Srcasm

I have some pretty awesome news to share with all of you, my faithful readers.  As of now, I’m working for Passpack, the secure, online, password manager that I’ve been talking about for almost two years!  This is starting out as part-time community/product/technology evangelism and educator for both Passpack and online identity protection.  No one wants to wind up like Sarah Palin and her Yahoo account, right?  That’s what I’m going to do — I’m going to to help you to protect yourself (and your digital self) both online and off — and we’ll do it in style.

To start off, I’ll be helping Passpack and their awesome team ramp up their blog and education strategies.  We’ll try to teach people how to choose stronger passwords, better security answers (for password resets) and safeguard all of their important data.  We’ll try to help answer any questions you might have about how Passpack (or any other password manager) works and educate you on the ways that people get comprimised online.  Once we get some of those things in order, we’ll move on to helping to spread the Passpack, secure messaging and shared host-proof hosting love around the world.

Now, I have one simple request from you.  Let me know how I can help you.  Whether it’s with Passpack or online security, I want to lend a helping hand.  If you’re not sure on something that I’ve talked about, let me know.  If you have an idea of how to make Passpack or online identity protection better, I want to hear it.  Not so hard, right?  Go ahead and ask away and remember, as my 3rd grade teacher always told me, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

I was scanning through my hundreds of RSS feeds and decided to share this with the rest of the class –

Stock market crash confuses Google Finance — has the wrong closing price for nearly every stock!

–VentureBeat

The gist of the story is that Google Finance was showing incorrect closing prices where it has the big red numbers as proper closing prices according to their stock charts.  Who would notice this you ask?  Everyone!  It’s not a mundane detail.  Things like Google’s finance services are relied on by many hundreds of thousands of people (I would venture a guess) and that means that it’s not only for fun, money-watching extravaganzas but also for their careers.

This leads to the point of this post — Attention to detail matters.  It doesn’t matter if you’re building a house, raising a child or creating Google Finance, all of these things need a lot of attention to detail.  It’s the little things that make the difference.  Take a look at Yahoo’s old email compared to when Gmail rolled out.  They both did the same basic things.  They received and sent email, they categorized it and filed it away and they allowed email signatures.  What Google did was made it simpler with the little things.  They made the interface AJAXy and they redesigned how “folders” worked.  They turned over a new leaf when it came to the amount of storage and more.  Under the hood, the site did the same thing as Yahoo’s email but they blew them out of the water with the other pieces.

I know that a lot of this advices sounds like, “DUH!  Everyone knows that!”  But apprently that isn’t the case.  Due to a coding error, miscommunication or some other issue, Google’s Finance missed one of the mundane details.  If you had relied on their service for your job, you could be as low as the stock market really is today.