Faulty Steel From China Halts Victoria Bridge Construction

China’s Jiangsu Zhongtai Steel Structure Co. Ltd. has been forced to halt fabrication of steel for Victoria’s new Johnson St. Bridge after inspections found it was not being built according to design specifications. This means the bridge opening will be pushed back to a least January, 2016 a delay of 5 months. Ami I surprised by this development? No, not really as the project has been beset with problems right from the start. Am I surprised to hear the steel is from China? Yes! Astonished, actually.

Conceptual drawing of the new bridge

The old “Blue Bridge”

Everyone involved is now blaming everyone else, of course, but the main liability appears to lie with PCL Constructors Westcoast who, as the main contractors, made the decision to have the steel fabricated in the Jiangsu province of China. I know almost nothing about steel fabrication but I know enough to realize that if I wanted a bridge to last for over 100 years as called for I wouldn’t have the steel made in China. That goes for dog food, kids toys and tires too!

The new bridge will be the largest single-leaf bascule bridge in Canada – and one of the largest in the world. The mayor of Victoria maintains that the city has a fixed price contract of $63.2 million to build the new bridge. Engineers, consultants and contractors are already clamoring for more money due to “unexpected” events and delays caused by others. My guess is that by the time all is said and done the cost of this fancy new bridge will exceed $100 million. 

Construction is well under way…but is now halted

I wrote about the trouble plagued process to replace the beloved old Johnson St. Bridge in my blog titled Victoria’s Iconic ‘Blue Bridge’ Is Toast way back on Nov. 25, 2010. At that time voters in the city went to the polls and voted by a margin of 61% to approve borrowing the money needed to replace the 86-year-old Johnson Street Bridge. I wonder what the vote would have been if it had been known the steel was coming from China?

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What Is The Yellowstone Super Volcano? It’s Kind Of Scary!

Yellowstone National Park is one of the destinations that pretty much every RVer we’ve ever met has either visited or it’s on their bucket list. We’ve been there just once and would love to go again. Ever wonder what makes those famous geysers erupt? Well, lurking beneath Yellowstone is a massive ocean of molten magma some six miles deep. That heat is responsible for Old Faithful and many of the park's other famous geysers and hot springs.

It’s actually a super volcano and it has erupted on occasion. Most of the eruptions have been small and the last one was some 70,000 years ago at Pitchstone Plateau. We must be overdue by now!

Super-eruptions are thousands of times more powerful than even the biggest eruptions we're used to. The chart above from USGS compares the Yellowstone super-eruptions with the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980. The difference is staggering. Mt. St. Helen’s, as bad as it was, is just a tiny rumble.

According to most geologists, right now, there's no sign of a pending eruption. But, what do they know? All I know is that every earthquake that happens is news to them just like it is to us. Yellowstone park does continue to get earthquakes but so do we here on Vancouver Island. I still prefer the remote possibility of an earthquake to the near certainty of tornados.  So, take heart, the USGS points out. "odds are very high that Yellowstone will be eruption-free for the coming centuries."

The USGS also notes that, if you simply took the past three eruptions, the odds of Yellowstone erupting in any given year are 0.00014 percent — lower than the odds of getting hit by a civilization-destroying asteroid. Anyway, next time you’re in the vast open areas of Yellowstone now you’ve got something else to worry about besides Grizzly Bears!

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It’s Just A 6-Pic From Our Walk Around The Lake

I didn’t get home from poker on Wednesday night until well after midnight so it was a pretty quiet day around home on Thursday. About all I got up to was a walk around the Quarry Lake with Paulette and Rylie. I did manage to win an enormous haul of $2.35 at poker though so that was good.

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Be On The Lookout For iTunes Phishing Email Scam

Phishing refers to an email that attempts to fraudulently acquire personal information from you, such as your Apple ID, password and/or credit card information. On the surface, the email may appear to be from a legitimate company or individual, but it's not. I know because I received an email that was purportedly from 2014 iTunes Apple and it looked “sort of legitimate” – but it wasn’t.

I suspected something “phishy” right away as I’d never received an email like this from Apple for movie rentals. The way they try and suck you in is to claim you have rented movies that you know you never have so naturally you may do what they ask in order to make sure you get a refund. I decided to check it out carefully and clicked on the alleged link to apple support. The next screen asked for my Apple ID password. Out of curiosity I entered in a ‘just made-up password’ and hit enter!

You can always check your legitimate purchases including apps on iTunes

Sure enough I was taken to a new screen so it didn’t care what password I entered proving once and for all it was a scam. On the new screen, they wanted my Credit Card Info, Social Insurance Number, Address and Bank Account. Not likely. I closed the email message and moved it to a secure folder. If you happen to get one of these I would suggest you immediately delete it without even opening it.

The best way to check on iTunes purchases is to go directly to iTunes then click on Store > View my Account and under Purchase History click “See All”. You will be able to check there and see what purchases you’ve been charged for. If you have any questions then you can deal directly with Apple. What made me mention this was an email I received from a reader last night who mentioned she had also been the recipient of a similar message. So…don’t give away your info for anyone!!

It’s only 6pm here as I’m writing this short post as I’m off to Victoria in just a few minutes for the start of or Poker Group’s 46th consecutive season. We have still have 3 original members including me and 2 newcomers at 25 and 20 years. I probably won’t be home until after midnight but all the money I’m bound to win will make it very worthwhile!

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Hackers Exploit Apple To Access Celebrity ‘Selfie’ Photos

This past weekend hackers broke into celebrity iCloud accounts and gained access to nude photos of over 100 celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst. Somewhat incredibly all of these explicit photos appear to have been selfies taken by the celebrities and then, knowingly or not, updated to their Apple iCloud accounts. Who does this? What’s wrong with these people? But, I can’t blame them for this as they had every right to expect proper security  from Apple.

There’s a rotten Apple in the iCloud

After the hackers splashed a lot of these photos over less than reputable web sites a big storm cloud began to gather over Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA. Apple has long taken shots at Microsoft for Windows vulnerability to virus’ and malware while claiming to be immune. That was always a rather dubious claim because most hackers just couldn’t’ be bothered spending resources on Apple Macs when they only had 10% of the market. Who cared?

But, Apple’s iPhone is a totally different kettle of bits ‘n bytes. It’s the most popular smartphone in the world and hackers are very interested in it while being not so interested in the Windows Phone. Hackers are bad guys but they’re not idiots. So, what does Apple think of this iCloud security breach? Here’s what they said:

After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone.

Apple has a limit on the number of incorrect passwords an iCloud user can enter before its system locks the account. They’ve declined to specify the exact number of incorrect attempts that would trigger an account lockdown. It’s not that many as I’ve had it happen to me when I was trying to figure out a forgotten password for a friend. We had to go through all kinds of hoops and barrels to get the account reinstated. So, how did these hackers manage to get the celebrity email addresses and passwords?

Hackers may have found a way around the incorrect sign-on number limit

In looking more into this yesterday I found out that the day before the photo leak, code for an an Apple ID password brute-force, proof-of-concept was uploaded to the code-hosting site GitHub. Some wise-guys then used the code to exploit a vulnerability in the Find My iPhone sign in page that allowed hackers to flood the site with password attempts without being locked out. Most of the top passwords used are absolutely pathetic with the most common being ‘123456’ or simply ‘password’.

I’m thinking anyone dumb enough to take nude photos of themselves and them put them on iCloud is probably dumb enough to use a pathetic password like ‘123456’. A day after the photo hack became public, the same proof of concept attack was tried and it no longer worked suggesting that Apple had acted quickly to plug the leak. Apple won’t comment on that but I’m betting it’s more than likely this or a flaw very similar allowed the hackers to access iCloud right through the front door!

This simple tool would have prevented the hackers from accessing iCloud

Back in June of this year, I wrote a post about How To Setup Apple’s 2-Step Verification System.  It’s simple and it would have prevented these hackers from getting into the celebrity iCloud accounts. Android has a similar 2-Step system. If you don’t have 2-step verification on your smartphone, you might want to check it out. Or, you could simply choose not to take nude selfies, right? I’m talking to you, Paul Dahl – we don’t want to see an image that will haunt us forever!!

Around 20 years ago, I was managing the implementation of the first corporate email system for the City of Victoria. After getting it running for over 1,000 users everyone used it like a gossip toy and was having great fun. Management got quite upset and asked me to come up with a policy to control email use. Huh? I thought it was a dumb idea and about as likely to be successful as trying to tell employees what they could talk about on their phones. But, a policy was demanded.

After considering many different ideas and options, I finally managed to come up with one simple policy to propose:

Do not write anything in an email message that you would not be comfortable seeing on the front page of the Victoria Times Colonist Newspaper.

After submitting my Policy Recommendation on Email to the powers that be I never heard another word about it, Eventually, the novelty of email wore off and it just became another annoying work tool like the phone!

Maybe though, Hollywood celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst should consider a “new, fresh, updated” iCloud Policy:

If you must take nude selfies with your smartphones,never publish them on any cloud service unless you are completely comfortable with having those photos circulated over the Internet for all the world to see.

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Updates And Follow-Ups On A Few Of My August Blog’s

It’s September already! How about that? Won’t be long before we turn our thoughts towards heading south across the Medicine Line towards sunny Palm Springs for another season at the Sands RV & Golf Resort. Normally, August is a pretty quiet month for us but not this year. The big event, of course, was ‘The Wedding’ and the fun of having so many of our family home for a week. It was an unusually busy blog time for me too and I never got a chance to follow-up on some things so now I will.

Mason really enjoyed attending his first ever family Wedding

In my post Do You Have Medical Insurance For Your Dog Or Cat?, I wrote about a company called Trupanion that insures pets by paying up to 90% of the costs for most Veterinarian services plus medications. As per anything to do with pets, RV’ers responded with many comments and a lot of questions too. The biggest concern was, of course, the cost of insurance. I said I’d do a quick check using our Rylie as a “guinea dog” and so I filled out the Trupanion web’s Online Quote.

What I got back kind of shocked me because according to information I had read about Trupanion the average cost for dog insurance ran about $40 a month. But, when I put in Rylie’s info it came back at $78 per month or $936 a year. That’s too high for me as I could put $1,000 a year into a special savings account to allow us to self-insure Rylie. I know I probably won’t do that but I still think close to $1,000 a year is a little too high. We’ll just continue to do what we’ve always done – pay up!!

A Day In Cowichan

Another few comments I found interesting were the concerns about bandwidth use relating to the above video clip in my blog about the Beauty of Cowichan Bay where we live. The clip was 5 1/2 minutes long which is much longer than I ever like to use but then it wasn’t my video clip. Bandwidth use is especially important to RV’ers as so many are on a 5GB cap limit. Here are some average numbers pertaining to video clips:

Some facts about Video Clip Bandwidth Use

5GB	5,000MB
Avg. Video Clip Bandwidth Usage per Minute	1MB
“Once Upon a Day…Cowichan” video clip length	5.5 minutes
Bandwidth Used	5.5MB
Percentage of 5GB cap used	0.11%

The next time you run across a video clip embedded in a blog or any other site you can approximate your bandwidth use by remembering the bandwidth use of an average YouTube video equals 1MB per minute. Plus that, your 5GB cap is equal to 5,000MB’s.

Another event that I promised to report back on but never did was August 12 Update Tuesday. In case you’ve forgotten this it was easy to do as it was a non-event. This was the Windows 8.1 Update 2 and by now all of you who have Windows 8.1 on your computers with automatic updates turned on will have it. I didn’t report back on this because there was nothing to report. It doesn’t mean to say it was no good as it most likely was but it was all “under the hood” stuff. It’s likely the last we’ll see until Window 9 next spring!

As every Canadian knows by now Tim Horton’s Donuts is now officially part of the Burger King Chain – what a revolting development that was! Nothing much will change at Timmy’s we hope but unfortunately for middle-class American taxpayers they’ll have to foot the bill for this tax dodge. What a whopper!

All Ferguson, MO police officers are now wearing mandatory body-cams!

I wrote about events surrounding the tragic events in Ferguson, MO a few times in August. Now, police in the St. Louis suburb where a white officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager have started wearing body cameras. The body cams were donated to the police department by two companies and each officer will get one to use. Video is going to be an invaluable tool in determining why an officer acted the way he or she did - and whether he or she acted appropriately.

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To The Top Of Cobble Hill Mountain & A Dropcam Review

Paulette has been on quite a fitness kick this summer and on occasion I get dragged along too. In the past week alone, including yesterday, we’ve hiked all the way to the top of Cobble Hill Mountain 3 times. Sunday morning was perfect as it was mostly clear and cool when we left home at 10am for the 10 minute drive to the park and trailhead.

At the top of the mountain I took this photo using my iPhone 5S

Arriving at the parking lot we were surprised to see so many vehicles. In fact, we had to park in the overflow lot. This was a good sign for Rylie as it meant there would be lots of people with dogs on the trails so Rylie would get to meet lots of friends along the way. I snapped a photo using my iPhone 5S and after getting home and looking at it I could see it looked more like fall than I ever imagined. I’m using my iPhone for quick pics a lot and its been working out quite well. It sure comes in handy a lot.

Looking at Cobble Hill Mountain from our front yard

Although it’s still summer like weather here on the Island, the signs of fall are around us. It’s getting dark earlier at night, it’s cooler in the mornings and on our walk in the forest Sunday morning the leaves are beginning to change color and fall to the ground.

The more I learn and use my Dropcam video security system the more impressed I am with its performance, simplicity and WiFi features that make it the perfect device for monitoring a home or RV while away for just a few hours or even a few months.

In my blog on August 17th (Dropcam – Super Simple Video Security For Home Or RV) I wrote about how simple it was to setup and start using the Dropcam video. After the first 2 weeks of use, I can say it has performed flawlessly and is sending alerts to my iPhone when motion or sound is detected just like the promotional ads promised.

Why would I be getting alerts? Wouldn’t that mean our home is being burglarized? Nope – it just means Rylie is up on the couch in the living room barking at dogs daring to walk by on the street in front of her home! We don’t leave Rylie home alone that often but sometimes, like going to Costco, she does get to stay and guard the home front. Normally, we assume she just finds a place to rest and sleeps until we get home. But, not always it seems.

Here’s the photo alert I received while at Carrie’s showing it was just Rylie

A few days ago while we were out for about an hour, Dropcam sent an alert to my iPhone along with a snapshot that showed Rylie up on the arm of the couch looking out the front room window. Out of curiosity, I switched to my “live view” and I could not only see Rylie but hear her barking ferociously at something outside. Now, I could have actually talked to her by using the camera’s remote speaker to say “Rylie, no barking” but didn’t for fear of scaring the wits out of her.

Our Dropcam automatically turns on when I leave and turns off when I return

Another great feature of the Dropcam that I really like is the iPhone apps ‘Control by Location’ feature that when selected automatically turns the Dropcam “on” when I leave home and “off” when I get back. The app uses the iPhone’s Location Services to determine when I leave home. It then turns the Dropcam on. When I return home, the app senses that and turns the Dropcam off. In the image above, you can see the alert I got after returning from our hike up Cobble Hill Mountain. Love the Dropcam!!

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