Take a minute or three and leave a comment. What strikes you as you read this?
There, a simple tool for a writing practice that will over time make you a more confident writer. I would promise you that in a heartbeat.
If you are new to the group, welcome. If you are a long time user, this post is packed with very good information. A quick read likely turn over a new rock that had not been overturned before. I hope that gets you to explore. Continue reading “Getting Started with Tuesdays with Deborah” »
Why is it that I find myself stuck in traffic at 10:30 PM on a Saturday? As we crawl forward at about 10 MPH, I know the answer. It is my love for someone. Someone who was at one time the person I depended on most, someone who is now focused elsewhere. I am on my way home from watching her perform. It was an honor just to be invited. To see her having such a great time and doing a fantastic job made my day.
When you run a small business, the people that work for you either are, or quickly become, your friends, your family. When one moves on, the loss is deep. Not only do you lose a valued employee, you lose the daily contact with a close friend. That was the case with me.
I love my work. I choose this life, fully and completely and sometimes I forget that the people that work with me work in my shadow. I am often startled when someone makes a decision to do something else. After all, I’m doing this because I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more.
This loss was magnified because she was there from the beginning. She was the one that helped me birth the business. There were aspects that I thought of as more hers than mine. I knew she was unhappy; I knew she needed and wanted so much more in her life. Still, I was surprised when she announced it was time to go. I was a little lost without her. It took awhile to adjust, and even today two years later, I find holes that have remained unfilled.
There will never be someone who has been with me all along. I am now the only common denominator in this business. There is strength in that fact, strength and sometimes loneliness. I have had to become stronger without her. I have had to trust myself and life little more.
Tonight, I sat in the audience and witnessed one part of her new life. I found myself smiling the whole evening. What I saw was all the strength, all the brilliance I remember working with, only bigger, stronger, happier, freer. I watched and felt the audience fall in love with her. She was in the spotlight this time, not the shadow. This was where she belonged.
My heart full, I creep up the interstate, reflecting on all the wonderful things that have come from both of us letting go.
Having a vision for your retirement lifestyle is a beautiful thing. It makes your dreams feel more concrete and obtainable. It gives you focus, direction and a barometer upon which to make your decisions for your future. With a vision, you live with intention and purpose because you know where you are going when you retire. Without the direction of a clear vision for guidance, it is unlikely you will feel fulfilled because you will not base your decisions on what you want and where you are headed, but instead you will base them on circumstances of the moment.
Try creating a vision of what you want your retirement years to look like in each area of life, and picture it in your mind every day. Then create your plan to get there, take action with a resolve not to quit, and watch what happens. Even the smallest steps will lead you to your retirement goals.
One effective tool for creating your retirement lifestyle vision is mind mapping. Mind mapping is a popular method for capturing your ideas and organizing them in a meaningful visual diagram. Unlike list-making, the visual diagram of mind mapping allows you to make spatial associations among your ideas and gives you a more holistic view of each aspect of your retirement lifestyle.
1. Write your main idea in the center of a sheet of paper and draw a circle around it. It is helpful to use a color you relate to this main idea to help your brain associate with it.
2. As you reflect on your main idea, you will think of sub-ideas. Write each one down somewhere on the sheet of paper and draw circle around it in another color. Then, draw a line back to the main idea in the center.
3. Additional ideas may come up that relate to your sub-ideas. Write these down near your corresponding sub-ideas and draw circles around each of them in the same color as the related sub-idea. Then, draw a line back to each related sub-idea.
4. Take time to view your retirement lifestyle mind map to see what it reveals to you.
I use mind mapping to help me sort out and organize all of my thoughts related to a specific project. I created a mind map of all of the activities that were involved in completing my certification as a retirement coach. My mind map gave me an overview, as well as the details, of my program and helped me to see what it would take for me to accomplish my goal of becoming a retirement coach at www.welcomingretirement.com
For those who are technically inclined, there are a number of free and inexpensive software programs available in the Internet. Search under the heading mind mapping technology.
Janice Williams, Retirement Coach, www.welcomingretirement.com
Serviceable folding chair, “check”; bag of cheese powder Cheetos and beef jerky sticks, “check”; cooler a.k.a. footrest, of cold drinks, “check” ; the family crest identifying tethered red balloon, “check”; the predawn run to Main Street to save OUR spot on the curb has begun.
“For what?” you may ask. “To see the parade pass by.”
I have thought of this metaphor often, coming to the seemingly simple question of, “Who sees more, the one sitting still, actively watching or the one blindly marching closely behind the uniform row before?”
Now I should let you know that I have been in both places, a sitter and a marcher. In my youth I did the high school, ride the victory bell around the track, all the way to being the chief ”Float Flower Putter Backer” at the mile after mile Rose Parade in Pasadena. As I have matured, however, I’ve been more of the orange fingered, face stuffing, “just sit there and hold our spot,” type of guy.
But…back to my question of, “Who sees more?”
As a Real Estate Broker, I hold “Open Houses.” In a way, creating my own parade, in which I’m the sitter. Got my folding chair, bag of goodies, cool drink and a red identifying tethered balloon or two. Now the parade starts as people start to wander in but, here’s the part I find most amazing. Unlike our parade down Main Street, my parade comes from all over the world.
I have had the opportunity to meet, come to know and work with people from 5 of world’s continents. Over 70% of the 50 states of America and all of the top ten cities of the world. Just by sitting still in my chair, waiting for the parade to go by. There’s no way I could have got to know all those people by marching all over the world blindly in group tours. Not to even mention the cost and the packing.
So what’s my point? Only this, “To be available.” Sit down, be still, put up your red balloon of welcome. Be available, look people in the eye, smile, say good morning to those you meet. Don’t be the one caught up in riding on your very own parade float with only the chosen few of your own little world to interact and ride with. Being so busy, putting the decorations back on as they fall off to be available to experience the world you’re motoring through missing out on amazing opportunities.
It’s come to the point that I look forward to setting my sign out down at the corner with my red balloon and then to hurry back to my folding chair, tear open my bag of cheetos and wait to see what great spot on this planet I’m going to be introduce to that day. It’s all about just being available to the parade passing by 24/7.
P.S. One of the people I have met, a South African, told me the following story. In her country she had always kept a pot of tea ready for those who might stop by during the day to visit. When she moved into her new home in Seattle, she got her pot out and warmed it up. After a month or so she called me wanting to know what she was doing wrong, for not one person had stopped by…..and she is such an amazing woman with the greatest stories of her life growing up half black, half white, in the racially torn country of her birth.
I’m just saying be available as the parade passes by your door, engage.
This post explores one easy way to hardened a WordPress site from possible exploitation.
In order to make changes to a WordPress site, a user must first be able to log into the site. Without the ability to login, no changes can be made to the site.
Why there is a vulnerability
Currently, out of the box, WordPress has no limitations on the number of password attempts allowed to login to a site. You may think, “big whoopee, who is going to take the time to type in all those different password attempts?”
Well, the answer is no one in their right mind would do that. Hackers/crackers are, fortunately, in the right mind. Unfortunately, not to be political or anything, they are in their far right mind.
If they are trying to get into your site, they are not going to type in a bunch of passwords and hope one matches, they are going to automate the process. They are going to run a program that will likely be able to try 10’s to 100’s of attempts a second. If they find a password that works, Bingo! they’re in. They can now make changes to your site.
Theory to beat this vulnerability
What if there would be a way to limit the number of attempts? After so many attempts from a certain computer, that computer would be locked out from making more attempts. This would foil automated attacks on your site.
From Theory to Practice-Limit Login Attempts Plugin
The WordPress Plugin, Limit Login Attempts, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/, will carry out such limitations. Limit Login Attempts does among the following:
A Look at Settings for Limit Login Attempts Plugin
This is setting screen for the Limit Login Attempts Plugin. Its can be found in Settings Tool in the Dashboard when logged in as an administrator. Here is what it looks like.
I am going to run down the different options and offer my suggestions.
Total Lockouts- This keeps a watch on the total number of lockout since the last refresh. Clear this at any time.
Lockout
Allowed retries- This is the most important and least important field at the same time. As long as there is a value here, this site will no longer be easy to hack/crack. For that reason, automated attacks will stop. They will move onto easier targets. I would suggest a value less than five. I am a horrible keyboarder and still I can make my fingers crawl on the keyboard well enough to get my password by the third time. Additionally, on the first lock, the user will only be locked out for a short period of time.
Minutes Lockout- This is the length of time for a lockout if the allow retries are exceed for the first time. The default here is great enough to frustrate crackers but not great enough to frustrate a user in the rare cases where a they did not type in there password correctly.
___ lockouts increase lockout time to ____ hours- This is the teeth of the plugin. This is what will stop hackers/crackers. When a hacker/cracker is locked out for the long period of time, They know their automated attack is a waste of time. They will be off to easier targets. The default values here are good values.
Hours until retries are reset- Again, this field as little significance. It is the count of the lockout failures. In this example it is four. The important thing is a hacker/cracker isn’t going to try three times, wait x hours and try again. They will be long gone finding easier targets. I would make this as large as the hours lockout in the previous line.
Site Connection- If you do not know what a reverse proxy is, select the Direct connection radio button. If you know what a reverse proxy is and your site is behind a reverse proxy, select the From behind a Reserve Proxy radio button. This would be a relatively geeky setting.
Handle Cookie Logins- Many times, a user, who has recently visited their site, re-enters without needing to re-enter their password. This is because there is a cookie, a small bit of text on the users machine that is put there by the website. When the user returns, the website uses this cookie as a form of validation and the user can re-enter the site without a password.
Make sure to select the Yes Radio button here. Otherwise a hacker/cracker could automate the process of trying different cookies, hoping to get lucky. They have about a one in 4 billion chance. :^)
Notify on Lockout
Log IP-This will keep a log of failed login attempts. It is informational and not to important. I’m a geek, so I would have this on.
Email to admin after ____ lockouts- The default value of 4 is fine, here. Again, being a geek, I would want to have this option checked so I could snicker at people who tried to hack/crack my site.
If you made changes to any of the settings, don’t forget to click the Change Options Button. This will save the changes.
Finally, there is the Clear Log Button. Sometimes log files can get big and unwieldy. For this plugin, this would only be the case if you had thousands and thousands of failed attempts. Still it would be worth while to clear this log as part of a quarterly cleaning
In closing, out of the box, a WordPress site is open to the potential of automated attacks to try and figure out passwords on a WordPress site. The Limit Login Attempts Plugin will close down this vulnerability. Using this plugin, is one step a WordPress site admin can take to further harden their site.
“Fictional characters like Professor Kingsfield of The Paper Chasehave contributed to an image of the quintessential law school professor who puts a student in the “hot seat” and delves into what seems like an intimidating and almost torturous line of inquiry. This pedagogical technique is commonly known as the Socratic method: one of the defining characteristics of the American legal education system, almost universally used during the first year of law school.” ****
Have you heard of the Socratic method? Did you ever watch the movie or TV show “Paper Chase”? Why would anyone subject themselves to this kind of harassment, humiliation and embarrassment?
Ms Quirk, What did you think of the ruling in this case? Really? Is that what you think? Class? Do you agree with her?
Terror, sheer terror. Fear of humiliation – why am I here? What makes me think I can do this. I am going to flunk out. I don’t belong here. My classmates are all smarter. One element of the Socratic Method is to prove your ignorance. Leaving you open for learning — I guess.
This is the study of law. I love it. Notice I said the study of law. Not the practice of law. The two have no relationship whatsoever.
When did I become so enamored of this study based upon such arcane principles started by some old dead guy of long ago who got poisoned for his actions? Socrates! Many a law student has used his name as a curse.
It started for me many years ago with the case of Helen Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad. I will give you the details of the case later but first let me tell you how I came to know Mrs. Palsgraf.
In the late 60’s I was a young bride married to a military officer who decided to go to law school I went from wearing hats and white gloves to meetings of the Officers Wives Club to a little more casual attire of the Law Wives Club. The law wives club, of course, was a supportive group (there were no “law husbands”) of women mainly to help us be supportive of our poor husbands suffering the grinds of law school.
At one of the meetings we welcomed the torts professor, Professor Peck. Torts we learned deals with a civil wrong resulting in a lawsuit. Along with Contracts and Constitutional Law it is a core subject. Professor Peck wanted to give us a sample of an actual law school tort class – along with a demonstration of the Socratic Method. So he told us the story of Mrs. Palsgraf and her ride on the Long Island Railroad. He took us through the torture of the questioning method. How should the court rule? Do you agree with Judge Cardozo or Judge Andrews? Really, Mrs. Quirk? Is that what you really think? Ladies, do you agree with Mrs. Quirk? Etc. etc. He took us through the torture and humiliation of the Socratic Method.
I loved it! I was hooked and knew someday I would study law.
And I did – some 25 years later I found myself in first year law school torts class.
“When do we get to Mrs. Palsgraf?”
“Soon Ms. Quirk, soon.”
Ahh, the day came. Even after 25 years I remembered the facts and that clock on the platform that injured poor Mrs. Palsgraf. But now came the terror.
“Do you agree with the majority opinion of Justice Cardozo or the dissent of Justice Andrews?”
Uh, um. Let me think.
This is a lot more complicated than I thought. I found that Palsgraf is a seminal case on how far we draw the line in negligence and proximate cause.
See, I was learning real lawyer words now.
As grades came out, I tied for first place in that first year torts class. And the rest, as they say, is history. I continue to learn the STUDY of law. Perhaps you will become motivated also by hearing about Mrs. Palsgraf and you too will want to STUDY law.
So here we go.
In the 1920’s Helen Palsgraf (little is actually known about her) was on her way to Rockaway, perhaps to take her daughter to the beach. She was quietly sitting on a bench on the platform waiting for her train. At the same time, a conductor was hurrying some passengers unto a departing train. He gave one of them a push to speed things up and the passenger dropped a package he was carrying. It happens that the package contained fireworks. (Little is known about the passenger and why he was carrying fireworks. Anarchist? Probably some Italians on their way to a celebration) the fireworks exploded causing a large scale to become dislodged off the wall, injuring Mrs. Palsgraf.
Question: Is the Long Island Railroad liable to Mrs. Palsgraf and should they pay for her injuries?
Now here is where we separate the engineers and the scientists from the legal scholars. If you are thinking about how the scales were bolted on the wall or what made the fireworks go off or even who the fireworks carrier was, you are missing the point. The point is:
Did the Long Island Railroad owe a duty of care to Mrs. P? And did they breach that duty? I.e. were they negligent by way of their employee the conductor?
A tort requires three factors: Duty, negligence, injury. There is no question that Mrs. P was injured and few would argue that the RR has a duty of care to its passengers. But should they be responsible for paying for Mrs. P’s injuries?
Here is where we would have the famous Socratic discussion that would last a couple of hours.
Are you bored yet? Exited? Curious?
The court split in its decision and the debate continues today. Speaking for the majority, Justice Cardozo went into a long discussion about foreseeability. Was it foreseeable that a passenger would be carrying dynamite? Is it foreseeable that an explosion could cause the scale to land on someone?
After pages and pages of discussion, Justice Cardozo went for a pragmatic answer that was basically “We have to draw a line somewhere”. In his dissent, Justice Andrews railed against drawing a line and said if there was negligence, then all results of the negligence should be included. Thus giving way to the argument of proximate cause: never mind the butterfly effect – which would mean a line was never drawn.
Interested? Excited? You too might want to engage in the study of law.
Now you know how Mrs. Palsgraf and the Long Island Railroad started me on the lifetime path of studying law.
But I don’t get into too many Socratic discussions anymore.
To Read the case yourself: http://www.courts.state.ny.us/history/cases/palsgraf_lirr.htm
“Anyone find a wallet? I give you a reward.”
The panic in his voice overwhelms me. I turn around to see a middle aged man, in worn clothing frantically walking around the store bellowing out “Anyone find a wallet? I give you a reward.”
I am at the Downtown Goodwill Store. I like to shop thrift stores, and this one is huge. I’ve been having fun just looking at all the stuff I don’t need to take home. Now, I am unsettled. I check my purse just to make sure my wallet is still safely inside. I have lost my purse before. I know the strange sense of loss that runs through you when you lose an object that you count on. My wallet is safe, and I feel momentary relief.
I attempt to continue shopping; he continues to wander the store begging someone to find his wallet. He is still in the store when I get ready to leave, long after I would have stayed had I lost my wallet. I would have been running home to call in all the lost credit cards and get the replacements ordered. It would have been a huge hassle for me. All it would have been was a hassle; I would have been fine.
His voice indicated that he didn’t think he would be fine. The panic in his voice made me wonder what he’d lost. How much cash did he have in that wallet? Was this his rent money, his food money, his bus pass to get home? Were there pictures of his children that he rarely gets to see? He hovered around the store, long after any real hope of finding the wallet had passed; his mind could not grasp the magnitude of his loss. He just kept repeating “Anyone find a wallet? I give you a reward.”
My mind raced through all the possible reasons for what I perceived as panic in his voice. I’ll never know what the real story is. I didn’t stop to ask. I saw myself as helpless in this situation. What could I do, really? I paid for the items I’d found and fled to the comfort and safety of my car.
As I think back, it would have been so easy to help him. I could have responded to his calls letting him know I was keeping my eyes open for his wallet. I was keeping my eyes open. I could have asked him what he’d lost. I could have offered him a little money, at least enough to take a bus home. I could have let him know that I cared that he’d lost something valuable. Who knows, my gesture might have opened up other people that would also have helped. Maybe, within that store there were enough of us that we could have helped ease his burden just enough.
Change happens in this world when we get out of our own way, when we follow the instinct to reach out to others. I wonder what opportunity for change I missed that day.
It was a warm spring day, my freshman year in high school. The bus was filled with teenagers and carnations. We’d had a fundraiser at school where you could send a carnation to friend. These carnations were our proof that we had friends. The more carnations you had, the more popular you were. Maybe it was the other way around.
There was laughing and yelling and flirting. All the things you expect on a high school bus. Other than the carnations, it was a typical bus ride home.
At the first stop, the bus driver stood up. This usually meant we’d been being a little too loud. We waited to see who it was that was in trouble. Fred, our driver, was a nice old guy. He was fair, and he’d been driving most of us since elementary school, and we didn’t pay him a whole lot of attention. Fred was just part of your day. He was the first adult outside your home to greet you each morning, the guy who drove you home and wouldn’t let you get off at the wrong stop. We were rarely in trouble with Fred. When he did stand up, we listened. He had a quiet command of the bus.
Fred started to talk with us. He said it was going to be his last day driving us. Silence swept through the bus, we were not expecting this. Then, he started to cry. His cancer had come back and the doctor told him he had to stop driving. None of us had known he had cancer. If we had, our teenage minds probably would not have really thought much about it. But, here was this guy that we were just used to, that we liked, crying.
Then, he sat down and opened the door. The first group of kids started to get off the bus. At the head of the group was probably the toughest guy on the bus. He clasped Fred on the shoulder then dropped his carnation in the metal basket on the dashboard. The next kid dropped their carnation in the basket. My bus stop was the last stop; I was one of the last to get off the bus that day. Every carnation went in the basket. Not one kid failed to do this. It was our teenage way of telling Fred we loved him. It was our way of saying goodbye.
I’d never seen my peers give an adult such deep respect. Fred had touched every one of us. His quiet steady love had transported us much further than just to and from school. We never saw or heard about Fred again. I don’t remember the bus driver that replaced him. When someone says “bus driver”, I picture Fred. I plant carnations in my garden, they remind me of that bus ride and of the power love has over all of us.
Great leaders who have gone before us have told us that one of the secrets to their success is to start acting like a success before you are one. This advice also applies to thriving in your retirement lifestyle. Picture yourself, carry yourself, and talk to yourself as if you have already achieved the level of success you desire when you retire. Think about how you would act, what your retirement lifestyle would be like, what you would do with your time, the clothes you would wear, and the car you would drive. Think about these things often. Taste them, feel them, smell them and hear them. Experience them with your whole being again and again. You become what you think about. AND you become what you move toward. Start moving in the direction of who you want to be in your retirement lifestyle by acting as if you are already there.
One effective way to picture your lifestyle when you retire is to create a vision board of what thriving in the third phase of your life will look like.
Supplies you will need: several lifestyle magazines filled with pictures, scissors, glue and a large sheet of construction paper or similar surface.
1. Gather together several lifestyle magazines that are filled with pictures. They can be purchased at any store that has a large selection of magazines.
2. Create your intention for this vision board and write it down – ask yourself what you would like it to reveal to you about your retirement lifestyle.
3. Go through the magazines and cut or tear out any pictures that catch your attention. Do this quickly without taking time to analyze the pictures.
4. Spread out your collection of pictures on a large surface. Again, without analyzing the pictures, pick up the ones that appeal to you in an instant and set them aside in a separate stack.
5. Now, spread out the new stack of pictures. Examine them carefully to see what they mean to you, how they relate to each other, what story they tell about your retirement lifestyle.
6. Make your final selection of the pictures that create the most meaningful vision of your intention in step no.2.
7. Place this final selection of pictures on the construction paper in the most appealing arrangement. Glue the pictures in place.
8. Spend some time viewing your retirement vision board. What messages does it have for you right now? How does it support your intention? Write down your thoughts.
9. Display your vision board where you will see it every day.
10. Continue to journal any additional thoughts that come to you related to your vision board during the next several weeks.
Making vision boards with an intention in mind can be great fun and revealing. I used this process to create a vision board that illustrates what it means to me to thrive in the third phase of my life. And after viewing it for several days, the vision board triggered the core content for the process I lead my clients through in my retirement coaching practice at http://www.welcomingretirement.com
Janice Williams, Retirement Coach, www.welcomingretirement.com
It’s 11:45 AM. Do you know how many administrators are on your WordPress site?
Unfortunately, WordPress, at its base is a piece of software. Any piece of software has the potential for exploits. With WordPress exploits, nefarious people could be using your site to inflict evil on other people. A major case and point happened recently. The largest piece of malware to ever effect the Mac has happened in the last few months. This piece of malware got spread through WordPress sites that had been exploited.
If you ask me, exploits and keeping your site minimally exposed to hackers are the number one reasons to keep WordPress, Plugins, and Themes updated. Often these updated fix exploits. With these fixed exploits, this lowers the potential of a WordPress site getting hacked.
WordPress exploits are well known. Have any doubts? Check out this list. By not having the most up to date version of WordPress, a WordPress site is open to any exploit on this list targeted at that version of WordPress.
One of the most valuable hacks, at least as far as the bad guys are concerned, are exploits that allow them to add an administrative user. This exploit allows for a hackers to do just that thing. Notice, the version of WordPress effected by this exploit is 3.3.1, the second most recent version. Anyone not updated to the most recent version, 3.3.2 is potentially vulnerable to this exploit.
Step back and think about it a second. What would be the problem if someone unknown suddenly could administer another WordPress site, potentially yours? As an administrator, they could make what ever changes they wanted to the exploited site. They could add code, users, posts, comments, all at their free will. If they so desired they could even delete the exploited site! That wouldn’t buy them much, but it is a possibility. They would much rather have a site up and infected. Then they can continue to use the exploited site for whatever purpose they wanted.
Beyond the direct affect on the exploited site, there is an even larger potential problem, the site’s SEO. One thing web search engines do while crawling sites is look out for malware. I have and maybe you have too, clicked on a link in Google only to be warned that you are going to a site that may be infected with malware. That alone, would be a scary enough for potential customers.
Google’s search engine will also keep a watch on an infected site. The longer the infection lingers, the lower the rank the infected site will receive. Any ranking the infected site had built up with Google could soon be lost without a timely fix.
So, what can be done to protect a WordPress site? One of the easiest things that can be done is to keep a watch on the number of administrators on your site. If there are more administrators on your site than you expect, you could have been hit by an exploit. Thankfully, when logged on as an administrator, The User Panel will show the number of administrators. This panel shows three administrators; the expect amount, by the way.
If the Administrator count is larger than expected, click on the administrator link to show who the administrators are for the site. If the numbers of administrators are less than the count of administrators, that is a problem. There are obscure problems that can allow the count of administrators to not be reflected in the list. More likely than not, the rogue administrator has been hidden, A very easy thing to do. If you find yourself in this predicament, you will either (1) have to get your hands dirty with SQL or (2) find someone who will.
Unfortunately, WordPress sites are vulnerable to exploits. These exploits can be used to cause harm to people who unknowingly visit they exploited site and also damage the sites reputation. One basic way WordPress site owners can keep an eye on the integrity of their site, is to make sure there is not a sudden increase in the number of administrators. This is an obvious sign that a site has been hacked.
In closing,
It’s 1:45 PM. Do you know how many administrators are on your WordPress site?
