Burzmali

I have mead fermenting in my basement right now. It helps that my step-dad owns an apiary, so I got the 22 pounds of honey for free. I hope you're patient. It can take months to completely ferment and some people say you should let it age for years before consuming. Mine has been going for two months now and it's almost ready for bottling. It's going to be something like 15% alcohol, so the wait is definitely worth it.

I always make an outline first. It's like getting a map to your destination before you set out on a trip. This usually takes about 30 minutes. I first set out all of the main ideas, like this if my essay was going to be titled "Demon's Souls: Harder Than Your Mom"

1. Intro
2. Game Description
3. Examples of Difficulty
4. Comparisons to Classic, Hard Games
5. Contrast with Current, Easier Games
6. Conclusion

After that, I go back and list the paragraphs under each point. Then I go back again and list the sentence subjects under each paragraph. At that point, I just need to use it to do the actual writing. I usually do the outline a couple of days before the deadline. Then the actual writing is done two days before. Finally, I go over the essay the night before, or morning of, the deadline and make any last corrections like proofreading or word choices.

The justification here is pretty simple: there isn't any legal way to play WoW without paying the subscription fee for it, but there is a legal way to play multiplatform online games without paying a subscription fee. On a related note, requiring users to pay for LIVE in order to use Netflix is complete bullshit. It costs Microsoft exactly $0 to allow players to use Netflix.

@BionicRadd said:

@Burzmali said:

I use an algorithm to generate a unique password for each site, based on something special about the site. This is the easiest, free way I've found to have unique, difficult to guess passwords for every site. As an example, you could do an algorithm like this (no, this isn't my algorithm):

1. Start the password with the last three characters of the website address, reversed, but change the each letter in some way based on something else you always have with you. For instance, look at the keyboard and change the first letter to the letter immediately to the left on the keyboard. Change the second to the letter or number that is up a row on the keyboard, and the third to the letter on the right. Wrap around the keyboard as necessary. In the case of Giant Bomb, this would be 'vkp'.

2. Add a constant string of letters that you capitalize based on some info about the website. Example: add 'car' and capitalize the letter closest to the first letter of the website name ('Car' for this site).

3. Add a certain number of repeating character pairs based on how you feel about some aspect of the website. e.g. If Giant Bomb is my second favorite video game site, then I have '@3@3@3' at the end.

The end result is the password vkpCar@3@3@3. Contrast that to my password for Yahoo, which would be i0jcaR3$3$3$. Ultimately, this means someone would have to get a couple of my passwords in order to figure out my login info for every site I visit. And even then, they'd have to put in some significant effort to figure out the algorithm, and they'd have to know my opinion of the site with relation to other similar sites.

It sounds complex, but you get used to it really quickly. I've been doing this since the Gawker hack and it took all of a couple days to get used to it.

I do something similar, but this post is extra entertaining in light of the XKCD strip above

The XKCD suggestion, with 25 characters, is harder to be worked out by a computer, but almost all websites have a limit of 20 or fewer characters (16 is the most common limit IIRC). Picking 4 random 4- or 5-letter words (or some other variation that adds up to 16 or 20) isn't nearly as difficult to work out by a computer, especially since it's susceptible to a dictionary attack.

Anyway, no password is completely safe, but the algorithm method incorporates more password security ideas while still being easy to remember and keeping safe the passwords used for other sites. It's pretty rare for a hacker to try to brute-force a password. Much more often, the person guesses a weak password, gets a password from a weaker site and assumes (often correctly) that their target uses that same password all over the place, or simply gets some accounts that were stolen in a mass crack like the PSN/Gawker/Steam attacks.

I use an algorithm to generate a unique password for each site, based on something special about the site. This is the easiest, free way I've found to have unique, difficult to guess passwords for every site. As an example, you could do an algorithm like this (no, this isn't my algorithm):

1. Start the password with the last three characters of the website address, reversed, but change the each letter in some way based on something else you always have with you. For instance, look at the keyboard and change the first letter to the letter immediately to the left on the keyboard. Change the second to the letter or number that is up a row on the keyboard, and the third to the letter on the right. Wrap around the keyboard as necessary. In the case of Giant Bomb, this would be 'vkp'.

2. Add a constant string of letters that you capitalize based on some info about the website. Example: add 'car' and capitalize the letter closest to the first letter of the website name ('Car' for this site).

3. Add a certain number of repeating character pairs based on how you feel about some aspect of the website. e.g. If Giant Bomb is my second favorite video game site, then I have '@3@3@3' at the end.

The end result is the password vkpCar@3@3@3. Contrast that to my password for Yahoo, which would be i0jcaR3$3$3$. Ultimately, this means someone would have to get a couple of my passwords in order to figure out my login info for every site I visit. And even then, they'd have to put in some significant effort to figure out the algorithm, and they'd have to know my opinion of the site with relation to other similar sites.

It sounds complex, but you get used to it really quickly. I've been doing this since the Gawker hack and it took all of a couple days to get used to it.

I've tried almost every kind of Dew that has been made, and everyone one of them, aside from the current base flavor, and they're all horrible. It was interesting to try Throwback and finally understand why Diet tastes so bad. They taste almost the same.

Magic for a couple of reasons.

1. The audience is older, so I can play in events without feeling creepy.

2. There are a lot more strategy options than Pokemon (don't know about Yugioh, but I'm assuming M:TG is more complex than that as well).

3. In my experience, the M:TG community is more extensive, which means there are more opportunities to play.

The potential downside to Magic is the cost. I may be wrong, but I think it's the most expensive of the three. However, you can play some decent and fun Magic with about $100 of initial investment and then another $40 (at most) every 3 months. What you do is take your initial $100 and buy playsets (4x of each card) of the commons and uncommons for the last few sets that have been released. These go for $40 or less on eBay, depending on the size of the set. Then you just keep buying a common/uncommon playset for each set as they're released (every 3 months). You can build some pretty fun decks with just commons and uncommons. And if you want some rares, you can get playsets of mediocre rares off of eBay for between $0.90 and $3.

Get Avast and run a boot-time sweep. That loads the virus checker before your operating system so it can sweep through all of your files without worrying about a file being in use and therefore untouchable. It will probably take forever, especially if you have a lot of temp files on your computer. So clear your internet and install temp files before you do it.

I used to donate plasma to the tune of $60 per week ($25 for the first visit, $35 for the second). Then one day they blew out the usual vein in my right arm and none of the ones in my left arm are worth anything. My arm hurt so bad that I couldn't bring myself to donate again. The money was nice while I was doing it, though, and the experience up until then wasn't unpleasant. I'd recommend that anyone needing extra money should at least give it a shot. Be sure to eat well and drink a lot of water beforehand, though. The process takes a lot longer if you aren't well-hydrated. My fastest time was 20 minutes, but once it took almost an hour.

@DerekDanahy said:

6 people would make me sit down and shut up. If it was one robber I'd try to take them down.