It has been reported by few people that Ping is “dead”.
Apple’s hopes to create a “social” service met with rejection and indifference.

Nobody, but me, embraced the new service trying to see what is was and how far it would get. I created Ping account the first day when the service was announced last year. My Ping is no more. I deleted it without regret. Nobody read it, nobody cared to make any comments. My favorite artists and songs were nowhere to be found. Bye Ping.

I do not have Facebook or Twitter account. It makes no sense to go with the crowd. Twitter is popular because of one persons bet or joke. Facebook is fading out. What happened to popular in the past Myspace and AOL ? Nobody is there anymore.

Amazing Google doodle today was dedicated to Les Paul.
The strings could be strummed by running the mouse over it. The sound was stereo. Strings on the left side produced the sound in the left speaker and the ones on the right in the right speaker.

What is more amazing you could record your strumming by pressing the black rectangle in the middle. I am not a musician, but you can play my doodle recording here http://goo.gl/doodle/4EwZx

Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009) known as Les Paul—was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible. He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound), delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.

Les Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss outside Milwaukee, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to George and Evelyn (1888–1989) (née Stutz) Polsfus. His family was of German ancestry. Paul’s mother was related to the founders of Milwaukee’s Valentin Blatz Brewing Company and the makers of the Stutz automobile. His parents divorced when he was a child. The Prussia family name was first simplified by his mother to Polfuss before he took his stage name of Les Paul. He also used the nicknames Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.

I watched Steve at WWDC 2011 keynote announce that MobileMe did not work and is no more.

It did not go well with me because I just renewed my annual subscription on May 12, just over three weeks ago. Immediately I logged in to my account at cancelled the service for a full refund. Information on Apple web site about account canceling and refunds said that refunds will be processed within 40 days. My refund was posted to my credit card account in only three days.

I had MobileMe or .mac as it used to be called on the beginning for several years. My thinking was that since I do some Mac related work it would look good to have an email in the form of myname@mac.com and later as myname@me.com.

Nobody even noticed my attention to detail. I still believe that it looks better if you have email address at the domain of your area of work.

If you own a domain name and have a working web site (“working” is imperative) then you list your “www”.your_domain_name.com on your business card. Your contact email address better be your_name@your_domain_name.com because I look at it first and judge your knowledge of basic business sense on that.

Ask yourself, how would it look to the customer if you work for AT&T and have email like bite_me@verizon.com ?

Is this “1″ fake or what?

You have to be blind or naive if you can not see anything wrong when looking at the official version of President Obama Certificate of Live Birth.

Check the page at the link below to see it for yourself.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate

For your forensic pleasures you may be able to download it from the official government blog.
I found it at the direct link below.

http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

On YouTube there are plenty of videos demonstrating details of this blatant forgery.

The moral of the story is:
If you are exposed to public scrutiny and have something to hide, better hire top professionals in the trade who may be able to help you hide your secrets.

It would not be simpler to tell the truth?

Quoted from Epsilon web site.

IRVING, TEXAS – April 1, 2011 – On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset* of Epsilon clients’ customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system. The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only. A rigorous assessment determined that no other personal identifiable information associated with those names was at risk. A full investigation is currently underway.
For Media Inquiries please contact Jessica Simon (212-457-7135, jsimon@epsilon.com)For Consumer Inquiries please contact Sarah Branam (303-410-5369, sbranam@epsilon.com)
* Updated April 4, 2011: The affected clients are approximately 2 percent of total clients and are a subset of clients for which Epsilon provides email services.

This is tragic!
Am I being pessimistic? – No.

So far I received apologetic email from Chase, Barclays, Best Buy, College Board, Target. It is tragic because most people do not understand what has happened and what will be happening soon. An avalanche of phishing emails is going to flood your email box if you do not act now to protect yourself.

The best way to deal with it is to change email address on each account. Delete breached email address. Do not use it anywhere and anymore. Forget it ever existed.

Each breached account has to get new unique email address.
No two accounts can share same email address.
Do not use same user name.
Do not use same password.

I changed all of my accounts, breached or not, to use randomly generated user names and passwords. Each account also got spanking new randomly generated email. Why randomly generated? Because it is simpler and there is no thinking involved, no “playing with numbers” and letters. Account names, passwords and email have nothing in common with each other.

Below are two interesting quotes from big name businesses.

Quote from Chase Bank email received 4/04/2011.

As a reminder, we recommend that you:
Don’t give your Chase OnlineSM User ID or password in e-mail.
Don’t respond to e-mails that require you to enter personal information directly into the e-mail.
Don’t respond to e-mails threatening to close your account if you do not take the immediate action of providing personal information.
Don’t reply to e-mails asking you to send personal information.
Don’t use your e-mail address as a login ID or password.

Great advice, but not everybody is thinking the same way.

Here is quote from FPL email received 3/31/2011.

Subject: “FPL: Reminder, your User ID has changed”
“At FPL, we are committed to improving the service we provide to you. We hope switching your User ID to the email address you first provided when you created your online account will help you access your account more easily.”

More easily for who? hackers and spammers?
What are this people thinking?
Who came up with this possibly fatal idea?

Stay tuned for more fatalistic news.
Need help with email problems – let me know.
I have few solutions that have worked for me and my clients for more than 15 years.