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Today’s Haiku Challenge Keyword: Lift

Carl Setzer 
the lift of music
reminding me who I am
on this summer's breeze

This is my response to today’s “Haiku Challenge” by Baffled.

These challenges inspire me, invigorating the creative within me.

This week has been rather intense. Last week, the first week of summer quarter, came with some issues. First, after enrolling for one math class without any direction for testing, it turns out I needed a placement test after all. Raced to get that done before the deadline where I would be auto-dropped from my class. It turns out, I need to go one class back. (I have studied calculus in the past, so remedial algebra stings a bit. It’s disappointing to have slipped so far. A lesson in humility, I guess. More importantly, this cost me about a week.

With this, in one of my other classes, I had significant technical issues, so I am somewhat behind in that class. At least by my definition of “behind”. This week I’ll finish my work right on the due date. I much prefer to be ahead.

These challenges easily fill my mind. When that happens, I lose track of who I am, and who I’m trying to be. One key thing that brings me back: music. Thus why my mind went there with today’s prompt.

I hope this post finds you well as summer progresses. May each of you find what you need as we end this week.

Great, Another Phishing Email Scam

Carl Setzer
scam alert letting text on black background

Well, a new scam landed in my inbox this morning. Check out the details:

Google docs phish email scam example

This isn’t terribly new. I first saw references last fall (here’s a piece by Wired Magazine from last November: “Beware a New Google Drive Scam Landing in Inboxes“. Now, this isn’t terribly sophisticated, but it’s pretty clever. Now, I don’t have a David Anderson in my contacts, so this one is pretty obvious for me. But that’s a rather common name. Imagine how tempting it would be if it looked like it came from my friend/colleague David.

So, what should you do if you get an email like this? Report it! In most email tools, you can report a message as spam. If you have Gmail, you can report it as phishing, too. It’s pretty straightforward.

Gmail report phishing steps

You’ll see a dialog like this one:

Gmail Report Phishing Dialog Box

Click “Report Phishing Message” and you’re done.

Anyway, this seems as good a time as any to remind everyone to:

  • don’t click on links you’re not expecting. In this case, if I knew a David Anderson, I’d ping him independently of this email thread and ask about it. Do not reply to the email!
  • Make sure you have good malware protection and antivirus software. Here’s a great place to start: PC Magazine’s list of The Best Antivirus Protection for 2021.

The Audacity of Audacity and Alternatives

Carl Setzer
AudacityLogo

When I logged onto Twitter today I saw the alarming news that “Audacity is now a Possible Spyware, Remove it ASAP“. The TLDR: Audacity’s new corporate owners updated their TOS a few days ago to allow them to collect/harvest user data (the article above has good detail about the issue…give it a read). Needless to say, a good many folks in the Open Source community are less than pleased. So, I’m here to try and pull together a definitive list of alternatives. Also, I have a long-standing interest in finding alternative programs to expensive and proprietary ones (ie: Adobe). Here’s my list of these to date.

In this list below, the only one I’ve personally used is Adobe Audition, so the rest are a collection of options that I don’t know anything about. Please use them with caution and a dose of due diligence.

Paid Alternatives (in no particular order):

Do you have any experience with these? Are there any ones you recommend that I’ve missed? Any of them you’d recommend over the others? Please leave a comment below.

Gazing to the west

Carl Setzer
To the west
gazing to the west
with the sun descending low
as the air's cooling

Looking to the west as I walk through this park. Sunlight drifts through the trees. Summer in the north bringing a steep angle to the light. Richly beautiful. To me, at least.