Yep, Tuesday was my birthday, and I enjoyed a nice quiet dinner with my wife and daughter at The Quarter Bistro, one of my favorite restaurants. All the food is good there, but it’s renowned, in our family anyway, for its incredibly rich desserts. I prepared for the event with a vigorous session at Body Specs followed by sets of pushups totaling my new age. That, and by not eating (much) chocolate beforehand.

The Black Forest cake was the consensus winner. My wife’s lava cake was too dark for her, so daughter and I stepped up to the plate, as it were. I topped it off with a tall and smooth cappuccino. All in all, a very nice day, with the minor inconvenience of having to spend much of it at work.

Another pleasant surprise was the number of birthday messages on my Facebook page. I don’t use Facebook for much other than forwarding blog posts, but I still got some very nice wishes from family and friends, including Aikido classmates and several folks I know from the Ann Arbor Writers Group. Thank you so much, everyone!  I am really blessed to know you all.

And in the “just desserts” department: while I was looking up “how to thank everyone for Facebook birthday wishes” I came upon this incredible story on the same site, in which the king of revenge porn, after screwing up the lives of lots of people, finally meets his match and gets shut down, hopefully for good.

One Woman’s Dangerous War Against the Most Hated Man on the Internet

Basically, revenge porn is sexually explicit material (mostly topless or nude women) that is posted online ostensibly as “revenge” for a romance gone wrong. But the genre includes material stolen by hackers from computers or phones. Worse still, personal information is often posted with the photos, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and place of employment, leaving victims vulnerable to job loss, humiliation, and even threats from the sick devotees who patronize this crap.

But when a seminude photo of Charlotte Laws’s daughter got hacked and wound up on an infamous revenge porn site, Charlotte struck back. Her resulting fight to get the image off the Internet involved lawyers, the FBI, and the rogue hacker group Anonymous, who served as “white knight” in this case at least.

While I’m glad this guy got stopped, there’s still a lot more of this kind of stuff out there. So protect your personal information and your photos! The Shields Up! tests at Gibson Research will perform free security checks on your computer. Try it. My guess is your information is not as secure as you may think.

I leave you for now with this thought: “Desserts” is the reverse of “stressed”. Stay relaxed!