Your hugs were a lovely way to start the day. I really really appreciate them because they made me feel the exact opposite of how I felt yesterday.
THANK YOU 
I didn’t get much sleep last night and slept in so did not bike to work. Dang it anyways.
However, I AM going to go for a run at lunch and I have a goal: To match the awesome run Aaron had yesterday.
I can’t wait.
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For those of you who want to see the spoof that was placed on my site, go here.
Did a 1000 meter swim followed by a 20km ride on the bike on Saturday. That was a wake up call. Hello Mark, you have a TRIATHLON to to in almost exactly one month!
If it was two events, I’d have it licked. I mean, I sure wouldn’t be any kind of speed-monster but I’d get the job done. However, you add that run on at the END, and you have yourself some kind of challenge – especially since I’d like to run that while maintaining POSE form.
One month to get things right. ’nuff said.
Took the kids to the park twice on Saturday and then Sunday was all about relaxing on the deck with the BBQ, some beers and a good friend. It’s all good.
And then today all hell broke loose. Long story short is that www.dayhome.ca (wifey’s site) security was SEVERELY compromised. Some SOB managed to hack the site and use it to put a spoof of a major Canadian bank ‘s website on there. Then they sent hundreds (thousands?) of emails out to people with a link to MY site where they were to verify their banking information. The spoof site was harvesting the information and sending it to the scammer where he will do god-knows-what with it. I spent MOST of the day on the phone with bank security experts and with my domain host. I THINK we have things nailed down now but I’m afraid to be confident for fear of jinxing things. It was an awful experience and I feel awful thinking that some people may suffer financially because of something I look after.
Because of all that crap and to top things off, I missed my run with Aaron (insert twelve choice swear words here).
Ugh…I could use a hug. And “yeah” I’ll even take ‘em from you fellas.
I hate SPAMMERS so much. I’m pretty sure I hate them more than Jon hates his neighbor’s dogs and believe me, that’s saying something.
You’ve all gotten email spam so I don’t have to tell you how irritating that stuff is but when you manage a domain like Aaron and I do, the whole spam thing elevates to a whole other realm.
I remember in our first month, completerunning was suddenly one day deluged with hundreds upon hundreds of email rejection notices. Apparently, some SOB spammer had forged their garbage advertisements under fake completerunning email addresses. Being new at the whole thing, we had no idea what do to so we read up and found out there isn’t much one CAN do. Argh. So, we ended up shutting down our email addresses for a week or two until it passed.
But the damage had been done. That’s because when spammers forge multiple emails from your domain, a rather unfortunate and completely understandable thing happens – half the internet thinks YOUR domain is a spammer and you end up on spam filtering lists. Double argh.
Fast forward a month or so and we discover blogs. Yay! Well, “yay” for a while because shortly after we discovered blogs, the spammers discovered our blogs and we got to learn about comment spam. Comment spam is, IMHO, way worse than email spam. It never ever ends. These jerks are constantly knocking at the door trying to find a way in to leave their garbage in your house. I could just scream thinking about the war I’ve waged against them. To give you an idea, the completerunning domain has been visited over 57,000 times SO FAR in April. That’s right, over fifty seven thousand times, spammers have tried and been denied access. How is that possible you ask? Well basically, they park their spambots at the entrance and they knock and knock and knock at the door and under the door, they turn the knob, they try to pick the lock and remove the hinges. They do this over and over and over and over…they NEVER stop. And every once in a while, they manage to sneak a few past your defenses so you gotta figure out how they did that and plug the hole. grrrr…
When WordPress 1.5 came out, things got better – much better because WP 1.5 has some great spam management tools built right in. Things also got better because I learned some other tricks to protect the entire domain all at once rather than one blog at a time.
The lastest attacks are on the other domains I manage. Those being Lori’s dayhome.ca domain and my own personal iocchelli.com domain.
So what’s happening over there? In a word, more of the same. I’ve had to implement anti-comment spam measures and just the other day those f’in bastiches once again deluged the internet with spam email this time by forging iocchelli.com email addresses. *sigh*
Why can’t the world beat this stuff?
Sorry, I just needed to vent a bit. Anybody got some advice or a nice, dry Martini they’d like to share?
Hokey smokes, the good doctor that sits beside me at work lent me this book and I must say it really rocks!
I am only two chapters into it but am very definitely hooked already. Some very compelling reading here folks. I was always impressed with Lance Armstrong but I am already even more impressed now. This book is raw and wastes no time cutting to the chase. Good stuff.
