(If your in springfield and read this call me I will be in town for awhile, if you dont know my number my email address is on the main page write me and I will get back to you)
I used to love the holidays, and in some ways I still do, but much of the magic and joy has been fading away, replaced with stress, struggle, memories, and more.
I still try to do a lot during the holidays making my yearly donations to various charities I believe in, calling old friends I haven't talked to in a long time, and spending some time with the family. It isn't the same when you were a kid and your next few months of joy could come for just getting the right gift. It isn't the same as when you had someone to share the holidays with. It isnt the same as when you actually believed in Santa and the spirit of giving because people were inherently good.
Well this year things are getting really busy before I head home. I thought I would have about 2 and half days to finish a project at work, but they didnt have everything ready for me until around noon today. I flight out tomorrow so to get it done before I go I will be into the office about 5 AM. Which for those of you that know me, I am truly not a morning person.
On top of that I had a lot to get ready with laundry, packing, and cleaning. Trying to remember all of the various tasks I am hoping to accomplish while home on break. Yeah thats right a bunch of goals work like goals for my break. My bag packed with a couple programming books to help guide the way. I still have to figure out one more xmas gift before the 25th as well. It should be a fun time while home, followed by a fun time in Denver, ending with a crazy great new years in Vegas.
The cherry on the top of the beginning of the end of the holiday stress was that there was a pretty large attack on my server (no not the one hosting this site, but over at Wastedbrains.) It seems someone found a way to use my mail server as a Spam forwarding server, sending out literally millions of spam messages each of which was recorded onto the hard drive entirely filing up ever last bit of space on the drive. More than half my system flagged as Spam and sent to the “Bad Mail” folder, but others were sent out. I dont even know what setting they got into on the mail server so I just had to shut the whole thing down (not that it had been working right lately anyways). So after stopping the spam, I had to deal with deleting Millions of messages from all over my server, folders so large you cant open them or they crash the file browser, so large that if you try to delete the whole folder it crashes as well. No you have to go in DOS mode and delete each file one by one running a batch command, my server has been deleting files for over 10 hours and seems to be about halfway done? Which all of this is making my sites run much slower than normal. Just a few weeks ago I had to delete thousands of Spam messages from my various blogs. It seems that all my sites are under attack and that on top of it they are getting far less traffic than they used to. Partially because search engines are probably starting to think my server is part of the Spam problem, when I am really one of the Spammers victims.
The office Christmas party was a great time, and I think everyone had fun, so I was glad it went over well and that no one really got in trouble or embarrassed themselves. I had a wonderful evening getting to know some of my co workers better.
Lastly I got to help Matt learn how to build some web page stuff for his boss, and since I write code by hand and dont steal software anymore, we had to find a free GUI web page designer and I learned how much better dreamweaver is than any free GUI html editor.
With that Happy holidays to everyone, those who are stressed from the holidays, those who don't celebrate the holidays, those who are happy, those who are sad, those who are with families, and those far from home. Happy Holidays, and to all a good night.
