The Sunjay Times

It rarely rains in San Diego, but it did last night. I guess my car’s brakes were still wet although it was sunny today. As I made a pretty tight corner, jamming my brakes a little hard, I felt the ABS go off and I thought to myself, “wow, am I glad I went with the ABS on this car”. I drive a Mitsubishi Eclipse ’05 and I remember the day I was debating if I should go with the GTS or the GT trim, the latter not having the ABS and cheaper.

I generally dislike the “scare” tactic used by salesmen. It usually entails providing you reason why if you don’t buy whatever they are selling, then something bad will happen to you.

But if I am going to be like that, then logic follows that I should start thinking about the things I need before I need them. I needed my ABS to stop my car before I hit another car. Surely, I can opt to get the ABS after I hit the car, but then I’d have to pay the financial consequences. So why not take the pre-emptive measure of getting the ABS first? I’m already penalized plenty for car insurance (namely because I am under 25, single, no kids, and drive a 2 door car). I do have a clean driving record, so my preference would be to keep it that way for as long as I can.

The punchline for this post is: What are the things in life that you should address before something undesirable occurs that will affect you, your loved ones, and/or belongings?

The other extreme would be to buy everything a scare tactic tells you. Sure, I could be struck by a meteor the size of Saturn that crashes on my car while I am driving to my hockey game, but what are the odds of that happening? (That was a jab at the insurance telemarketers that try to sell me their load of crap).

Without even feeling a *little* bit guilty for being biased (heh), another thing that comes to mind is my company’s flagship product. You can read all about it from the marketers, but one of the things we do is prevent people from accidentally visiting malicious websites that will silently install malware (trojan horses, viruses, spyware) on your PC. Did you know, just by visiting a link from your e-mail, you could get infected? That’s all it takes. Yes, that was a shameless plug for my company. I work for the Websense Security Labs. You could get a product as such AFTER you have been hit by piece of malware silenty running on your PC, harvesting all your credit card information from all that online shopping, but you’ve just paid the price. And if your Big Corp, Inc. — the damage to your reputation because you lost your customer information will be hard to undo.

There are plenty of examples like these in life, I guess I just need to list them all, and address them as they come. Do share in the comments below. I’ve just enabled Akismet, to combat comment spam. We’ll see how well this thing works!

On another note, I haven’t written anything for 1+ weeks because I was on a trip to Louisiana. Might post some hideous pictures up later. Cheers!