Mike Schorah

This is a completely TRUE story that occurred just last Friday night as my family and I were preparing a luxurious log cabin in Missouri for the arrival of guests on Saturday. We were at a borrowed three-storey log cabin set in 160 acres of private land in Missouri: it was amazing - surround sound in every room and lots of comfort. Friday night, after doing our chores to get the place ready, we went outside to enjoy the owner's hot tub on the edge of the woods. It was only when it was too late that we discovered that the cabin has doors that lock themselves after you go through - and we'd gone out with nothing but swim suits, VERY small towels, and only Cathy, my wife, had shoes! Use a little bit of imagination, but not TOO much, at the picture of 17-year old Chris and me, wearing Cathy's shoes, swim shorts and hand-sized towels making our way along a half-mile path through woods, under star light, with temperatures hovering around freezing at 10pm at night accompanied by t...

Email systems are a bit like sending a postcard through the mail, but where everyone handling it takes a photocopy of the message on its way from sender to recipient. Some email systems, like Gmail, go further and index the contents of the email so that they can be searched later, with somewhat relevant advertisements displayed by the side of the message. By contrast, messages sent within our software are automatically encrypted in the app on the sender's computer desktop. Messages remain secure as they travel across the internet to the app on the computer belonging to the recipient and only then are the contents unscrambled so that they can be read, just by the intended recipient. We use the AES-256 algorithm , certified for use up to "Top Secret" classification! We're building a system designed to give you both privacy and trust.

"What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big. Some of these companies got started almost by accident. The world thinks of startup founders as having some kind of superhuman confidence, but a lot of them were uncertain at first about starting a company. What they weren't uncertain about was making something good—or trying to fix something broken. "They all were determined to build things that worked. In fact I'd say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman way, it was in their perseverance. ... "Perseverance is important because, in a startup, nothing goes according to plan. Founders live day to day with a sense of uncertainty, isolation, and sometimes lack of progress. Plus, startups, by their nature, are doing new things—and when you do new things, people often reject you. "That was the second most surprising thing I le...

Praying today we had a sense of being, again, on a rollercoaster ride. This time, it felt as though we had been slowly chugging up the slope and now the train was edging forward, ever so slowly, along the almost-flat top of the ride ... sitting at the front of the train, we can see that there's a steep downward slope coming soon and, as we gain momentum, the ride is going to be both exhilarating and scary!

We went along to church and to kids' Sunday school practically every week since I was born. As a result I soon learned a lot of the Bible stories and tried to be a nice person. When I was 17 I decided that I really did believe in God, and in Jesus Christ who'd died for me so I committed my life to him. But my life didn't change. I didn't change what I did with my time, money or friends. Mid-way through my time at university even I could see that this just wasn't working. I'd had a great girl friend when I was 17, but I hadn't had one since - even though I was chasing every girl within a five mile radius! Previously work had been easy, but that term they cranked it up a notch at university and for the first time I really found myself struggling. My dad had been a great rock of stability in my life, but in the same few weeks his work closed down and he was unemployed. No longer was the future certain, and I needed his money to help me get through college! It w...

This morning I got asked, "How do I write a blog?" This, culled from various sources, is my answer: Set a schedule, blog often Aim for somewhere between three and six posts a week for the first month. Writing blog posts so often will likely be tough at first: it's something else to do in an already busy schedule, and most people find it hard to write well. But it does get easier with practice. Don't aim for perfection It's generally better to aim for quantity, not quality. Don't try to craft every sentence to perfection, instead get information out to your audience quickly. Write casually but clearly Write quickly, as if you're talking to a friend. Readers want you to get to the point. Ryan Singel, who writes about security and privacy at Wired.com's Threat Level, offers a great tip: Start every post with a good first sentence that describes the story you are going to tell. Assume your reader won't get past the first paragraph. Never start with ...

I once had a romantic flight, all alone, across the South China Sea gazing in fascination down at green island jewels covered in coconut trees, with an attractive sandy strip marking a boundary with the clear blue water. It was the stuff of holiday brochures, but as we circled over Cebu, one of the biggest islands in the Philippine set, I caught sight of shanty-style housing and my first glimpse that all is not perfect. The plane touched down at Mactan airport and I saw the run-down emergency vehicles in their garage. On the roof outside was the motto, “That others may live” and I sensed the Lord saying that that was why I had been sent, even though I myself felt as battered and run down as those pathetic fire engines. Pastor Joy Bendoy, sender of my invitation, was waiting for the plane. The heat, humidity and mosquitoes hit me as, without signalling, we launched into a chaotic stream of vehicles that would never pass a vehicle inspection. That doesn’t seem to matter in the Philippin...