Do You Own Where Your Digital Files are Stored? What would happen if your Google docs disappeared? Or if the material on whatever online publishing platform you use (Medium, Substack, Ghost, etc.) goes away? Or if those accounts got shut down? Creating, sharing, and storing content in the cloud can be so easy. And [...]
Pretending you’re invisible can save your life At least two or three times a week, I see a local news story about a pedestrian getting hit by a car while crossing a street. They're either killed or seriously injured. Sometimes the driver stayed on the scene. Sometimes they left. But that’s not my [...]
A common social engineering trick can make you a victim of fraud When someone tells you that you look familiar, how do you respond? Because we want to be friendly and helpful, most of us will volunteer personal information as we try to figure out the connection. Doing that may put us at risk of [...]
Not long ago, I published a post about why you should check a website’s About page before you trust the information on the site. The post was inspired by information in Tim Carter’s Ask the Builder newsletter. You can read it here. Another one of my favorite newsletters is from Joe Cannon. He writes about [...]
How often do you check the About page of websites you visit? Perhaps the most common reason people visit websites is for advice and information. But how do you know if the advice is good and the information is accurate? One way is to read the About page. I check the About page on most [...]
Recently a friend asked if I’d ever heard of a particular pay-to-publish company that someone she knew was considering as a publisher for a book. I hadn’t, but I decided to see what I could find out. So I Googled two phrases: [company name] scam [company name] reviews In addition to the company’s website, I [...]
You Should Know the Number of Steps Do you have stairs in or around your home or workplace? For your safety, know the number of steps in each set of stairs. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, more than 1 million people per year are treated in emergency departments for stair-related injuries. You’ll [...]
What happens when your child’s school receives a bomb threat? Of course, the children are probably evacuated. But where do they go? When I was growing up, we had fire drills. Alarm bells would clang, and we would be led by our teachers to a designated place away from the building where we would stand [...]
Does your house of worship (church, synagogue, temple, mosque, etc.) need an armed guard to protect members from an active shooter? This excerpt from How to Survive an Active Shooter addresses some of the issues related to protecting houses of worship from possible attacks. It is geared primarily to organizations that do not have the budget [...]
You want to know as soon as possible if they’re safe, but why should you never try to call a loved one who is in an active shooter situation? Because that could get them killed. In news stories following the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, worried parents talked [...]
