45 Lessons of Life - by Regina Brett

Image by cleopatra69 via Flickr

Written By Regina Brett, 53 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me...
It is the most-requested column I've ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone...
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first pay check.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give it time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

A Tale of Two Restaurateurs - by Patty Mooney

Image via Wikipedia

Subtitle: If the Customer Is Wrong, Then You Don't Need My Business

Long ago, my husband and I used to frequent a local Vietnamese restaurant - the first one established in San Diego. It wasn't in the greatest location, but the cuisine was fantastic. Mark and I would go there once or twice every week. Then Long, the owner, decided to move his family and business into the ritzier section of town, and sold the place to another restaurateur.

With trepidation, Mark and I continued frequenting the restaurant, but the food and service began to decline until one evening, when we had invited four people to join us, I did not get served my Pho (noodle soup) until everyone else had finished eating. To say the least, I was quite upset and left there telling Mark that I never wanted to return and as far as I was concerned, that restaurant could just disappear. Within a few months, we passed by the place and noticed that it had been vacated.

I often wondered whether that eatery had imploded due to the energy of my wrath. But I'm sure it boiled down to the lack of good customer service.

Fast forward to a recent excursion to the Sonoma wine country where amazing restaurants abound. Our wine broker, Alan, took Mark and me to a Sonoma bistro called "The Girl and the Fig" where they serve "country food with a French passion." Alan often takes his clients to the local wine-country restaurants and brings his wines along so that clients can enjoy the food-wine pairing, and he can then sell his wines. He and his partner produce the Abstract wines which are quite good. You may have read Alan's piece that I published earlier this year called "Rocking the Vineyards of Sonoma."

Alan told us he had called ahead to make sure that he would be able to bring his own wines, and that the woman to whom he had spoken assured him that the corkage fee would be $10 per bottle. He had already shared two bottles of wine with us during our dinner and had opened the third so that it could breathe. Now this is when the owner, a guy named Michael, walked over, not to see how we were enjoying our meal, but to vilify Alan for having opened the third bottle, and then to chastise all of us about it. He grabbed up our wine glasses and would not allow Alan to pour that third bottle of wine. I felt as if my fingers had just been rapped with a ruler by a nun in a black habit.

And yet, when the bill arrived, there was a corkage fee of $15 per bottle (despite what the woman on the phone had told Alan) and the third bottle was included - even though the owner had not allowed us to consume it. Nobody likes conflict, and Alan was trying to entertain us, his visiting guests, sans any negativity. But what's right is right - right? So we told Michael that Alan had called prior to coming and was told the corkage fee would be $10. And a corkage fee of $10 is reasonable in these economic times, the three of us believed. If we had known that the rug would be yanked out from under our feet and we would be charged $45 for three bottles (one of which we didn't even drink), perhaps we might never have gone to that restaurant at all. Michael said, "Nobody here would have told you $10 per bottle." Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

In 1908 César Ritz (1850-1918), the celebrated French hotelier is credited with saying 'Le client n'a jamais tort' - 'The customer is never wrong'. "The customer is always right" is widely thought to have evolved from Ritz's quote. Hasn't everyone heard of the Ritz? The place is celebrated in song (Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz.") It's even a word in the dictionary - "We went to this really ritzy joint." And who has not eaten Ritz crackers?

I do not believe that The Girl & The Fig will enjoy a hundred plus years of notoriety as Ritz has. They may serve food with a French passion, but Ritz's concept of the customer never being wrong has not resonated with Michael the owner of The Girl & The Fig. It's not advised to go through the work and constant challenges of establishing and running a restaurant, only to piss your customers off.

I have waited a month since our little soiree to write this, so I feel dispassionate about it now, and am sharing it as a lesson to all of us.

There was one good thing that came out of it though. Alan, Mark and I coined an entirely new word which you, too, are free to use. "Douche-baggery" - as in, "What douche-baggery is this!" Or, "There seems to be a high level of douche-baggery afoot." It's vocabulary with a French passion. Use it, share it, and recognize it when you see it, because the customer is never wrong.

How to pick a password that's secure and easy to remember - By Chris Gaylord

Image by Zellaby via Flickr

Try to pick a lengthy string of characters that's easy to remember, but gibberish to others.

The man accused of one of the juicier hacking cases of the past few years is no Internet mastermind. On June 24, a French citizen who goes by the pseudonym "Hacker Croll" will face charges that he broke into Facebook pages, e-mail accounts, and the Twitter feeds of then-Sen. Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears, and other celebrities.

How did he break in? Police say that he's just a good guesser. By cruising through blogs and social-networking pages posted online by his victims, he allegedly dug up enough information to guess people's passwords and security questions.

This trick is pretty easy to pull off. Try combinations of family names, graduation dates, birthdays, favorite bands or sports teams -- all information that many of us share willingly online.

This isn't a call to scrub down your Face book profile until it's pointless. But Hacker Croll's story is the latest of many (often-ignored) reasons to improve your online passwords. But since doing so is such a nuisance, here's a simple, easy-to-remember way to craft secure passwords for all the websites that you visit.

Before we roll out the grand plan, let's walk through why most passwords stink.
First, do not use common words or patterns. The most frequent password on the Internet is "123456" -- nearly 1 in every 100 people uses it. It's simple, can be typed quickly, and is the first thing hackers will try. Throw in the next 4,999 most popular terms and they make up 20 percent of all passwords used online.

These numbers come from computer security firm Imperva in Redwood Shores, Calif. The company stumbled upon a list of 32 million passwords posted by a bragging hacker who had recently snatched the data from RockYou, which designs software for Facebook and MySpace.

This rare look into people's password habits showed how lax or at least unoriginal people can be, says Rob Rachwald, who helped write Imperva's report.

Hacker Croll's tactic works well when targeting specific people, but Mr. Rach wald says that most online thieves cast wide nets.

"It's not me trying to guess individual passwords," he says. "Hackers use so-called 'dictionaries,' " lists of common terms and phrases that a computer tries one after another until it finds a match.

Since 1 in 5 accounts draws from the same pool of 5,000 passwords, an automated program has pretty good odds -- especially since Imperva estimates that modern PCs can race through 110 tries each second.

That leads to the second rule: The longer a password, the better. Eight to 10 characters work best. Why? Even if you avoid common terms, some hackers could still attempt to "brute force" their way into your account. This means telling a computer to try every permutation that it can think of until it busts in. On average, a five-character password will last a couple of hours against such a barrage, according to John Pozadzides, CEO of software company iFusion Labs. Eight characters will hold up for centuries.

This also explains why sticking to lower-case letters is a bad idea. "Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk," Mr. Pozadzides says in his report, "would change the processing time for an eight-character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries." (While he calculates hacker speeds differently from Imperva, the scale is what's impressive.)

The solution? To pick a lengthy string that's easy to remember, but gibberish to others, think of a phrase. For example, Hamlet's line: "To be, or not to be: that is the question." Boil this down to an initialism: TbontbTitq. Now swap in some numbers and special characters: Maybe "2" instead of "to" and "?" to replace "question". (Zeroes make nice "O's" and "3" works as an "E".) You've now got 2bon2bTit? -- a 10-character chain with all the fixings.

Add another layer of security by extending it for each website. That way, if someone figures out one of your passwords, they don't gain access to all of your accounts. Attach Fk to your Facebook password or maybe Hm to Hotmail. Better yet, reverse the order of these additional letters to further obscure their meaning.