Pet Peeve

I'm not a big fan of having to create an account on a website in order to use it. I can understand why they ask people to register, but I don't have to like it.

So when I do finally succumb and create an account, I do expect a certain level of... proficiency. And to achieve this goal, they just have to manage one simple thing: DON'T SEND ME MY PASSWORD IN AN EMAIL. This is such a flagrant disregard for basic security that it's likely to make me blacklist the site altogether.

In this day and age, with identity theft such a common event, the lazy developer responsible for this atrocity should be run out of town. If you've implemented such a system and don't know why this is a bad idea, shame on you.

If you don't want to put the effort into designing something more secure, just take advantage of one of the single sign-on authentication schemes like OpenID or Facebook Connect.

Zap

After thinking about it for the past few years, I finally bit the bullet and had lasik performed on me yesterday at the Stanford Eye Laser Center.

Short version: 40 minutes of staring at a blinking red light, 4 hours of itchy/burning tears once the anesthetics wore off, a night's rest, and I currently have 20/20 in my right eye and 20/15 in my left. It'll take a few weeks for my vision to stabilize, so this may not be my final visual acuity numbers. I'm also seeing a bit of a halo around lights, which I hope will improve as my eyes recover from the surgery.

Poor Andrew... There won't be any eyeglasses for him to pull off anymore.

Kindle Double Whammy

I usually buy my books used (pre-loved? pre-read?), but every now and then I don't have the luxury and am forced to buy it new. That's pretty much what happened last week for when we got tired of waiting for a copy of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child to be available at the library.

What's prompting me to blog about this is that I have a Kindle. If I want both the hard copy and a digital copy for my Kindle, I have to pay for the book twice, and there's no way I'm doing that. With a CD, I can just buy the CD and rip it, and I'd be able to listen to it on whatever system I want. With a book, I don't have that option. I'd be willing to pay $1-2 more for the digital copy, but I don't see that being a choice any time in the near future.

As much as I like the Kindle, I don't see myself only buying digital copies of books. Especially since it would be in a proprietary format so I wouldn't even be able to read it on anything other than a Kindle. What happens if I break it? The idea of having to shell out hundreds for a replacement Kindle before I can read those books again just makes me cringe.

I hope that as the number of people using e-readers increases, these issues will be worked out. I'm hoping the publishers are willing to work out some sort of deal for those who'd like a hard copy and a digital copy of the same work. But I'm not holding my breath...