Une lettre à ma femme

C'était par un bel après-midi d'automne que moi, assis sur mon lieu de travail, j'avais vu ma vie transformée alors que j'aperçu une porte daquele sort une femme entourée d'une étrange aura. J'ai tout de suite appris qu'elle était la personne qui pouvait changer la voie que ma vie avait prise. Le prochain matin, á mon réveil tout cela ne sembla qu'une illusion, puisqu'il j'étais au travail à nouveau et je fut m'occuper de mes tâches professionnelles. C'était à ce moment-là que j'ai noté une présence un peu trop familière. La créature de rêve aux proportions parfaites m'a fait percevoir la ressemblance avec la femme que j'avais vue la veille. Mes soupçons ne se dissipèrent pas avec le temps, puisque dès la fin de ce jour de travail j'ai constaté que il fallut approcher cette femme mystérieuse qui était en train de sortir du travail. Une fois timide et doux, j'ai finalement trouvé mon courage pour faire l'approche et dire la vérité à elle. J'avais pendant un longtemps tenté d'oublier mes limitations en me noyant dans la rêverie. Néanmoins, le jour où je l'ai recontré finit pour boulerverser cet état de choses en me faisant mûrir et grandir. J'apprendra à dévélopper mes compétences professionnelles et académiques en mettant un terme à ces complexes. Ce processus avait aussi pour effet améliorer mon niveau scolaire aussi que mes rapports avec mes amis. Sans elle, rien n'aurait pu arriver. Aussi naive que gentille et intelligente, elle va tout faire m'aider et m'aimer, allant jusqu'à se marier avec moi et découvrir mes motivations et m'aider à remporter des importantes victoires en m'aident avec sa beauté et soutien. Pour cette femme, je suis infiniment reconaissant.

it is possible to risk little and win big in this world

Possible, but highly unlikely. Look at small business, for example. The number one reason for failure is the lack of capital during those first few years. More capital = more risk, yet more capital (and thusly, more risk) is necessary to have a shot at succeeding.

One way to minimise risk is sweat equity: The more work you do yourself, the more risk you can alleviate. Taking out a business loan to hire app developers for software can be negated if one were good enough at programming themselves, for example.

Another way is to have money set aside specifically for the risk being taken. We're talking money that you could lose without losing sleep. It's a tough one, but it's possible.

has human technology outpaced cultural development?

I think there are places on the earth where it has, and places where it hasn't.  And that where it has, it's largely got to do with the level of education of the people -- where the population is largely uneducated, there's often a fear of many kinds of technology, and apparently (though seemingly contradictory) more willingness to use it for harm rather than good.

Not that the more educated places always use technology for "good" -- the number of weapons we have that can seriously harm the planet show otherwise.  

Overall we're like young kids with new toys, and we're still figuring out what to do with a lot of them.  That's both wonderful and worrisome -- hopefully we'll all mature more together before we do real damage to ourselves.  But I don't think that knowing how to make advanced technology is inherently "bad" in any way, we just need more rational thinking about how best to use it, and less fear of the unknown holdovers pushing us in harmful directions.

my favourite fizzy drink brands

Below are my favourite fizzy drink brands. I've tasted a number of flavoured carbonated beverages over the years, but few have provided the exquisite experience of power, strength and character such as these, making for an event best enjoyed when drinking in small, delicate sips. And with the appropriate palate

Ting is a carbonated beverage popular in the Caribbean. It is flavoured with St. Kitt's or Jamaican grapefruit juice (from concentrate), and is both tart and sweet. It comes in a green glass bottle, or more rarely in a green and yellow can. Like Orangina, the beverage contains a small amount of sediment consisting of grapefruit juice pulp. Ting is produced under licence by Cott Beverages.

Doogh is a yogurt-based beverage popular in Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia. It is made by beating unflavoured yogurt until smooth, and then diluting with water to a consistency similar to whole milk. Salt (and sometimes pepper) is aded, and commonly dried mint is mixed in as well. Carbonation is achieved by letting it ferment. Doogh is generally served chilled or over ice.

Mitsuya Cider is a Japanese carbonated drink created in 1884 and now produced by Asahi Soft Drinks. Its basic flavour is somewhat similar to sprite but less sweet. Additional flavours also available include grape, lemon, mikan and white peach. On occasions, Mitsuya Cider releases its "White Cider" variation, which may come with its own alternate flavour: white cider with melon.

Mitsuya Cider used to be sold exclusively in ornately decorated metal bottles, but is now produced primarily in plastic. The vintage metal bottles are still available for nostalgic customers.

when the backslide creeps in

I'm not religious, but chose to observe Lent this year as the cleansing for which its practiced. I maintained. I could have been stronger, sharper, more disciplined. I stayed strong even after Lent was done but sadly about ten or so days after, I fell into one bad habit and a few days after that, gave myself *permission* to fold on another. Earlier last week I took stock of myself and said, "Wait, you can stop these bad habits. You just did it before." As such, I'm starting up again, though on one of the habits I still fall victim to, yet never curbed during Lent, I decided to nip that one in the bud, seeing as it's a far greater vice of mine and one I realised led to the other two.

It's going well so far. Beyond realising I don't need it, I'm finding I don't miss it. Before going down that rabbit hole, let alone knowing there was a rabbit hole at all, I had gone without it for years. Though it's not drug related, it might as well be.

eating out by oneself

So yesterday I'm minding my lunch at my daily diner

Eating alone in a restaurant. Not everyone can do it. (obviously everyone can do it under circumstances where they are actually hungry and they have to eat and that's where the food is)

But to do it and enjoy being there, by yourself, is not something that most people are fond of. Such ordeal, such rite-of-passage, was featured in Sopranos Season 6, when Tony went out to Las Vegas. Tony was a little awkward but he "leaned in" and got his food.

Can you sit there in a restaurant by yourself and get a meal and not be awkward?

I used to do that not long ago, once in awhile in country style diners, in my younger, travelling years. It was a thing to do, like Jack Kerouac wrote about it and stuff. He would get big peach pies in Iowa. I don't think peaches grow locally there, but they probably do now, some varietals. (peach trees can be grown anywhere, they just won't yield.) Kerouac was awkward to the point of being paralysed with schizo anxiety. That's a basic fact of his bio, but it wasn't a selling point for his book, nor the cult of personality that (briefly) built up around him. There's a recent movie called On The Road I was going to watch but the trailer is unappealing. And it makes it look like they really miss, who those guys were. To call them tragic heroes is charitable.

In any case I am not comfortable sitting at a diner, among locals whom I don't know. Pre-covid, post-covid, now, whenever.

I took a trip with my father ten years ago (God bless his resting soul) to our own version of the Dirty South, and we stopped at this diner and I got the most excellent Southern fried meal — literally chicken fried steak — and I thought it was an authentic local diner "that we discovered" and I suppose it was, but it turned out to be something akin to Huddle House. Right. A couple years ago Huddle House was in the news for having one of their waitstaff murdered, on the job and in cold blood, and then - wait for it - not having the good grace to close for the remainder of the business day. Levels of insensitivity that shouldn't even be possible.

EAP-TSL

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication framework for network and internet connections. Providing the transport and usage of material and parameters generated by EAP methods, it only defines the information from the interface and the formats. Each protocol that uses EAP defines a way to encapsulate by the user EAP messages within that protocol's messages. Examples of standards that use EAP include WPA and WPA2.

EAP Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS), defined in RFC 5216, is an IETF open standard that uses the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, and is well-supported among wireless vendors. EAP-TLS is the original, standard wireless LAN EAP authentication protocol, which calls for both a client's and a server's certificate. Therefore it requires mutual authentication using client-side X.509 certificates without giving the option to disable the requirement.

The requirement for a client-side certificate, however unpopular it may be, is what gives EAP-TLS its authentication strength and illustrates the classic convenience vs. security trade-off. With a client-side certificate, a compromised password is not enough to break into EAP-TLS enabled systems because the intruder still needs to have the client-side certificate; indeed, a password is not even needed, as it is only used to encrypt the client-side certificate for storage. The highest security available is when the "private keys" of client-side certificate are housed in smart cards. This is because there is no way to steal a client-side certificate's corresponding private key from a smart card without stealing the card itself. It is more likely that the physical theft of a smart card would be noticed (and the smart card immediately revoked) than a (typical) password theft would be noticed. In addition, the private key on a smart card is typically encrypted using a PIN that only the owner of the smart card knows, minimizing its utility for a thief even before the card has been reported stolen and revoked.