Show Me the Money!

Money, Money. It happened again this week. I woke up from a wild dream that I was the CEO of a major car company and Daffy Duck just walked in and handed me 17 billion dollars. Not only that, but I don’t even have to explain what I plan to do with it. The week before I dreamed I was a bank CEO and Bugs Bunny hopped into my office and dropped off a giant sack of cash and yelled, “have fun and let me know if you need more,” as he left. An unexpected windfall, or as it is sometimes referred to, found money is always a pleasant surprise. Remember the last time you reached in a pants pocket and pulled out a five spot? It brought a smile to your face.

Think back over the years. Were there insurance policies that faded from memory? Stocks or bonds that got misplaced. Water or utility deposits never collected when our residence changed? Bank accounts and safe deposit box contents left behind? Maybe even some un-cashed checks and wages? Have you considered that our erudite electronic savant may lead us to found money? Is it possible that our digitally demonstrative servant might offer us a way to prospect for treasures unknown? Is it possible some cold hard cash is only a few keystrokes away?

Money, Money. Hundreds of companies claim they will find, for a small fee, lots of money lying around just waiting for us to claim it. However, our government requires lost assets to be turned over to the states. All but nine of the states and even a few Canadian provinces have joined together to facilitate reuniting lost assets with their owners. To augment the states' ability to locate lost property owners, MissingMoney.com, a national database, was established in November 1999 and is the only database endorsed by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA). MissingMoney.com enables owners to perform comprehensive searches for lost assets.

X marks the spot. Let’s start this treasure hunt with a trip to missingmoney.com. There we will learn that this site is a jumping off place for a search in any state we live or lived in. The database maintained by NAUPA is updated monthly and the searches we perform are, hold on to your hats, FREE. (Free cash for FREE, Martha) Start your search by entering your name. Remember, less is more. If you put in John Q. Public then the search will be for exactly that. But maybe your lost assets were made out to J. Q. Public. That will not show up unless you type it exactly that way. So start with just Public. Now every lost asset for any first name, initial or middle name Public will turn up in the results.

If your name appears with a lost asset it will display the name of the state holding the asset and the company or agency that reported the asset to the state. Click on your name, and it will take you to the state website where the real work begins. Every state has a form to fill out and you must be able to prove you are the person the asset belongs to. Dealing with the states in general can take months nevertheless the outcome may well be worth it. One person I talked to about their experience indicated it took almost nine months to work through the red tape, provide the documentation required and then just waiting for the wheels of government to turn. But, they got a check for twelve hundred dollars from some assets lost in the late 1950’s. Another friend reported that he received $400 representing a forgotten utility deposit.

Searching for hidden assets is fun too. (Unless there isn’t anything for me.) Still after spending some time searching for yourself, you will be tempted to plug in the name of your brother or sister, mom, dad, acquaintances and so on. My son is on his grandmothers favorite grandson list now because he happened to find her name on the list. He emailed her and she got a little cash out of it. Tell your family and friends about this site. Somebody’s experts, estimate 1 in every 8 people in the U.S. have missing money.

Money, Money. Maybe dreams can come true.

More helpful hints and ideas can be found in Grumbles From The Keyboard. And, if you like to eat while reading check out Epicuria: Adventures that really Cook!

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

It’s Christmas Time in the City!

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Christmas cards must go, oh what fun it is to address each and every one, OH. Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, there’s got to be a way, to address all those cards and mail them on their way.

It’s that time again. Time to find the Christmas cards, sign them, stuff them in the envelopes and put the address and stamp on each and every one. What’s that? You’re sending electronic email Christmas cards this year? Emily Post says, “…Your great aunt Sara, who cherishes your handwritten notes, may still prefer a traditional card. Others, too, might rather have a traditional paper greeting.” Personally, I prefer a traditional Christmas card. Something I can set on the buffet table, pick up and know that this person considered me important enough choose or make a card, write a short note or simply sign, place in an envelope and spend fourty five cents to send a three dimensional greeting. There is something elegant and sophisticated about traditional social graces. An email card makes me one of untold many in your email address book, superficial and one dimensional.

However, personal graciousness and stylish behavior doesn’t have to be tedious and overwhelming. We can turn to our trusty computer companion to help us complete this task of a time honored ritual. One of the ways we can shorten our time devoted to our family and friends is to use software to prepare mailing labels or for more sophisticated users we can use a mail merge. (Martha, we could leave your sister off the list.) Let’s take a look at some tools that might help us complete our tasks and once done, give us a leg up on next year.

First, we can look at address labels. Many stores carry precut labels in standard sizes for envelopes that come on 8 ½ by 11 inch sheets for your printer. They will have a number that will tell your computer what type of size and format is needed to use these labels. For example the most common address label seems to be Avery 5160. Many other brands will tell you on the packaging that they are equivalent to Avery such and such. Decide which size is needed and purchase them.

Many PCs are shipped with MS Works installed as a basic office suite containing a word processor, database, spreadsheet etc. If you have this on your PC, the MS Works Task Launcher has a very simple wizard that will walk you through creating a page of labels that fit the labels you purchased. Here again, there are two choices. We can simply tell the wizard to create a page of blank labels and then we can type in the names and addresses in each label. When completed, save it to the computer and then next year we can simply pull up this file, make whatever changes are needed and print another set of labels.

We can also use the wizard to make the labels but instead of typing in all the names and addresses, we can tell it to pull the names and addresses from our address book or a database file of names and addresses. This is called a mail merge. Once this is done we can save this as well and next year simply pull up the file and print the labels again. This does require that we keep our address book up to date. Other programs such as WordPerfect have a similar function and can also be used to create labels.

If you have MS Word on your computer then you can also go to http://office.microsoft.com/ and click on Templates and then search for Christmas Labels. There is an entire collection of labels there that fit most of the common size Avery labels. Simply download the template and create some festive labels.

What’s that? You don’t have any of these programs on the PC? Go to www.avery.com, click on the software tab and download Avery Design and Print Online. (FREE) This program can create many different labels, supplying a template for different pictures, borders etc for your label. It’s web based so almost any PC can use it.

Finally, for those of us that torment our friends and relatives with a nefarious Christmas letter, using the mail merge feature will allow us to write a Christmas letter, but merge the letter with an address book. This allows the author to write one letter, but each time it prints it pulls a different name from the address book. I did this one year and while each letter was the same, it would start out with Dear “first name” and then as the letter progressed; each family would find that I mentioned them by name while referring to some interesting tidbit. It appeared to each reader that I had typed a letter exclusively to the recipient.

Keep those cards and letters going, there’s only thirty days till Christmas.

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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

How did they Hack Uncle Joe’s email?

My mother used to say, “How many times do I have to tell you?” George Santayanna mused, “Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." We’ve talked about it before but events the last couple of weeks would seem to inspire a repeat. The word for the week is passwords. Why do we use passwords? Passwords are used to prevent unauthorized people from accessing data that could be used to harm us. Either financially or our reputations.

Consider this report by the Guardian, 61% of us use the same password for all of our secured accounts. Banks, brokerages, email accounts, music buying accounts etc. One password gives an intruder full rein over our lives. With that said, don’t feel that it is necessary to live in a constant state of fear. The Internet’s benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, especially when they can be mitigated by using a little common sense.

Here’s another little known fact. According to PCmagazine, the top ten passwords in the world are, password, 123456, qwerty, abc123, letmein, monkey, myspace1, password1, link182, (your first name). If your password is on that list it needs to be changed now. Hackers will look at your email address; this tells them what domain you belong to. For example, if your email is 123@aol.com then they know that you have an account at AOL and if they go to the AOL home page and type in your email in the sign in field, they are confident that a very high percentage of the time, one of the above passwords will get them into your account. Once in they can, as they did to a friend of mine, notify everyone in the address book that you are in desperate need of money and please send some to an address in Nigeria by wire transfer. Or they can send an email that touts some bogus website that supposedly you visited and were simply wowed.

Facebook and Linkedin are great social networking sites that allow us to keep our friends and family up to speed on our comings and going. But if someone guesses our password and accesses our social network site, all kinds of things, good, bad, true or not can be posted by someone with an agenda. Worse yet, if that nefarious character changes our password to a tough password that we can’t guess, it will take an extraordinary effort to even close the account much less wrestle it back to our control.

It’s probably not critical that we have strong passwords for low level accounts. Certain blogs or sites where we function under an avatar or screen name or sites like online newspapers where a breach would not bankrupt us, but when it comes to banks, insurance and bill paying sites STRONG needs to be our mantra. What makes up a strong password? First forget about dictionary words. Hackers have software programs that can try every word in the dictionary in a matter of minutes. Children’s names, birth dates, anniversary dates etc can all be tried in seconds. Here are some simple tips. Longer is better, random sequences, characters and numbers mixed in with some symbols like # or ^, increase the difficulty of cracking a password by magnitudes of order.

What’s your favorite phrase? Take out the spaces, leave out a word, throw in a few misspellings and the makings of a great password arise. Remember, just because a site says to create a password with a minimum of six characters, doesn’t mean that we have to stop at six. Try using our weight followed by a # sign and followed up with a misspelled word that means something to us like misteak. (Martha, that reminds me of dinner.)

According to Microsoft, it's not necessarily bad to write passwords down - a piece of paper is going to be much harder to hack for an internet crook than something stored on your computer or online, as long as it is adequately protected. Hide it, disguise it, put spaces in it and blend it in with other things. And don't write "My banking passwords" at the top of the page.

Not sure how secure your password is? Surf over to www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx where Microsoft provides an online password checker. Type in a password you use or are thinking of using and a progress bar appears to indicate the strength of the password. Try some of yours, you might be surprised.

Be safe out there.

Cure Constipation, put a copy of Grumbles From the Keyboard beside the commode for the morning constitutional!

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Want to cause constipation? Try the recipes in Epicuria: Adventures that Really Cook!

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734