The Mandelbear's Musings

So, ... this is the start of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. I'm not doing that. My track record for writing fiction is rather dismal. I'd be tempted to blame it on the deficiency in imagination associated with Alexithymia, but mostly it's the fact that I didn't do any planning.

However, this is also National Blog Posting Month (supposedly; NaBloPoMo's web page, such as it is, seems to be mostly broken, possibly due to a change in ownership of BlogHer.com. Many other references have also gone stale.) No matter. I don't need somebody else's website to keep track of what I post this November -- that's a one-liner.

 ls ~/.ljarchive/2018/10 | wc 

So here I am, staring at a mostly-blank page in Emacs, writing down a very vague plan in hopes that it will become more specific as I go on.

I do have a goal. I recently added a couple of donation buttons to my Dreamwidth profile page; the goal is to make this blog into something that people feel is worth supporting.

I have a few ongoing series of posts -- not all of them are things I'd consider worthy of being paid for, and in fact most of them aren't, but all of them are important for maintaining audience engagement. That's my excuse, anyway.

The ongoing series at present are:

• Done Since... -- posted every Sunday (sometimes delayed or advanced depending on conventions and where the end of the month falls), this contains my summary of the week followed by (under a cut tag) the week's worth of to.do file entries. This is currently the only thing that's posted consistently.
• Thankful Thursday -- my weekly gratitude post. These have been mostly fairly consistent recently.
• Songs for Saturday -- pretty much what it says on the tin. I haven't been all that consistent about these. There's (almost) always one on (American) Thanksgiving. Of course.
• The Computer Curmudgeon -- these are a combination of public service announcements, mostly about security- and privacy-related events, and longer informational pieces. These posts are cross-posted onto computer-curmudgeon.com. If people think these are worthy of support, I'd be delighted.
• The River -- These are posts about, ... Hmm. What are they about? Love, friendship, grieving, ... I guess the overall theme is emotions. There were a lot of these in 2008 and 2009, to the point where I was considering publishing a collection tentatively titled Two Years on the River. Didn't happen. Should it? It would take a lot of editing.

Okay, when you get down to it only The Computer Curmudgeon has the potential for being donation-worthy, and that only if I post to it more often. Poetry could if I wrote more of it. Anyway.

It's November 1^st Posts: 1; days with a post: 1.

(This bit of nonfiction is being written in response to recent events; it also seems to fit the "communication" part of the theme, "Community & Communication", of this month's Crowdfunding Creative Jam)

Someone died recently and left his widow with a problem: his computer's hard drive is encrypted, and he didn't leave the recovery key or his password anywhere that she can find.

Oops.

This is not unlike losing track of the key to the safe deposit box, forgetting the combination to the safe, or neglecting to make out a will. "But I have all that in a file on my computer!" I hear you cry.

Oh, right.

You need a JustIn Case file, someplace where it's safe but reasonably easy to find if anything happens to you. (I'm talking to myself here, too, by the way.) The bare minimum is whatever it takes to get into your computer (a FileVault recovery key, BitLocker PIN, or alternate admin password) and possibly into your password file, browser keychain, or whatever. *That* information needs to be in a couple of different places known to your family! At least one place should be outside your house, e.g. with a trusted relative, your lawyer, your safe deposit box, or the like. The other place should be in your house, e.g. in a locked filing cabinet (they're pretty easy to break into if necessary). Lable the file "Justin Case".

Even if almost everything is on your hard drive, there's a minimum set of things that have to be written down on hardcopy:

• Your master password, recovery key, or whatever it takes to get into your data. Or at least all of your data that you don't want effectively burned when you're gone. (Keep that separate.)
• The location of your will, safe deposit box, offsite backups, retirement and bank accounts, life insurance policies, and so on.
• The name of your executor/executrix.
• Any important information that your family is likely to need

My plan is to add an SD card with my most important files on it -- I checked, and the directory with all my passwords, tax information, receipts, and so on is only about 200MB. Perfect use for an old 500MB card or thumb drive that's too small to be useful for anything else.

Don't forget to update it if you change your password! That, after all, is the main point of this little exercise.

Ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl is open!. I posted a prompt there.

So... a pretty good day. Ok, a good day -- it doesn't need the qualifier. It started with a Hawaiian word: 'ohana, which means "family in an extended sense of the term including blood-related, adoptive or intentional." I like it. Thanks, Callie!

I took a walk, going West on McClellan for a change, which quickly took me into the quiet residential area of Monta Vista. It's quiet enough that I'll be able to make phone calls (if I can ever get back into that habit).

I work with cool people. $BOSS sent me a link in email with the subject "best WolframAlpha answer ever".

And best of all, I put in this prompt on ysabetwordsmith's poetry fishbowl, and got the poem "Afterlove". Ame liked it, too. I think that's my first-ever poetry prompt (unless I'm just being a forgetful old bear), so it's kinda special.

A few other links in the