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Daniel Pearl World Music Day 2019

I really had such a good night at the celebration of Daniel Pearl World Music Day at The Lyric Theater in Blacksburg! But before I begin….

What is Daniel Pearl World Music Day?

DanielPearlMusicDays.org

Daniel Pearl World Music Days was created in response to the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl at the hands of extremists in Karachi, Pakistan. Danny’s family and friends came together to work towards a more humane world, forming the Daniel Pearl Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and innovative communications.

Danny was a talented musician who joined musical groups in every community in which he lived, leaving behind a long trail of musician-friends spanning the entire world. Commemorating Danny’s October 10th birthday, World Music Days uses the universal language of music to encourage fellowship across cultures and build a platform for “Harmony for Humanity.” The Daniel Pearl Foundation invites you to join us by dedicating your music performance this October as part of the 12th Annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days

The Event

In the town of Blacksburg that I call home the organization Hillel organized a concert to celebrate the day. The headliner was a musician by the name of Sammy Adams, known for his hits “All Night Longer” and “I hate college”. He was opened by a joint act between Jahn Rome and Fabrizio Music, which was one of the best opening acts I’ve ever seen. Their energy and stage control was electric and they made a genius move bringing the crowd to the stage. After their act came the FiveFiftyFive.

Doing a wonderful mix of original songs and a covers they kept the moving the energy higher and higher, eventually bringing back on Jahn and Fabrizio for a cover of “Thanks for the Memories” and “Sugar, we’re going down”.

Finally they reached the climax of their show with a mix of “Havana” (Camila Cabello) and “Seven Nation Army” that had the audience roaring.

Finally the headliner Sammy Adams came on, building the energy song after song. At one point a fan joined him on stage to rap “I hate college”.

His continued on with original after original, even giving the crowd a taste of some of his unreleased music. When the audience was maxed out he unleashed his secret (or not so) weapon, “All Night Longer”. The audience went into a frenzy giving a memorable ending to an unforgettable night.

My Involvement

I was volunteering at the event through my organization and co-sponsor of the event The Low-Techs. I had the privilege of working green room where I got to meet and personally get to know Jahn, Fabrizio, and Kyle, Ryan, Max, Collin of the Five Fifty Five. My other volunteer role was as photographer during the show (if you couldn’t tell from all my photos) and after the show at the meet and greet. Overall I had a wonderful night and got to meet some of the coolest musicians yet! Hope I get to reunite with these guys soon!

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Identity Theft is No Joke, Jim.

How I woke up to my website being hijacked, and tips to make sure it never happens to you.

WOW! It has been one hell of a morning for me. While I woke up early this morning excited for studying I was instead woke up to a cute email from WordPress telling me my verification email had been changed. So naturally I tried to do what I always do if something is up and change my password. Well not only was my verification email changed, but my account email was changed. Oh, and my password was changed. Oh, and my website (joshuaglaab.com) now only featured articles written by one, Aditya Sarkar. Well, that’s interesting. So I spent most of the morning with the fine people at word press and they sorted me right out so that I could get my website back.

How Did This Happen?

I have a few theories about how our good friend Mr. Sarkar got a hold of my information. Consulting with Firefox it appears my data had been breached not once, but FOUR TIMES! All regarding websites I had used in the past. Not a bad culprit, but there could be other possibilities as well. My frequent use of public open wifi left me at a high risk for a long time. All that needed to happen was one enterprising individual to open a wifi sniffer at a starbucks and just wait for me to input an email/password combo.

How Can I Prevent This?

I will describe the steps I now take to protect my information.

  1. Randomly generate strong passwords for all websites
    • This makes it much harder for a person to get into any account, and by randomly generating all passwords, if one gets lost in a breach the others will be safe.
  2. Organize Passwords in a secure location
    • Since the passwords are WAY to big to memorize I have organized all of mine in a secure account, which is also protected by a monster password and two factor authentication.
  3. Two Factor Authentication
    • This might be the most important point on this list. By requiring your phone to log into accounts it makes it impossible for someone to break in without access to your phone. Even if they get the password they wont gain access to your account, giving you time to lock them out again. Almost every website has an option for you to enable this. I personally set up texting and an authentication app for many of my accounts.
  4. Install a VPN
    • This is your armor for sketchy wifi. Even if someone sniffs your data on the public wifi the VPN encrypts everything you send so the would be hacker only gets a string of gibberish.

Anyway

This has been my story of getting my website hijacked. Make sure you take steps to protect yourself on the internet! Its a mad mad mad mad world out there, so do yourself a favor and put up some defenses.

Godspeed