The reasons of my blog’s change

Frederick Giasson


The reasons of my blog’s change

During my blogging process I learned many things on me. First I wanted to blog to increase my English writing. Then I start to blog on one of my passion, the security. I wrote many posts on many domains of security. I got feedbacks and some quotidian readers. But the more I wrote and the more I found that I’m passionate by many things and that I want to talk about them. It’s the reason why I changed my blog. I want to talk about subjects that passionate me, anything, not just security. I don’t want to write about only one of my passions, I want to write on all of them. I wish that I’ll be able to transmit you my passions; in a language that is not my native tongue.

I read about writing in the past few weeks and I need to say that they are right: The more you write the more you want write about things that you observe.

Analog Blog – Organize your Moleskine notebook as a blog

Frederick Giasson


Analog Blog
Organize your Moleskine notebook as a blog
This January I was introduced to Moleskine notebooks. It seems that there is a little frenzy, on the blogsphere, on the subject, these days. I was recently searching for a good, beautiful and classic looking notebook for my next trip. I found it in the Moleskines.

When I found a discussion on it on the blogsphere I followed references and discussions. There is literally a small and beautiful community of bloggers that are passionate by them. They transmitted me this passion for Moleskines. You can find many posts on Moleskine hacks to optimize it’s usage [1][2][3][4][5].

Personally I was interesting to try to use some of these ideas, enhancing them, and use my Moleskines as an analog blog. Okay, it can seem crazy, it can seem really, really geek (and it is) but I’m curious to found if it can be effective and practical.

We first need to remember the main blog’s characteristics:

  • A blog is a sort of electronic personal journal that you use to put thoughts in and get comments by the community. (Have in mind that this post is about analog blogs. Then this is a paper personal journal and you’ll not get comments from the community).
  • A comment system is implemented for each post. (In our case, it will be your own comments on past posts. The concept will be strengthened if you suffer of multiple-personality).
  • The posts on the blog are usually classified in categories.
  • Blogs sometimes refer to external resources.
  • Blogs usually reference internal thoughts.

Is that not beautiful? Okay, there is how you can see it on paper:

post_small_01

Figure 1

[Date : Location]

  • This is where you enter the date of your post’s entry. This is probably one of the most important feature. You’ll be happy to have it in 20 years. With it, you’ll be able to track the evolution of your thoughts. After you can optionally add the location where you write the post. It’s a way to help you remember the circumstances of your writing. The mind work this way; with a simple smell, image or word you can remember a whole situation.

[Title]

  • I personally think that the title is really important. It can help you to know, in a single phrase, what the post is about. It helps a lot while skimming the pages of your analog blog.

[Meta Data]

  • This is a good idea of Merlin Mann. You can put some words that act like the title, help you rapidly remember the object of your post.

[Comments Pages References]

  • This is the place where you put the page numbers of the comments you done on the post. I’ll come back to this feature later.

[Category]

  • This is the category name to which your posts belong to.

[x : y]

  • This is the permalink of your post. You’ll use these numbers to refer to this post. X is the number of the book where the post is present. Y is the current page of this book.

*Note: In the whole post I take in count that you are a Moleskine freak. So every reference has 2 numbers, one for the book and the other for the page. So if you have only one and don’t think about buying another one then you can erase the book number reference.

[v : w]

  • This is an optional reference. It refers to where the post continues if he is made on more than one page.

[a : b]->

  • This is a link on an external reference. Basically an external reference is a reference that is not in your analog blog. I’ll come back later on external references. A is the number of the book where the external references link page is and B is the page of the book where the external reference is viewable.

->[c : d]

  • This is a link on an internal reference. An internal reference is another blog entry in your analog blog. It can be in the current book or another one. C is the number of the book where the internal references page is and D is the page of the book where the post is viewable.


categories_small
Figure 2

The categories page is essential and is the second main feature after the posts’ pages. You can see it as a dynamic index. You can create your categories when you start your analog blog; but you also can create them when you need it. When you’ll create a new post that enters in one of these categories, you’ll dynamically add it on this page. This page will be the first or one of the first of your book. Remember, this is a sort of index or table of content.

[CategoryX]

  • This is the name of a category. This is the same name that will be writing in the [category] section of the Figure 1.

[1 ; 2-4 ; 8 ; 12]

  • This is the pages of the current book where you have posts that belong to this category.

comments_small
Figure 3

This is the page where you’ll enter your comments on your posts. For this special page, I suggest you to begin at the next to last page. When the next to last page is full, continue to enter you comments on the previous one. Why working in reverse order? You think that all will be upside-down? You are right, it will be. But you will always be sure that you’ll not lack space for comments as long as your Moleskine is not full. There are two problems that will rise if you say, when you’ll start your analog blog, that you’ll take the last 20 pages for you comments. First, it’s possible that your posts entries reach the start of your comments and that you have only use 10 pages of your 20 dedicated ones to comment. You can also use the 20 comment pages and you don’t have any place left to continue adding comments. It’s why I suggest proceeding like this.

[e : f]

  • This is the back reference to the post you comment. E is the number of the book where the commented post is situated and F is the page of this book where the comment is viewable.

external references_small
Figure 4

The external reference page will be you last one (or last few ones). This is the place where you’ll put the external references referred by posts in the book. These external references can be an internet URL, an address, a phone number, etc. The purpose of this section is to put references that you don’t want to rewrite every time you refer to them in the analog blog’s current book.

[g : h]

  • This is the reference number. G is the number of the current book. H is the page where the external reference is viewable. As you can see, you can use this reference in another book.

Finally you have your own analog blog ready. Now I just hope that this whole thing is effective and usable. Only the time will tell me it. I’ll probably not see the benefit of it in the first days, but month after month after month I hope that I’ll see them.

Okay, okay, I’ll do the security review of the analog blog system. It’s 100% safe over the internet as long as your Moleskine is not open and in the view of a broadcasting web camera. And it’s physically secure as long as he is on me and that I’m not assaulted with a .45.

So, this is a little post that I wanted to write. Share your thoughts, comments and additions by commenting it. I’m sure that the “system” is not perfect and it’s why I hope you’ll comment it.

[Update: 21 April 2005] I published a lightweight version of the system for Moleskine Pocket Daily Diary (or notebook)

[Update: 29 January 2005] I published a reaction and clarification post on the subject of analog blogs.

Personal Wiki – One of the best ways to create your daily journal

Frederick Giasson



Personal Wiki


One of the best ways to create your daily journal

My mind was at another place this week, it’s why I lacked posting on security. So I experimented a new really cool tool (okay, I’m possibly a big out to date).

Do you know what a Wiki is? There is the definition. It can appear as another blog like way to archive knowledge and distribute it. It can seem another fantasy of the open source/open mind society. It can look like the product of the cool techno wave with a urban name. Yes, this is probably all of them but there is a reason why it’s getting really popular. Basically it’s an elegant and ease way to make a public repository of knowledge on one or many subjects. The main features are: (1) the possibility, to any visitor, to edit and add their knowledge on a subject and (2) the possibility to link WikiWords to reference knowledge. The editing will be logged and other visitors will have the possibility to check what had been modified, when and by whom. If everybody agrees on what is written then the text will remain as long as another person add his own knowledge to the community’s.

I searched and tested many Personal Wiki programs for my own purposes. I wanted to know if this technology was interesting for personal uses. Web based Wikis are really powerful and full of features. The problem is that you need a web server with a database and a server side programming language (like PHP or ASP depending of the Wiki program). The installation is long and sometimes painful. You need to know what to do and how it works. So I started to search for an ease to use and install Wiki program for my personal purposes. I tested some but I found exactly what I needed with WxWikiServer. Basically it’s a home made web server. The only thing that you need to do is running the program and connects to it with your web browser. After you downloaded it, it takes about 2 minutes to begin to use WxWikiServer as you daily journal.

Why a Wiki as a daily journal? Because it’s a simple and quick way to organize your thoughts of the moment. You only have to start you browser and type. You can easily search your diary. You can link every of your thought one between another with a simple click. All additions and changes you made in your diary are logged, over time. You can visualize the changes of a page of your diary, over version, by a simple click. You can track the changes of the whole journal over time. You can organize it the way you want. You can backup it; you can publish it over the internet. Definitely, this is an awesome tool and probably the perfect one at the moment with a Moleskine.

There is how I personally use it. I created a list of WikiWords on the startup page. They are main categories. After, I create WikiWords in these categories as sub-categories. There is a part of my diary’s WikiWords tree:

  • ToDo
  • Writing
    • HowTo
    • Diaries
      • Paper Diary
        • Moleskine
          • Moleskine Hacks
  • Readings
    • Quotes
  • Thoughts
  • Travel
    • Travel Blogging
    • India

This is the knowledge tree of my daily diary. This is just a snippet and it’s astonishing to view how it grows rapidly! The ToDo page is used to put everything that I need to do the current day or during the week. Finally I have a daily diary. I can easely search in it; know where and when I changed entries; have access to all the changes, over time, which I made. Old ideas are not necessary wrong, it’s why it’s helpful to always have access to them.

Security? No know security holes are known for WxWikiServer. It’s sure that possibilities exist but it worth the risks. You can easily manage who can read or write it. A suggestion, if you need that your diary was only viewable and writable by you, then erase the anonymous account in the Users.wkc file accessible at the Admin Login section. Also, change the default password of the admin account. Then you’ll be the only one able to view and edit it. It’s sure that the files are plain text on you local hard drive but no one (theoretically) without access on your hard drive will be able to access them. You can always ask this additional feature to Ryan Norton: “Encryption of the local file”.

Definitely, Wiki is an awesome simple idea for linking singles thoughts one between the other with the possibility of being revised and enhanced by the community. They are not blogs but they emerge from the same stream.

On Writing – Bird By Bird

Frederick Giasson



On Writing – Bird By Bird


Some quotes wrote by Anne Lamott that I write to remember

Sorry for those that read this blog for the security stuff. The thing is that sometime I want to write, and share these writings, on other subjects than security. The more I write the more I have things to write about. Ideas come up in my minds and only disappear when I wrote them, otherwise they say: “I’ll not go out of your brain until you write me down! Otherwise you’ll lose me forever!” As you know, I started to write for myself with this blog. At first it was an experience. More and more it become a part of me; I become more and more with the writer’s thinking. Hahaha not a professional, but a tinny neophyte. I don’t aspect to be a professional writer (hope for you); I just aspect to continue to write for myself.

I just finished reading a beautiful book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a book that anybody who write for fun or profit need to read and reread. It’s a true and inspirational work on writing and writers. It initiates you in world of writing and publishing. I really appreciated the work and I need to write quotes from the book to be able to remember them time to time.

It can seem that I ripped the whole book but I hadn’t the patience to do it. I suggest you to buy it at your local bookstore or if there is none, on Amazon. It’s a 15$ well spent.

“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.”

“E.L. Doctorow once said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trop that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, life, I have ever heard.

So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, or course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on bird written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.”

“Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time – but she knows gold when she sees it.”

“You need to trust that you’ve go it in you to listen to people, watch them and notice what they wear and how they move, to capture a sense of how they speak. You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.”

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”

“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. […] that what it means fo us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw.”

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. […] Write as if your parents are dead.”

“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.”

“But they are always yours, your books as well as your children. You helped bring your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”

“Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.”

Travel Security Tips and Tools (Part 1) – Lodging security tips and tools

Frederick Giasson



Travel Security Tips and Tools (Part 1)


Lodging security tips and tools


Have you traveled in a foreign country, a place you haven’t been before; a third world country? You can fear such place; you can be fascinated by them. Some rest in their neighborhood all their life because they fear them; other put their lives in danger because they are fascinated by them. The firsts can learn to not fear them to have the chance to learn fascinating things from these places; other can learn to not put their lives in danger to have a chance to continue to learn from them. Both of them can learn security hints and tips to help them to archive their aims.

Some kind of things can be done to increase your security, at home or while traveling. The first and principal one is awareness. Awareness can be acquired in many ways. We’ll check some of them. The second is tools; all can be used as tools; but some are better then other in different situations; we will check some of them.

Awareness is a state of mind. It’s a way of thinking and probably your best friend and weapon. What differentiate a great warrior and a death one? Their awareness. The first have; the second doesn’t. Be aware of what? Developing situations, environment and your interaction between both of them.

All awareness self-defense principles apply. They are more than essential in an unknown place. They all apply when we talk about travel security. Right now, what’s interest us are the things that you need to be aware off when you are choosing a room in an unknown hostel and what to do when you have chosen it.

When you get near the targeted hostel, check the surrounding place. Check the people; check the buildings; observe. Are you suspecting things? Feel your guts; are they trying to tell you something? If you answer yes to one of these questions then go to another place. Is this paranoia? No, it’s awareness. If your feelings are right then enter in. Check the place and the staff working in. Always keep your luggage with you; put them in front of you or between your legs if you need to wait in a lineup or need some rest. If your feelings are always right then ask for a room. Don’t pay for it right now. Ask to see it before. If you don’t like it then ask for another one. You are the client, don’t forget it!

What do you need to be aware of when you are checking for a room? Some things are essentials. The location of the Room is one of them. The room is at which floor? Is there a security stair near your room in case of fire? The first 3 floors are habitually a good bet. After, inside the room, how many of exists are accessible? Can you use them properly? Are they helpful in case of emergency exit? If it’s a window, check if you can open it. Check if you would be able to use it as an emergency exit.

I think that the first principle in traveling security is to look like and act likes a local. It will save you a lot of problems. People like and trust person that look like them. It gives them the sentiment that they can predict their behaviors that result a sentiment of security. This principle also blurs (and possibly erase) the prey tag on your head. It’s not just a question of how you look like personally but it can also be a question of how the environment near you looks like. What I mean? Okay, you got your room and you’ll sleep in. You had two small cards on your night desk They just wait to be put on your room’s doorknob, to tell the staff what to bring the next morning or to not disturb. There are two of them, one in English, that you understand, and the other in the local language. Please, don’t put the English one at your door, put the other. Remember, you try to look like a local. You don’t need to tell them that in this bedroom, there is a rich foreigner full of cash that is just waiting to be stolen. This, you don’t need. Remember, local police don’t care of you and your problems. Specifically because they are your problems and not them; they have much more to do than investigate some little felony. Remember, you are in a third world country. In these countries, sometimes, police is just the name given to another criminal group.

Now you look like a local, you act like a local, your room is well situated and you have 2 good emergency exits. You got the jackpot. You have done everything in your power to get out of troubles. The problem is that sometimes, things can even append. Awareness just decrease your chances to be in troubles, it doesn’t erase them. It’s in this case that your situation handling skills will be helpful.

It’s why tools have been invented: to try to increase the effectiveness of your actions. Security tools have 2 utilities: help prevent things to append and help you in the actions you took to face a particular situation. The first utility is passive, the second is active.

Many passive tools can be useful in our actual situation. The first one is a portable door lock. This tool is awesome in his simplicity. With it you’ll only be able to unlock a door by inside. It’s a simple piece of metal that you put on the door’s lock mechanism; and it cost only around 10$USD. It can save you a lot of trouble while sleeping.

Why not add another security layer to your door’s lock? Use a personal alarm with door adaptor. Yes, I’m talking of the alarm that cry at 130Db when you put off the alarm’s sling. It’s not just useful on you. If you buy an adapter you can use it on your door or on the window. The adaptor is just a small metal clamp that you put between the closing door or the closing window and their frame border. While the contact is made, the alarm is off. If the contact between the 2 parts of the clamp is lost then the alarm will start. Then if someone opens the door, the clamp will fall on the floor and the contact will be lost; then the alarm will start and woke you up. What a wonderful multi-utility security tool! And it just cost you around 20$USD. Another interesting tool of this kind is an Alarm door stopper that you can find for around 12$USD

Another tool that can save your life while you are sleeping is a portable smoke detector. In most third world hostel they just don’t have one and when they have one, it’s possible that batteries are not working since many years. It will cost you about 20$USD and will save your life if the situation happen.

Depending of the country you are in; don’t forget to put a bug net over your bed! It will protect you from mosquitoes’ bites and all of their resulting diseases. Check the risks with your local travel agencies before leaving.

All these systems will buy you reaction time. It’s this reaction time that will save your life in many situations; and naturally what you’ll do with this time. The question of what to do with your reaction time depend on each situations and the training you got to manage them. Otherwise, some active tools and habits can always be useful in most situations.

A good habit is to pack all of your stuff that you don’t need to sleep in you travel bag and put it beside you before sleeping. Your mum probably tells you to leave anything inside the house when you need to get out of the house for an emergency. She is right but the problem is that you are neither in your house nor your country. You can be in a place that none of your follows know the existence of. A place where your government doesn’t have an embassy. A place where you need all of your precious things to keep you alive. Water purifier, comestible food, medicaments, etc. If you lose them, it would be like an arrival in hell, Hades waiting for you. This advice doesn’t have any implication on you and your safety. You get 5 minutes to pack your things before sleeping. If something goes wrong and you need to immediately leave the place, you only have to bend one arm, get you travel pack and leave as soon as possible. That’s it.

A good active tool that is always useful to have ready is a thing that humans used and loved since ages; a light source. His primary use is to see in dark. Wow, what a discovery! Not really, but it’s essential when we talk about security. If there have a problem that forces you to leave precipitously, you need to see where you are going. If there is not any light, your movement will be slowed. You’ll have a chance to fumble on rubbles and possibly disable you for a moment. Then your hard gained reaction time will be lost forever. A simple spotlight will probably safe your great arms. Otherwise, it also can be used as a kubotan or a bludgeon dependant of his dimensions or be used to blind a possible opponent for some precious seconds that let you the time to get out of there!

Simple things can save your life while traveling. No one of these tips is hard to apply; they are just common senses. This is my first article on traveling security. I started with lodging security while traveling because it reach every travelers; business, leisure or adventure travelers. It’s vital and essential. You need to sleep every day and you need to sleep well.