I push my fingers into my eyes; it's the only thing that slowly stops the ache...

I ended my work week on a high note, which is my favorite way to end the week. I don't have to stress about or even think about work again until Monday. Much of my time this week has been spent trying to foil and track down a bastardly little hacker who's been deleting data from our database. It's an application that I inherited, and it was written long before I started working there. It was written in ASP (classic, not even .NET), and was so sloppy and full of holes (even for ASP), I'm kind of surprised it took this long to become compromised! It's been both frustrating and exhilarating. I thought I had them shut down Monday afternoon, but I was wrong. The network admin and I then tried something else that we were sure would stop it, but wrong again.

I was becoming quite stressed this morning, watching my data being deleted one record at a time, every few minutes. The net. admin and I continued to dig through log files until we finally found the hack. That allowed me to see exactly what was going on, so I could get into the code and fix the hole that allowed them to get into our data. Just for good measure, we tracked it down to six different IP addresses that had been doing the malicious deletions over the course of the last five days, and the network admin banned them from our server. Unfortunately the little thundercunts spoofed their IP addressess, so we couldn't really track them down without a ton of time and resources. I already lost time that I definitely couldn't afford to lose, and with our perpetual shortage of IT staff and money, I had to just leave it at that. I would really have enjoyed tracking them and making them suffer, but at least it's resolved now. It was kind of a fun mystery to solve, as long as I didn't focus on how far behind my other projects this was making me.

We spent the evening at the library tonight. We brought home a mountain of books, since we got our regular supply plus stocked up for vacation reading (for next week).

We came home and L & I played a quick game of tetherball. It was the first time we've played, and it just doesn't work well. The pole is too short, so we're going to have to come up with a better one. I think if we make our own from 'scratch' it will be cheaper and better than anything we could buy. Now I have the ball, so we just have to get a good pole and concrete it in.

We headed into the very noisy birdroom to do our reading. The population has increased by one. We adopted a spunky little lovebird from the Humane Society. L named her Kealy (I don't love that name). She had escaped from her cage a few times at the H.S., so she is very happy to be cage free now. She's made herself right at home. She and Saffron (the ring-neck dove who is about 5 times her size) seem to be courting. She had just finished up a little bath when we came in to read.



Sagan and Saffron

(top left to right) Cypress, Scarlet, Kealy, Vivienne, Darwin, Lexi, Sirus, Sky, Willow

Peach