Put the extinguishers away...

So many small fires - especially with hackers this week. I narrowed it down to a security hole in the calendar program I used on - oh - half my sites. That's like 12 sites. So i've fixed every site that was hacked and taken off the calendars - I'm looking for a secure calendar and testing one on a site that's been hacked 6 times in 2 weeks. "Bring It On!" Now I wait for the hacker to come by so I can track him and see if he gets anywhere. All this on top of starting a hosting business, moving some sites from CrapEasy, and joining my church's Board of Directors. Fun week - and it's only half over!

Got 2 new clients this week, so it's not all bad - and I reale I'm still not charging enough. I'm too nice and I need to step it up if I'm going to have money to live on! Someone smack some sense into me! :-) I try to beat the competition and find out I'm beating them senseless becasue my rates are so low.

I'm learning! Have a good week. ;-) My life seems crazy unless your outside the box.

New Hosting

I now own a dedicated server. I had to do it - Doteasy was killing me with their downtown and crappy service. Nothing is set up yet - but the hosting company is called Cube Creative Host at http://www.cubecreativehost.com.

This will allow me to offer affordable hosting my clients while having a site that stays up on a more consistent basis. If you are interested in switching your host, let me know! L'll have packages set up soon and will be moving many of my sites over to the new host.

I'm off to Bill's family visitation. Funeral tomorrow. I hate this. :-(

No Whammies!

If you need to redesign a logo - StrongBad has a fool-proof method for kicking it up a notch.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail153.html

Hacked sites make me sad with an "m"

Let me tell you my favorite number: 444. Why? Because that's now the permissions number I place on all my configuration.php files. Why? Because three of my sites were hacked yesterday and today by snot-nosed kids in Turkey and Russia. I have spent all day - ALL DAY - securing sites (which I guess is a good thing) and fixing sites - all which were hacked in different ways by different Hackers. All of this AFTER I ran the security upgrades released by Joomla. WTH?

Two of the sites were noticed by clients who freaked out - which they should - because it can look scary when you don't know what's going on. Two of the sites were easy stupid fixes - replace the config file and lock it down. Amateaurs. The third was well-done. This punk actually ran an SQL injection that replaced the admin password (my password) with random letters and deleted all the other site admins. Too bad I actually know what I'm doing and can replace the password in the database using a password string from another site. And I also have backups of all my databases and site files. The crappy part is that it's taken all this time. Time is money and I need to run out and meet a client soon - but have to do all this crap first.

I'm screaming on the inside about all this - you just can't hear me because your ... Outside The Box.

And thus, I think a new catch-phrase is born. We'll see where I take it.

Bill, you will be missed!

A dear friend of mine passed away yesterday morning. I'm still in denial about it and it will probably hit me later. We're not sure how he died - the EMS doesn't seem to think it's natural, so I'm waiting to hear what happened, along with hundreds of other people in the community. I had the privilege of hanging out with Bill a few weeks ago at a community picnic and I'm really glad he came. He was getting over a divorce and he said his life was just at the turning point of coming back around and he was optimistic. He always had a smile - was always positive about life - and loved Jesus. He was a real asset to the Chrysalis community and I will miss him dearly. I know I'll see him again one day - but until then I with many others - will be sad we can't hang out with him anymore.

Wow

So I'm finding out stuff from friends in high school because I went to dinner with an old friend tonight. We went to Apollo Flame - in Biltmore Lake (Old Bent Creek/Enka) and ran into like 5 people from high school. Had fun making fun of some people we knew back then and I learned alot of stuff that happened while I was there that I was oblivious to - and still wish to be stupid to - but now I know. I wonder if anyone else has had those sorts of things happen since high school?

Can't stand people who drive while talking on the cell phone - they usually drive slower and forget where they are. How annoying! Especially those drivers from Florida. We love having you visit and spend your money in wonderful Ashe Vegas, but please don't drive or talk on your phone. :-)

Well, gotta run. This blogging while driving down I-40 on my cell phone is hard to do one-handed! Have a great weekend. ;-)

I'm back

Well, after some time trying to figure out what was going on with my other blog, I decided to let Google host my blog like veryone else and let them worry about the spammers. This being away from my business domain will also let me talk about clients without them finding out. :-)

Fiesta! VBS was at church all this past week. I couldn't help out all week, but did put together a sing-along slideshow of photos taken over the week and presented it at the closing on Friday and at church today at both services. You can see it (without the music) at ELC online.

This past week I took my grandma back to Durham. She was in Asheville for the past 11 days and stayed with mom. We took a trip to Banner Elk to see her sister, who I had never met.

Just got a contract from Appalachian State to maintain The Appalachian newspaper Web site because the university webmaster doesn't know how to update files on thier server. That's really waht it comes down to - but I'll benefit from it, so it's OK. :-) And it will get me back to Boone every once in a while for free.

Dennis is visiting Charlotte from San Diego for the next few weeks. We're hoping to plan a Hawaii trip later this year. :-)

I'll figure out how to post more later and hopefully post some about my clients soon.