Category: Entertainment

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I’ve been meaning to take a picture of this restaurant ever since I saw it from the IKEA parking lot across the street. I finally did, and also finally went there for lunch. It’s pretty good. They sell T-shirts that play even more on the name.

Anyway, the next time someone tells you “There’s No Pho King Way!” you can tell them that yes, there is, in Carson, California.

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Spider-Man answers his cell phoneComic book convention season has begun, and I’ve updated my Tips for Comic-Con with a bunch of ideas for keeping connected during and after the con. Smartphones, live-blogging and social networking have changed expectations and added a new set of challenges to the crowded event.

Getting Online

  • Wi-Fi is available in some parts of the convention center (which ones varies year to year). It’s frequently jammed, though.
  • If you see both free wifi and a paid hotspot on a service you already subscribe to, go with the paid service. It’ll be less crowded.
  • If you need to get online but can’t connect on the convention floor, hit a nearby hotel lobby.
  • Hotel internet access is often faster early in the morning than late at night, because no one wants to get up early to go online. That’s the time to upload your photos.
  • Cell reception can vary a lot by carrier in some convention centers, especially those with basement exhibit halls (Long Beach, I’m looking at you.)

Social Networking

  • If you want to update multiple social networks from the con, don’t spend time posting to all of them on a busy connection. Pick one and have it sync to the others using built-in connectors or IFTTT.
  • Tag your photos by convention+year and topic. Examples: Comic-Con 2013, #SanDiego, #cosplay, #SDCC, #StarWars.
  • Look for photo pools/groups dedicated to the convention (ex: SDCC on Flickr) or topics.
  • If you aren’t posting photos instantly but do want to share them, post them nightly or as soon as you get home. Interest drops off quickly after the con is over.

Hardware

  • Set your phone to vibrate and text instead of calling. You won’t be able to hear it ring or carry on a conversation on the main floor. Even then, you’ll want to check frequently for messages you’ve missed.
  • Bring a spare battery for your camera so you can swap it out in the middle of the day.
  • Make sure you bring chargers and data cables for ALL your electronics. Charge your phone every night, even if you don’t think you need to.
  • If you heavily use a power-hungry phone, carry a battery extender so you can recharge without finding a socket.
  • Save battery by turning off or slowing down notifications that you won’t be keeping up with during the con. If you only plan to check (for instance) Facebook in lines and after hours, you don’t need your phone checking every 5 minutes while you’re on the floor.

Head over to Speed Force for the full list of Comic-Con tips!

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Emerald City Comicon’s website was hacked and deleted this week…along with all their backups.

Ouch.

Ticketing is all handled offsite by EventBrite, so tickets and financial info are safe. They’ve redirected their URL to the Facebook page while they rebuild their website.

Lesson learned: Isolate your backups.

I don’t just mean physically. Yes, you need to keep some offsite in case the reason you lost your server is that the building caught fire. But isolate the online access as well. If you back up your site by pushing the backups from your server to a remote location (either self-hosted or cloud storage like Dropbox or Amazon S3), those credentials are stored on your server somehow. What could an attacker do with them?

Consider: If someone breaks into your web server, what else can they do in addition to vandalizing your site? Can they access other databases? Can they hop onto your internal network? Retrieve or alter private files? Can they get at your backups? If so, can they get at all your backups including private documents?

The answers are going to depend on your network and backup setup. But they’re questions you need to start asking.

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