2010 June archive at Cynics Unlimited

Archive for June, 2010

Jun

How to Stop Spam

By Nirdeza 0 Comments

Categories: Technology and Tutorials

Roughly 85% of all email received during the first quarter of 2010 was spam mail, according to a recent Kaspersky labs report. Spam is a multi-billion dollar industry that costs businesses billions of dollars and causes great annoyance to millions of internet users. Fortunately, there are many ways that businesses and ordinary citizens can fight the spread of spam and minimize its intrusion on commercial and personal internet activity.

Business Spam Solutions

Businesses concerned about spam and other computer-related security issues can choose between a large number of software and hardware solutions. Leading the way for serious protection is Barracuda Networks, a business security firm that provides a large range of spam and virus firewalls that can handle anywhere from 10 to 100,000 users. Barracuda firewalls can be clustered to support nearly any size of business. Spam and virus definitions are updated hourly by Barracuda networks and automatically pushed out to customer firewalls.

Of course, hardware firewalls are not the cheapest security solution, particularly for small businesses. Software-only solutions tend to be cheaper and often have per-desktop licensing to match smaller budgets. Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition claims to block 99% of spam in addition to providing malware protection, disk-based recovery, antivirus and email encryption. Corporate purchasing starts at 5 licences and can be purchased in exact denominations up to 1000.

Finally, services like Google’s Postini can filter spam for businesses (usually ISP’s) before reaching the local services. Individual users can log directly into Postini using their regular email address and passwords to verify whether filtered mail should be sent through to the user’s inbox.

Consumer Spam Solutions

Quite often, consumer spam solutions are based on the same technology as the corporate solutions. For instance, Symantec’s Norton Internet Security is a personal product that offers much of the same security features (including antispam protection) as Protection Suite but at a more consumer-friendly price. Competing commercial products include Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 3-User and ZoneAlarm Security Suite.

However, it’s the free solutions that many will opt for since many are available for non-commercial use.

>>Continue Reading Article

Jun

Top 5 Kangaroo Sites

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments

Categories: Interesting...

As anyone who follows my writing can figure out, I love kangaroos. My habit of carrying my daughter in a “pouch” (Baby Bjorn) when she was an infant earned me the nicknames of Mama Kangaroo, Captain Kangaroo (even if the TV character was actually a man) and the Kangaroo Lady. I’m even convinced that I was a kangaroo in a previous incarnation. So I’ve decided to list the top 5 kangaroo sites on the Internet.

5.Ausflag: Our Own Flag (http://www.ausflag.com.au/)

Those of us who grew up in Canada in the 1960s or before might remember when the flag in our schools, public offices and other venues was the Union Jack. Then we decided we wanted a symbol that represented us, Canada, and unfurled our now world-famous maple leaf. But while we Canadians have ceased using the Union Jack for our national flag (though some provinces, like Ontario, do retain it on theirs), Australia hasn’t. That country’s current flag is blue with a Union Jack on the upper left-hand corner, a large star beneath the Union Jack and five stars on the other half of the flag. Today, however, many Australians have decided they too want their own flag, one that best represents their nation and its people. And what better image to represent Australia than the kangaroo – which, by the way, already appears on the logos of a number of Australian national institutions such as the airline Qantas.

The website Ausflag suggests several ideas for a new Australian flag right here, http://www.ausflag.com.au/designs.asp. All four are very attractive, but as you might guess, the one I like best is that in the upper right-hand corner. This flag, which was designed by Ausflag executive director Harold Scruby, depicts a kangaroo, in silhouette against the sun, over the great red continent. It is, in Scruby’s words, a “revolutionary rather than evolutionary” flag. If I were Australian, I would be proud to have this beautiful animal stand for my nation on our flag.

4.Tie Me Kangaroo Down (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D-LmRNdQiQ)

This is the original kangaroo song. It was written and performed in 1957 by Australian artist Rolf Harris, who contrary to what I initially believed is still alive today and recently performed at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” is quite a unique song in that it uses an instrument called a wobble board, a type of keyboard that Harris designed himself and that can be heard just as the song begins.

The video includes pictures of kangaroos as well as other examples of Australia’s extraordinary wildlife, such as the koala and duckbill platypus. It’s a song that young and old – in my family’s case, from my three-year-old daughter to my 72-year-old father – can enjoy.

3.True Blue Roos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMTyhnyAwaQ)

I deliberately listed this site right after Roo Gully for a reason. This song was written by Australian country singer Craig Giles (see his website here at http://www.craigiles.com/). It tells the story of two kangaroos at Roo Gully named Sonny and Max. It begins with the line “Sonny and Max are real good mates [note: ‘mates’ in the Australian sense of companions rather than romantic partners] and they call them double trouble.” And the video shows Sonny and Max indeed getting into trouble, helping themselves without permission to a bite of one of their owners’ ice cream, crawling under a parked truck, and fighting on the middle of a living room floor and promptly scurrying outside. “True Blue Roos” is a nice tune with a catchy beat you can tap your foot to. Moreover, you get to see not only the cute kangaroos but the beautiful Australian scenery on the Roo Gully resort. By the way, Craig Giles is touring the American South this fall, so any readers from that area might consider going to see him perform there.

2.Roo Gully (http://members.iinet.net.au/~roogully/)

I wrote about the world-famous Roo Gully Wildlife Sanctuary in August of 2008 (http://www.cynicsunlimited.com/2008/08/31/roo-gully/) so I won’t go into it in great detail here. It’s located in Boyup Brook near the city of Perth in southwestern Australia. Owner Carol Lander takes care of orphaned and injured kangaroos and other animals with the ultimate goal of releasing them back into the wild or, if that’s not feasible, providing them with an environment as similar as possible to their natural habitat. The site contains some beautiful and interesting videos (such as that of a joey – baby kangaroo – being born) as well as the life stories of some of the various kangaroos who have made Roo Gully their home over the years. There’s also information on donating to Roo Gully or “adopting” a kangaroo of your own.

1.Cracked.com (http://www.cracked.com/funny-2615-kangaroos/)

I was called a slut in print. Because I like Black and Hispanic men? (I joke that I share Madonna’s tastes in men but have the good sense not to keep marrying White men in a feeble attempt to “cover” myself.) No, because I’m a kangaroo. According to “The Opening Eye” of Cracked.com, female kangaroos are “dirty, dirty sluts.” Apparently right after she gives birth a female kangaroo will copulate with the “first hit-n-split douchebag to buy her a Foster’s” and get pregnant again.

It gets worse. I’m also a heartless murderer. We’ve all heard about boxing kangaroos. Adding a bit of kick-boxing into the mix, a kangaroo is capable of delivering a “Mortal Kombat-style claw-first kick to the abdomen” of his opponent. If that doesn’t work, the kangaroo will pursue the enemy into the water and use his (the kangaroo’s) forepaws to hold the opponent underwater long enough to drown him or her. But kangaroos have their redeeming qualities. Baby kangaroos are “agoddamndorable.” If you succeed in hand-rearing an orphaned one, it will instinctively cuddle up with you when you come home. And as the author writes, who doesn’t need that after a tough day at the office?

Anyway, check out the whole story at http://www.cracked.com/funny-2615-kangaroos/ and click on “View Comments” to read my effort to defend the female of my species. And join in the conversation yourself!

Jun

Winding Down – My Journey Towards Menopause

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments

Categories: family

About a year and a half ago I wrote an essay about having an only child. I said in it that although I was fairly certain I would not have any more biological children, I had decided against a tubal ligation in the small likelihood I chose to have another baby. Now nature seems to have made the choice for me. I’m going through perimenopause, the phase of a woman’s life just before menopause.

While menopause is thought of as the complete cessation of menstruation, ironically one of the first signs of perimenopause is that a woman’s periods come more often. My own menstrual cycle, for example, has gone from its previous monthly schedule to between 21 and 25 days. Eventually, though, menstruation becomes less frequent than usual and ultimately stops altogether.

When I realized that my consistently short cycles were not merely one-time aberrations and that I was indeed undergoing perimenopause, I had to take in the implications of that – beyond of course the temporarily increased spending on feminine hygiene products. The most important question was whether or not I would be able to have another child. My doctor told me flatly that if I really wanted to, I’d better start working on it now. I still appear to be ovulating. However, at my age – I’m 41 and three-quarter years as I write this – the eggs I have left are less likely to be fertilized in the first place and, if they are, more likely to end in miscarriage. Even if I were successful in getting pregnant, there is also the higher risk of Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities in the resulting fetus. I don’t relish the idea of being forced to choose between having an abortion on one hand and bearing a developmentally disabled child on the other.

There’s also the question of the dynamics with my existing child, now three years old. She’s a fairly easy and even-tempered girl (she’s never given me a sleepless night, even as an infant), and we’ve sort of settled into a comfortable rhythm with both of our schedules. But another baby could throw this symbiosis completely off-balance, especially if he or she were not quite as adaptable as my daughter. And no matter how “good” she is, my little one is still after all a little one and I’m not sure I could handle two kids under a certain age at the same time. To paraphrase the Prophet Mohammed’s advice about taking another wife, if you fear you cannot deal justly with two or more, have only one.

So I’ve, again, concluded that I only want one child, at least for now. I’m open to adopting later on when my daughter is older and less dependent on me. But with the decision to forgo any further biological reproduction comes a certain sadness. It’s a visceral emotion, essentially, as I’m perfectly content with the child I have now and don’t possess any overwhelming urge to procreate at this point. Yet there’s a certain bittersweet feeling that I won’t ever experience pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding again, that I won’t have another genetic child whose looks and temperament and so on I can compare with my daughter’s and say, “That’s where he/she gets it from!” This sadness quickly passes, though. Not only am I satisfied with my daughter, but I “have” a lot of other children – a bevy of nieces and nephews and now a great-niece (the daughter of one of my sister’s biracial sons and his wife).

I suppose the other thing I must confront in approaching “the change” is the fact that I’m getting older. I remember once when I was working in a hospital as a college student during the summer I had a 60-year-old patient tell me she felt sad on seeing the tampon dispenser in the hospital washroom because it reminded her of when she was young. I said most women my age would be pleased NOT to have a reason to use the dispenser. Two decades later, I’m more understanding of her. Over the years I’ve taken my menstrual cycle for granted: even if it could be a nuisance, it was just “there.” But as I know from my older sister, who’s undergoing her menopausal transition right now, and from friends who’ve already passed theirs, life goes on. Not to mention that I’ll be spared from shelling out money for sanitary pads and another IUD!

Jun

Foodstuffs of the Future: Crabsticks, Offal and Test-Tube Hotdogs

By Jim Bergerac 1 Comment

Categories: Interesting... and Society

Hello, and welcome to tomorrow’s world. Perhaps that introduction conjures up fond memories of the cheerily optimistic BBC science programme, or possibly evokes darker images of bunkers, radiation and inevitable cannibalism. Just as sweet goes with sour, this first in a series of food articles tastes a little of both, as I turn my attention to the likely diet of our nearby human future.

If the reliably hysterical science coverage of British newspapers is to be believed, we’re about to run out of fish, bees and bananas, and those are merely the media-friendly tip of the extinction iceberg represented by an expanding population and manmade climate change. On this small planet, our mushrooming population of gluttons, gourmands and gastric bypasses will inevitably run out of things to eat, and unless we start on each other our diets are going to be required to evolve to incorporate some ‘unusual’ new tastes, just to put it mildly.

You are what you eat

Mould, industrial waste, lab-grown fish fingers; these are some of the protein sources already shuffling their way towards your plate, and it’s hard to predict exactly which aisle of the global supermarket stocks the grotesque superfoods that will be needed to save hungry, stupid humanity from gnawing off its own buttocks.

Imagine a culinary car-crash between Heston Blumenthal and Ray Mears, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of our future menu: grasshoppers poached in liquid nitrogen; squirrels toasted over a pile of burning tyres.

If that sounds too weird for you, look away and concentrate on enjoying those beefburgers for the next decade or two. You’ll want to remember them in the future, when even a fancy dinner resembles a surgeon’s binbag, and decade-old cinema hotdogs are so desirable that they’re regularly hijacked at gunpoint by starving migrants from the encroaching euro-desert.

Well done humanity, you’ve eaten pretty much everything

It probably tastes a bit like chicken

Exaggeration aside, we really are chewing towards a gigantic helping of environmental apocalypse. We waste more food than at any time in history, whilst clearing the rainforests to make burgers and busily scoffing our way to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Where is the next course going to come from? Who’s going to bother growing it? We may as well forget about the luckless inhabitants of the developing world (part of the problem is that most of us have already), because they’ll be too busy dealing with hurricanes, flooding and widespread pestilence to produce much in the way of stimulating ethnic cuisine.

An order of doom, topped with gloom, stuffed with woe

Intensive farming is poisoning our land and eradicating pollinating insects, yet pests proliferate whilst useful birds and bees expire in their millions. Urban rodents multiply faster than at any time since the bubonic plague whilst overfed kitty cats maim songbirds and consume enough tinned meat to feed a small third-world family.

We really don’t have enough farmland in the world for humans to eat so much cow, let alone an auxiliary population of obese housepets. What this means is that every time you see a mad old woman with twenty cats, an entire African village is going hungry. Bear that in mind when the bomb falls and you’re having second thoughts about the moral implications of cannibalism.

You’re probably thinking that this is all getting a bit dark, so it’s lucky that scientists have been working hard to solve these problems before we start dreaming up exotic marinades for their juicy PHD brains. In labs across the world, white coats are spattered with a variety of delectable stains, ready for that fateful day when society collapses like an underdone soufflé and Jamie Oliver must roam the street, mugging grandmothers for their hoarded tins of corned beef.

This might seem a long way off, so you may be surprised and/or disgusted to find that many of these monstrous science foods are already on your shelves. If this makes you a little queasy, you’d best learn to swallow it down with a smile on your face, because your future offers a stark choice between starvation, Soylent Green or an outlandish smorgasbord of artificial foodstuffs scraped out of warm Pyrex beakers.

Continue Reading at Stinkbiscuit >>

Jun

The Artwork of Daisy Hsieh

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments

Categories: Entertainment

Hello, I would like to introduce the work of my friend Daisy Hsieh, a budding photographer. She takes pictures of everything from animals (a favourite of mine), people (including her very cute son, the little boy doing martial arts), landscapes and buildings. So maybe we could start with some samples of her work.