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First JOTI

I had been hoping to arrange to do a full and proper event around JOTI, but this was not to be. Instead I'll report on my JOTI baby steps.

• JOTI coincided with Apple Day which is a major fund raiser for our group. As a result this put a bit of a crimp in scheduling an event around JOTI. I had hoped to see if there was an Internet connection at our meeting hall and Apple Day coordination centre but wasn't able to do so.
• The second challenge was setting up a computer and test the requisite chat software to ensure it operated correctly. Again, time and other commitments were the enemy.
• I fell back to e-mail and web chat. I found the web chat software to be finicky. At one point I seemed to be connected but out of channel where no one could hear me.
• e-mail using the station lookup proved reliable but far less interactive than the full JOTI experience promised.

I sent hello messages from our group to a number of groups in such places as: Alaska, Russia, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Barbados, Iceland, Brazil, Croatia, Sweden, Ireland, Mexico, Egypt, Norway, Israel, Finland, and others. I also received some hellos from several different groups around the world. Below I've listed their web sites (if they have them).

• Dalyellup Scouts in Western Australia, here. Hi Joanne.
• Palmerston North Scouts in New Zealand, here. Hi Penny, Harry, William and Edward
• 243rd Tuscany Scouts in Alberta Canada, here. Hi Aklea Scott.
• Oulu Finland, here. Hi Andrew.
• AVSC in Padua Italy, here. Hi Ugo.
• 9th Benoni in South Africa, here. Hi Joy and Peter.
  

Also, some of the groups may not have yet had a chance to reply to the messages but should be able to find me through this web site's E-mail Me widget.

Unfortunately, the JOTI search stations / send message doesn't cc you back. If you don't keep track of who you said hi to - you could be out of luck.

Using feeds to speed up your browsing

Some of you may wonder how much time I spend looking at blogs and web pages to find gems like this. The truth is far less than you may think.

In an earlier article, I wrote about using web feeds for blog (and news) headlines. So rather than reading huge amounts of web pages, I can just look at my feeds and see just the headlines once or twice a day. That lets me read or bookmark what looks interesting and save a lot of time.

If you read the article on security excuses, you may wonder how I found a web page on a site I've never looked at before. I could have found a page that referred to another page, but I didn't. One of the blog feeds I subscribe to is the Security Bloggers Network which aggregates blog headlines from security bloggers. The only down side of this is that with many authors there's a lot of variation in what style and content that may not be acceptable to everyone.

Top 10 excuses for not securing your computer

I came across a good blog article describing the top 10 excuses people use for failing to secure their computers, here. It's actually a repost of another article.

This is the first time I've actually read this persons blog and I can't say much about their style and content other than this was a good article worth pointing to. A quick look shows posts about malware, viruses, security, and cleaning up infected computers.