Happy Leap Year!!
Protection And Service – By MPO Jim Whitman, Winter Park Police Department
Don’t worry, I didn’t buy you a gift either. What? You didn’t know? That’s okay, most people won’t realize it until they are writing the date on a document that day. But do you know what Leap Year is and how it came about? Well here is a quick bit of knowledge that will either bore you- at which point you will move on to the next article- or it will provide you with yet another fact for you to drop at your next cocktail party. It seems that when we were all taught that it takes 365 days for the earth to orbit the sun, it was not completely true. Apparently, it takes 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes and 46 seconds to complete that orbit. Now most of us wouldn’t even care about those particulars. However, every four years those extra hours and minutes add up to an extra day and in order to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons, the extra day is added to February- thus creating February 29th. Now, if you are still reading, the term Leap Year came about because certain dates that occur after February and that are fixed (for instance Christmas, Dec. 25th) always advance one day during years with 365 days in them but with the addition of the extra day, Christmas will now leap past a day and occur two days later (Christmas was on a Tuesday in 2018, Wednesday in 2019 but will be on Friday in 2020).
Now that you are either bored or confused, let me share some basic crime prevention information. As the amount of commerce increases on the internet, scammers are constantly inventing ways to separate you from your money. Emails that appear to be legitimate will often contain hyperlinks in them to help “expedite” you to a certain web page. These emails will often appear to originate from a bank, insurance company, utility company, or sometimes an attorney’s office. If you aren’t careful and click on one of those links, you may unknowingly have “opened the door” for some nefarious entity to have access to your computer and all of its contents. So, prior to clicking on a hyperlink in an email, ask yourself the following:
Do I usually communicate with this sender?
Was this email sent at an unusual time?
Did the email originate from a suspicious domain (like Microsoft-support.com)?
If there is a hyperlink, hover over the link (don’t click on it) and see where the link is taking to you (often time it is a totally different website). Also, check for misspellings in the hyperlink as that is also a good indication that it is not a valid link.
We always want you to practice internet safety and besides, you need to hold onto your money so in four years you can buy us a Leap Year present.
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