Personal Security

Personal security is something everyone must be concerned about. The world HAS become a dangerous place. Actually, the world has always been dangerous. Some predator animals have and will always look at us as a meal. Fire and firearms have offered humans some protection during our history. Humans have been hurting other humans probably since we learned we could. It is looking as if that will never change. Today we must be very aware of our surroundings when shopping, entering our work/school and homes. They are always looking for the opportunity to take (our kids and valuables), rape, kill or a whole list of other horrible inhuman deeds. The war on drugs has given black market a broad base to excel in crime. Our leaders in the world are each day giving criminals more power and rights as they take away the rights of law abiding citizens. The Internet has made the world like a small village. The World Wide Web is a place where we hang out. Criminals hang out here too.

As of the time and date of this post there are 250,681,017 malicious websites online. Each one is crafted in some way to take, steal or hurt users and computers. This list grows each hour. There are more than 114,120,414 security threats too. These include but are not limited to virus, worms, bots, traps, algorithms and other programs designed to once again steal or control. I recently came across a WordPress Gravatar profile that had a malicious website listed as the link.

Blocked

I wrote about this before and posted it on my former Facebook. This is something my ex-girlfriend and I completely agreed upon;

When you are adding friends on Facebook would you want this person to come to your house? Would you let them in your home? Would you let them around your kids?

If you answered NO to any of these questions why would you let this person see any personal information about you? Would you expose your friends to this person?

People fail to realize that when you post something on the Internet even though it may SEEM private it really never is. Because a friend of a friend of a…. you get the point right? Also these social media places own anything you post and can sell/share it to companies. You agree to this when you accept the terms of use.

Think about this.

You (not really you, an example) post photos of your kid(s), where they go to school, where you eat-out at or shop. Where you work, go to school or pictures of your home/car. You post photos or describe places nearby you frequent. Even pics of the night sky give geographical information. Are you thinking yet? The lion lays in wait, no matter how long it takes to get his prey. Human predators sometimes will take months or even years to get a victim. We MUST be careful in everything we do on-line.  Everything you publically share is a clue for that evil person to located you, a loved one or even a friend.

I recently learned this.

A few months ago I received an e-mail from a former colleague who worked in a call center I set-up in the Philippians. She  was telling me she saw my profile on a popular internet dating website and asked if I was available. HUH? I never, not ever have been on ANY Internet dating site. I actually do not see the point in a long distance relationship. Even one that is 100 miles away is difficult. Why would I want to date someone hundreds, thousands or halfway around the world? Seeing each other would be few and far between. Okay my point may be wrong on this reasoning. But that is not my point concerning security on-line. She gave me the link to this “profile of me.” It was my photo from the former Facebook page. It contained enough personal information about me, age, city, MORE PICTURES from the web and things I have posted here on WordPress like quotes and a general “feeling” of the things I write. It took me 7 weeks to gain control of “MY PROFILE” that was found out by the dating site to probably have been set-up by someone in Nigeria or what they told me. They kept a record of the IP Address used when profiles are created and it was not one from the USA. There were over 2,500 letters in there from unsuspecting women who had written to “Me” who was not me. That is scary! What this person or persons had hoped to accomplish by creating a fake profile is beyond me. But I am sure it was for some evil purpose. Be careful ladies. You never know the predator that is behind the profile until it could be to late.

Today a phone call came to my cell phone. This call is what prompted me to write this post. It was from NYC – Bronx area. The caller had some of the worst English imaginable, could hardly understand the guy.
Now this is me, someone who has talked with people from all over the world and this guy was broken. As best as I could understand he was offering me a job. Said he found my “Resume'” on Monster or CareerBuilder. (I don’t have one on either) but explained he didn’t know which. He knew my name. My cell is not listed and I only share it with a select few. Though I did use the number on that damn Facebook app a few years back and Twitter. You can only use Instagram on Mobile (because they have no access by PC) so I am thinking maybe one of those.

PLEASE EVERYONE BE SAFE! Be aware and protect yourself, your family and friends.

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The Female Makes All The Rules

I recently read a blog about female narcissist. I wish I could remember who wrote it so I could link and give credit. I never knew a women could be one. I thought that only men were the ones with this disorder. I believe I am a very smart person. Still I have to admit I just never knew a woman could be a narcissist. I have read many blogs, written by women, who write about the narcissist husband or boyfriend. Perhaps this is why I never gave any thought on what defines one. After reading the blog about narcissism females, all the signs, everything they do, I decided to research this further. I was surprised to learn that narcissistic personality disorder is not gender specific. That actually shocked me when I put two and two together to discover I was in a long term relationship with one. First and foremost I do not intend on going into details. I believe a relationship is private between two people, no matter how horrible it was for me.

 

This lead me to remember some things from the past. I recall a friend. My friend was a very attractive woman. We were buddies and knew each other since kindergarten. One day she was telling me about maybe she had an asshole magnet in her pocket. I looked and there was no such device. She went on to say every guy she dated or was interested in turned out to be an asshole. I told her maybe it has a lot to do with where she is finding these men. She went to bars and drank alcohol. This was the source of her dating and I am not saying just because people go to bars and drink makes them bad. I was only telling her maybe to try looking for guys who go to other places may yield a better choice.

 

Seems I too may be looking in the wrong place. I do not go to bars and drinking is a very, very rare thing for me. I looked in my pocket and there is not a device that attracts narcissistic females. Though I think I may have attracted a couple.

 

Back in the collage days, I was one of the lucky few who had a job that paid more then 5 times the minimum wage. I lived in a upper class one bedroom apartment. I attended 3 classes before work, worked 8 hours M-F and sometimes a half day on Saturday. I had enough money to live a  comfortable lifestyle. I even partied a little back then. I had a friend who lived in the same complex. We met one day when she was having some car trouble. We went to the same university so I gave her a ride that day. On the way to school I gave her a key to one of my other cars so she could make it to work that night. I did repair her car that week-end, and we hung out a good bit after that.

 

One day the management company left a letter in all our boxes. They were raising the rent from $95 a month to $125. Now that did not bother me financially, but for a collage girl working a part time job at minimum wage that was tough. That week-end my friend and I were hanging out at the pool, with our apartment manager. He was a pretty cool old guy. She was telling him about how she may have to move because she could not get more hours at work, to pay the rent increase. He started telling her that he did have a two bedroom that was opening at the end of the month. The rent was $145 and if she could find a roommate he would transfer her lease. She asked me, hey what about you, you want to be roommates? Now,  I had already met my lease and was on a month to month bases. I thought about it few seconds, she did keep a clean place, didn’t drink beer and was an accounting major. I could add an additional $300 a year to my savings account, and she was a girl. Sounds good to me. I told her. So next month we were roomies.

 

That was perhaps my first experience at being controlled. Not in a really bad way, but financially. It did not take very long before she said I had too many cars, to much credit debt, too much money in savings and not enough invested in stocks and other risk. Lets not forget my roommate was an accounting major! I learned it was easier to live with her if I just listened. One thing I believe I learned early on, you can never read a woman’s mind. She is always right. And she is ready when she says she is ready. I was into a lot of things. I built race cars and engines. Raced moto-cross and had a sponsorship. Toured in the martial arts circuit,  played tennis and competed in a few world cups. I was an amateur radio operator (HAM) and was in the cutting edge of technology. One day a fellow HAM who worked for IBM gave me a computer. He was telling me this was the state of the art machine. And one day everyone, every business will use computers… they will change the world!

 

Now mind you, I was still waiting for that Dick Tracy watch to come out. At that time PONG was the video game and cell phones where the size of a brick, more of a radio than a phone. What my friend wanted me to do with this computer was to figure out how we could send Morse code by typing it out on the keyboard. We had read about how some HAM’s where experimenting with this. So this is how I got started in computing.

 

One thing about these first computers was it took five 5 1/2 floppy disk to boot them. You turned the machine on, inserted disk one, waited for a while and it said on the black and white screen insert boot disk two. You went through this process until all five disk were loaded and like magic a blinking curser came up on the screen as C:\_  If you wanted to save something you had to insert a blank 5 1/2 disk that held a whopping 1.2MB and save. There was a gigantic 512KB processor, 8MB of memory and no hard disk drive. By todays standards your washer has more computing power. A couple months later I learned I could buy what was known as a HARD DISK DRIVE that plugged into the serial port on the computer. It would allow me to turn on the drive, turn on the computer and it would boot up without using all those floppy disk. It held a tremendous 10 MB ! and cost $1000.
I could afford that. So I bought one.

 

Now roommate liked the computer. She was learning how to write stuff with it. She started taking a COBOL class and was experimenting with some accounting stuff. We halved the bills and each did their part in the apartment. There was no romantic involvement with us, we had a good friendship… until I came home one Saturday with that damn $1000 Hard Drive. She hit the roof! Threw a can of soup at me. Kicked a few things around the apartment called me every foul word I never knew existed in her sweet vocabulary. She was all of five feet six inches and weighed in at most 120 lbs. wet. But in those minutes she was larger then the Hulk. She told me I was to take that thing back and get a refund. There is no way you are going to spend that much money. I looked at my hand… Nope, no wedding ring. Looked at hers, nope, no wedding ring. I told her no way. Its my money I can spend it on whatever I want. Okay she said you will regret that. For the next few months she made good on her word. Silent treatment. Leaving stuff laying all over the place. Ignoring me when I talked with her. Eye rolling, the works.

 

One day my friend came by. He asked me if I would be interested in selling the hard drive. I told him I don’t know, I had all the boot disk on it and a few programs I was working on to get the keyboard to talk with the radio. He said I’ll give you $1,250 for it if you let me have all the data on it too. I could not turn that down, and I could buy an 84MB hard disk drive for that price. Sure, so I sold it to him. Roommate and I were “married” again after he left, when she saw him carry out the drive and the check in my hand for $1,250. All of the sudden we were best friends again as if nothing had ever happened. Funny right?

 

Moral of the story; I Found The Rules
THE RULES
1.The female always makes the rules.
2.The rules are always subject to change at any time without prior notice.
3.No male can possibly know all the rules.
4.If the female suspects the male knows all the rules she must immediately change all or some of the rules.
5.The female is never wrong.
6.If the female is wrong it is due to misunderstanding which was a direct result of something the male did.
7.If rule 6 applies, the male must apologize.
8.The female may change her mind at any time.
9.The male must never change his mind.
10.The female has every right to be angry or upset at any time.
11.The male must remain calm at all times, unless the female wants him to be angry or upset.
12.The female must under no circumstances let the male know whether or not she wants him to be angry or upset.
13.The male is expected to mind read at all times.
14.The male who doesn’t abide by the rules, can’t take the heat, lacks backbone and is a wimp.
15.Any attempts to document the rules could result in bodily harm.
16.If the female has PMS all the rules are null and void.
17.The female is ready when she is ready.
18.The male must be ready at all times.

 

Need I say I never bought that 84MB Hard Drive? Also, my roommate was never anything like the one for certain narcissistic girlfriend. And the other friend I am sure was looking for love in the wrong place. I like peace. I like conversation. I avoid chaos. Maybe that is some of the reasons why I put up with that narcissist. I think it may be harder for a guy to see a female who is narcissist. I believe men are more prone to violent behavior. And I can say
I was never hit or was violence even an issue. But violence is only one of the things this disorder exhibits. Emotional, mental and blame-game abuse are just as hurtful. Still I know my heart is not broken. It is only inaccessible to that person.

 

Some Pictures of old software.

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