My New Banner and...

Kauai 2007

This week I am posting from Seattle at the Tech Conference. Yesterday I attended an internet safety summit. It was very good, some parts a little scary. The gist of the conference is how to be safe with your personal information online. One area of interest were internet safety tips for personal information. This helps prevent: online identity theft, online predators and/or hackers of your computer:

Do not share your last name in profiles.
Do not share your location.
Do not share your phone number.
Turn off any live cams, or isight built-in cameras when not in use. (Skype users!)
Be careful with videos and pictures and how they can lead a predator to your family members.
Be cautious posting your children's schools.

Do you know how long it takes a predator to get personal information including your address, phone number and school? 9 minutes! Now, I tend to live in the place where everyone that comes to my blog is a friend or a honest human being and I haven't worried too much...but this all day presentation was very interesting and created quite a passion in me to make sure my friends and family, students and parents are more informed! If you're intrigued, click here for a link to my notes.

So, I was a bit guilty of not practicing these so did a little overhall on unposting our last name from our blog. My old banner had it fairly blatant so I whipped up this photo in Photoshop by merging two pictures. I cut the picture of Joey out of another picture where he was walking along a trail using paths and the pen tool (I know pretty fancy) then "masked" him into the water pic! After cropping and resizing to an appropriate banner... you can see the product. Here are the pics before "merging" them!