My other superpower is that (some) difficult things come easy for me – and I compensate by making some easy things waaay too difficult. Long ago, when I’d drive seven hours from San Jose down to Pasadena to visit Eve in the days before maps on a smartphone, I’d always joke that I could find my way through Los Angeles highways to within three blocks of her apartment without a map, but then I’d drive in circles through those three blocks for an hour trying to figure out how to get to where exactly she lived.

…

BentRead More »

My superpower is that I’m a boring person. I pay off my credit cards before they’re due. I back up all of our computers and iPhones and iPads. I keep our cars up to date on routine maintenance. I have all our spare AAs and AAAs in one drawer and I go through and throw out the dead ones. I have a binder for warranties. I rotate mattresses. I have a label maker and I use it well.

Conversely, my anxiety is my Kryptonite. The kind of fears that run through my head in the middle of the night: I think my car hesitated when I started it the other day; is the battery dying? Is it the alternator? Will I end up stranded in the parking garage at the office when I just want to get home through rush hour, and then somebody will have to come get me and I’ll have to figure out how to get a tow truck into the garage and where to tow it to? I had the smoke alarms in the house replaced the other day; is a bug going to crawl into one of them and block the sensor and make the whole lot of them start screaming at me in the middle of the night and freaking out our pets? Did I remember to lock the front door before I left the house this morning? Did I remember to floss last night? I started the clothes dryer before I went to bed; is it safe to leave it unattended or is tonight the night it’s going to catch fire and set off the smoke alarms?

…

StuckRead More »

I posted a Life Pro Tip on Reddit:

Delete your web browser’s cookies once or twice a year.

It wipes out tracking data, so advertisers lose the profile they’ve built on you.

It also logs you out of all your web site accounts. When you log back in to them, you’ll find out right away if you don’t know your current password for a site, and then you can reset it. Better now than in an emergency!

(If you use a password manager like 1Password, logging in again is easy.)

The audience I had in mind were the kind of people who keep a PC for ten years and never delete cookies, and who write down their passwords in a notebook that they lost so having to log in to all their accounts again would be a traumatic experience.

It immediately spawned a lot of discussion. Paraphrased: “Lol, great advice for 2012, boomer. It’s useless to do this only once or twice a year. It’s useless to do it at all, because sites have moved on to using browser fingerprints. Use a plugin to autodelete your cookies after each session! Whitelist a few sites whose cookies you want to keep around for longer. Use an ad blocker! Use a VPN! Use Privacy Badger from EFF! Turn up your Firefox settings! Stop using Chrome! Use Pi-hole! Or if you don’t want to be tracked at all, stop using the Internet.”

Gatekeepers. Privacy maximalists who think if you don’t live like a cybersecurity lab tech, you don’t deserve to be online. Trolls and edgelords who just want to look cool. Ah, Reddit, you never disappoint.

My post was up for about half a day, it got almost five thousand upvotes, and then the moderators removed it.

I’m okay with that. It started some interesting discussions, it educated some people, and I learned a few things.