In this digital hi tech age there is one thing of vital importance and that is passwords! It doesn’t matter if you are using a laptop, a PC, an iPad, a smartphone or even your credit card, a password is vital but it is also something of a huge pain in the rear. Different passwords for different web sites; your PC, your iPad, your smartphone, your bank cards. How can you remember them all? Easy, use something simple: great idea! Actually, no, it’s a bad idea, very bad!
Looking on the internet, a little research reveals that one of the most popular passwords is Password. Yes, some people apparently think computer security is of such low importance that they use a password like that.
Come to think of it, one of the systems I use at work has a similar password, only they have replaced the ‘o’ with a zero. Pretty sneaky eh? Bound to deter those resourceful cyber thieves. Yes, my colleagues and I at the Trident Nuclear Launch Centre were pretty pleased with that one!
Here are some other passwords that you shouldn’t use
123456
Yes, don’t try this one at home.
1234567
Yes, even with the extra seven, it’s still a little weak!
ABC123
For Jackson Five fans only!
QWERTY
Yes, it’s right there on the keyboard in front of you. Good reminder if you forget it.
1234567890
Another variation of the 123456 theme.
Football
Using the name of your favourite sport –Good idea if you are a fan of Japanese underwater polo!
Monkey
This word comes up on a lot of lists of bad passwords, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps there are a lot of fans of the old badly dubbed Japanese TV series ‘Monkey’. People do use names of their favourite TV show though, perhaps that explains why I used to use Fireball XL5 until I became rather interested in . . . oops, nearly let the cat out of bag there!
One final password story to finish. This doesn’t concern the internet but years ago I got a job working for a cigarette vending company. It was a bit of a pain getting to work that first week because I didn’t have a car. The bus nearest to my home didn’t start early enough so I had to take a twenty minute hike further up the road to catch the earlier bus to Warrington and then catch another bus from Warrington to work. Towards the end of the week my manager asked how I was getting on and I replied OK, apart from the trek to work. “What,” he said. “Why didn’t you say? You might as well take one of the spare vans; they only get used when one of the newer ones breaks down.”
That night I drove home in my very ‘own’ small ford van. In order to start the van you had to insert the key then enter a number on the keypad on the dashboard. Security was the watchword my boss explained. Our vans carried cigarettes, cigars and cash from the cigarette machines. It was vital to protect our assets and profits.
To start the van you had to enter a code into the pad. It was a six figure number and my boss stressed I couldn’t share it with anyone and writing it down was frowned upon. Anyway, I memorised the number, started the van and set off.
All went well that first week but somehow, between Friday night and Monday morning I suffered an inexplicable memory loss. Time after time I entered what I thought was the number only to see code incorrect flash up on the dash.
Eventually I had to admit defeat and call my boss. He wasn’t happy and rather dismissively passed me over to one of the other drivers.
“Where are you now?” asked the driver.
“Sat in the cab” I answered meekly.
“Well pull the sun visor down and tell me what you see.”
I pulled down the visor and there, in ballpoint pen, despite our company code of ethics; protecting profits and assets and so on, someone had written the high security code.
It was 234561! A slight variation on the number one password from the list of all-time worst passwords!
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Zenith TTL
Olympus OM10
Digital
I spent a lot of time last week trolling through my book collection and photographing the books for last week’s post about 
Sadly, Lazenby listened to some poor advice which advised him that secret agent espionage films were on the way out: They weren’t, but it turned out Lazenby was. Sean Connery filled in for one more Bond film, Diamonds are Forever, until Moore took over on Live and Let Die.
The very first book I picked up about Marilyn Monroe was the biography by Fred Laurence Guiles. ‘Norma Jean, the life of Marilyn Monroe’. It’s a particularly well researched book and for a great many people, fans and writers alike, it has become the definitive biography of Marilyn, the place you go to find out all those facts and figures about her life, especially her early life. Her death is not really discussed in the same fashion as in later books, some of which are wholly devoted to the mystery of her passing. In my edition which I bought in the seventies, Bobby Kennedy is referred to only as ‘the easterner’ and it was only in later years that Bobby Kennedy and his brother, President John Kennedy became publically identified with Marilyn.
A slim volume appeared in 1964 called ‘The Strange Death of ‘Marilyn Monroe’. It was this book that kick started rumours of strange goings on in the hours leading up to 
Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed is a book I picked up quite recently. It is written by a British author, Michelle Morgan, and is similar to Fred Guiles book of Marilyn, very well researched but focusses on various people associated with Marilyn who have not been interviewed before. After reading this and other books, I get the impression that Marilyn compartmented her life, and those that were in one compartment, were not necessarily aware of people who were in the other ones.
Talking about J Edgar Hoover, here’s another book I picked up about Marilyn. This was a remainder book and concerns the information about Marilyn in Hoover’s FBI files. Marilyn: The FBI Files by Tim Coates. It’s an interesting addition to the many books about Marilyn with pages of FBI files concerning Marilyn, many of them redacted with various names and details blanked out.
Donald Wolfe wrote another book; ‘The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe’. I’ve not read this one yet, it’s one I’m saving for my holidays.
Finally, Fragments, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. When Marilyn died in 1962 she left all her possessions to her acting mentor and head of the Actors Studio in New York, Lee Strasberg. When he passed away Marilyn’s effects went to his daughter and now it seems many will be auctioned off. This book is a look at the letters and notes she made, fragments of poems and thoughts scribbled in notebooks, on hotel stationary and envelopes. Marilyn’s thoughts and written meanderings show her to be a thoughtful woman who cared about what she saw and heard. Marilyn was a great reader and left behind a large book collection, part of which is listed in this book. Click 
The first one involved a pedestrian who crossed the M6 motorway running lanes and was hit by a car. Police officers believed he had spent the afternoon and evening at a nearby race course, attended some evening festivities and for whatever reason, decided to walk across six lanes of motorway traffic. Initial reports were for a drunken pedestrian so I can only guess that the man was intoxicated and in that inebriated state made a foolish decision and was killed.
I suppose I must be a little bit naïve regarding politics because I thought the referendum about the EU had been and gone, was done and dusted and that was that. Before the results appeared, I thought the whole thing was pretty simple: either we would leave the EU or stay in it. Oh well, how wrong I was!
Stuart Sutcliffe.
Derek Taylor.
How easy, or hard, is it to write a weekly blog post? Well there is no straight answer to that. Sometimes I just seem to get a whole host of ideas and other times I struggle to find one. The important thing is to keep jotting those ideas down, the ones that come when you are feeling creative or just full of ideas, and use them on the days when you don’t seem to have anything new.
Take a look at the picture just below. Not a particularly outstanding picture I know but that house is the one where I grew up. I took the picture a while ago after a sort of nostalgic drive around the old neighbourhood. Yes, the house with the white door, thats my old home. It’s changed a bit since I lived there. The privet hedge has gone and the car space is new. One amazing thing I found out on that visit is that the walk to my old junior school, which seemed to be a heck of a walk as I remember it; surely at least a 30 minute walk, was actually more of a ten minute walk: Well, it was a long time since I walked to my junior school. I stopped in the road, took my picture, thought for a moment as a thousand memories crowded my mind…
Letters from an Unknown Author! 