeals to me because I am interested in programming and have done some programming in the past. I (unfortunately) don't think I'd recommend it to anyone who's not in an IT related field even though it does explain technical things pretty well and it doesn't delve too deep into the actual nuts and bolts of code.

Anyway, that's pretty much where I'm at right now... a few little new and exciting things and the rest of my life is pretty much the same.

I didn't get it...

I didn't get the job that I was really excited about a couple weeks ago and I'm disappointed but I'm not horribly so. Don't get me wrong, I REALLY wish I did get the job and I really do need to start doing something different than what I'm doing now... but the woman that I interviewed with was very nice and when she called to tell me the news today she reassured me that if the posting had been for a junior-level position (instead of the mid-level) and implied that if the one other person who had already done QA work didn't apply that I would have been her pick. (If there was anything that worried me about my chances for getting it it was the fact that I was attempting to skip right to the mid-level from the non-IT world.) She said I interviewed VERY well. (I think it was my best interview to date.) She also mentioned that she could tell I was "very analytical" and that it definitely seemed like I wanted to be a programmer eventually and she encouraged me to try for any entry-level programming positions that I saw or if she posts a junior level QA position to try for that, too.

So that's where I'm at now. Somewhat disappointed that I didn't get a job that I really wanted but reassured that I did the best that I could do and was just beat out by someone with more real world experience.

Me... excited?!?

Those of you who know me know that I'm not an easily excitable person.

I tend to be very mellow and laid-back even in the most extreme conditions. However, I just got off the phone with an old colleague and friend who I worked with on a joint project with my current department and the IT department. I called her to say hello and get the scoop on a job I applied for over in her neck of the woods, so to speak.

She mentioned (without me asking) that I could use her as a reference. She also gave me a little background on the department that I'd be working in. She said that the position had room for advancement, was very busy (job security!) and that she thought it was something I could handle. The one negative that she heard mentioned was that their physical space was small so people were tightly packed together... but that's something I'm used to... ;)

Anyway, now it seems that I have at least three people going to bat for me on this job. My current boss has been MORE than supportive plus two people I worked with in the past in the IT department both seem to be in my corner. The only thing that I think might get in the way me of getting the job is that the position now sounds like it's more of a mid-level position and I really don't have any hands on experience aside from my college programming assignment debugging days.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up... but I think this job would be a perfect move for me right now! Now I just have to try not to get nervous. I have a tendency to get nervous around new people and clam up and just give basic answers to questions I should elaborate on.

Website updates, spam, job stuff.

I also took a bunch of stuff off of smushybrain. I haven't really kept it up to date and the things I had there were pretty useless or outdated. The only thing it seems that site is good for these days is for people to use made up email addresses at smushybrain.com in forged "FROM lines" on their spam so that I get endless bounce-back email that until yesterday was all forwarded to my one email address that I had set up there. I added a rant about the spam issue on the main page and took down the pictures and links pages and some other random stuff. I also moved my one email address to be picked up through gmail (for the awesome spam filter) and set all email that didn't go directly to that one email address to bounce-back instead of being forwarded to me!

In other news: I found out that I didn't get the job I interviewed for a couple weeks ago that I kept a secret up until now. I didn't think I was going to get the job, anyway, though. There were a few questions on the interview that rubbed me the wrong way such as "Occasionally you have to bend the rules to do your job. Give an example of when you had to bend the rules to do your job." and the comment that if I was looking for a glamorous design job "This isn't it." I felt I maintained my composure when I said that I couldn't think of an example where I had to "bend rules" to do my job. The whole time I was thinking that the only times I could think of when people "bent rules" at work were when they were trying to get out of doing their job. I couldn't think of anyone who needed to "bend rules" to do their job let alone any time I have had to do so. The interviewer looked a little put out by my response and I don't think he believed me. I also didn't know what to say when I was told again that the positions wasn't a "glamorous" job. I didn't expect glamor, I expected exactly what the posting asked for: someone to crank out websites. If I needed more justification for not feeling bad: I'd feel horrible about being a part of a link farm, anyway...

In other, other (and better) news: someone here just mentioned to me that there's a job opening up in the next couple weeks that she feels I'll be good at and to keep my eye out. So, we'll see about that...

Too much packaging & Wal-Mart to push fluorescent bulbs.

What would happen if we removed the overly ridiculous packaging from our groceries right in the checkout line here in the good ol' US of A? I'd imagine someone would probably get stabbed... probably right in the checkout line in plain view of the million or so cameras in most supermarkets these days. (REMOVED DEAD LINK TO ARTICLE ON THE UK GUARDIAN WEBSITE. 03/16/10)

Also, the news of Wal-Mart pushing "green" lightbulbs was kind of interesting to me this morning. I've never thought of Wal-Mart pushing anything besides low prices. (Well, actually, I did see a few commercials recently pushing "organics" lately, too. I wonder if they need a new gimmick because the promise of low prices aren't good enough anymore? Whatever happened to them promoting the hell out of Made in USA products, too? Most of their crap is made in Taiwan and China now...) Anyway, that's all beside the point, I've been thinking of switching over to compact fluorescent lamps as the lightbulbs in my apartment die but there was one line that was a little troubling in the article that I never considered before. Compact fluorescent lamps are said to contain mercury which is something that probably shouldn't just be dumped in dumps when the 100 million bulbs that Wal-Mart plans to sell wear out. I wonder if there are companies out there which recycle fluorescent bulbs. I'll have to google that later and try to find out.

It makes you think...

(First a little background for those who might possibly be reading this who don't know me: I currently work in Bakery Merchandising for a 115 store supermarket chain.)

Every once in awhile I overhear something that makes me chuckle a little and then I sit back and start to think. Today it was our new secretary who said to another coworker: "Why do they call it patent flour? I thought flour was flour."

At first I just gave a snarky little chuckle at the person's expense and then I started to think. I wonder how it is I wound up where I am in life and why I know what I know. There was definately a point in time where I did think "flour was flour" and it didn't really matter that there are a ridiculous amount of types of flours out there. If I wanted to make a cake, I used a cake mix. If I wanted cookies, I just went to the store and bought Freihofer's Chocolate Chip Cookies. Furthermore, bread was bread. The only choices I knew about were white and wheat... and then it hit me. I remember asking that same basic question I laughed at in the last paragraph about 4 years ago when I was working in one of the bakeries that I now help oversee...

Now I don't know if I'm making sense, I'm know I'm kind of rambling... but the part that made me think is how did I start to learn about all of this and why? Deep down I don't really care about flour. (I'm sure someone out there does... but that person is not me.) I don't care about baked goods. Don't get me wrong, I love to eat cookies and different kinds of breads... but why did I spend the past few (5+, actually) years learning about and working with baked goods? I never expected that this would be what I'm doing for a living...

I used to think of myself as a geek. I knew all about what the "fastest" and "best" computers were. (Now my advice is just to buy something cheap that meets your basic needs because no matter what you buy and how much you spend it's going to be obsolete in a couple years. I don't know anyone who really NEEDS multiple processors and GIGABYTES of RAM to check their email, add friends to their MySpace friend list and watch funny videos on YouTube... but that's a topic for another blog.) I used to sit for hours in front of a monitor and type code and end up with a little program that does something silly or a web page full of information that my friends looked at to keep track of what I was up to and what sites I was looking at on the internet. I used to spend my free time working on and riding mountain bikes. I used to work on my cars...

When did I start to care about flour? When was it that I started to snicker at office drones who don't know the difference between patent and hi-gluten flour? When did I start to feel like our technology driven culture was becoming more oriented toward the "use for a year, throw away and upgrade" model? Why did this one quote that made me chuckle make me think about all of this? When was it that I became so cynical?

I don't know the answers to all of these questions... but I do know that I love to learn new things. I tend to throw myself into whatever has captured my attention and learn as much as I can about that particular topic until the next thing that grabs my interest comes along. Lately I've been thinking about tons of different things like: painting, green building, eco-friendly industries, green power sources, how to better use online social networks for the good of society instead of as a popularity contest, RFID technology and using the internet as a more coherent means of distributing information.

Eventually I hope to elaborate on most of the above topics in their own blog posts... but for now that's what I started to think about after I got a cynical chuckle at a coworker's expense.