More insane busy-ness.

Friday, we actually worked on the house a little. We have been putting up massive amounts of shelving in the garage in a (probably vain) attempt to get enough crap off the floor to make room for at least one of our vehicles. The garage is big enough to park four cars in, so you would think it wouldn't be that big of a deal to make room for at least Debbie's Tracker and Nestina's Wrangler. You would, of course, be wrong.

In any case, that kept us busy and sweating like pigs until dark. Saturday, I was back in the garage for a few hours re-arranging junk to make enough room to put up more shelves. After that we had a youth pool party, cook out, bonfire, etc. event with a singing group that were here from Cedarville. They were going to be doing our morning service Sunday, and had some time to kill Saturday afternoon. It was a lot of fun, but we didn't get home until after 10PM.

Sunday was the Cedarville group in the morning, lunch at a barbecue put on by some local organization, Wal-mart for last-minute shopping for Nestina's week at summer camp, ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery in downtown Traverse City, pulling together a bunch of information so Nestina could apply for a job at Boyne, evening service, then finally home.

Debbie and I took Monday off, but it wasn't really a day off. We got up early to shuttle a groups of kids out to Lake Ann for the week. We hung around there, got everyone settled in, grabbed some lunch, and wandered back into town. The heat and humidity were unbelievable. We came home and crashed for a couple hours. Debbie had a Bible study in Kalkaska and I had to get the minutes typed up from the previous two monthly deacon meetings. A storm move through that just about leveled the place. We lost a lot of trees, but nothing was damaged. My parent's place wasn't so lucky. I haven't been out there yet to survey the damage, but I hope it wasn't anything major. At least it cooled it off a little.

Tuesday was work and a deacons meeting, and today is work and a (even-smaller-than-usual) youth group. Tomorrow, I am supposed to dig up rocks at my parent's place for them, the church, and myself. There are on-going landscaping projects at all three places that need rocks. There is an old barn foundation out in front of my parent's place that has a lot of good-looking stone. I will take my chain saw over while I am there so I can take care of any blow-downs from the storm.

Anyway, that's about it. Nothing has really caught my eye in the news lately.

[Geek Warning: If you are a technophobe, you may want to stop here.]

I did do some research on the IP addresses that keep showing up in my firewall logs. They all belong to level3.net and a block of addresses reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. I have no idea who, but someone using these IP's has been hammering my network with attacks spaced about 17 seconds apart. I will be setting my firewall to block all addresses in the ranges 4.0.0.0 through 4.255.255.255 and 224.0.0.0 through 239.255.255.255. If you have a firewall, I would highly recommend you do the same. If you don't have a firewall, you need to get one. If you are not geeky enough to configure it, call someone who is. (Tip: if you see a nerdy-looking high school kid getting the crap beat out of him by guys with spiked hair and shrapnel in their faces, he's your guy.) We have been having serious internet issues and I don't know if it has to do with these attacks on our network, or if the storm partially took out our ISP. We don't have time to play on the internet until Friday in any case, so if the problem is still there Friday, I will take it up with Earthlink.

I'll make a prediction: unless something painful, bloody, and very public happens to those responsible for these attacks (and many are already known with pictures, business and home addresses, and full biographies published on the internet), the internet will become useless within a couple years. The time it takes for a virgin Windows XP machine to experience its first attack on being connected to the internet is now measured in minutes; less time than it takes to download the software to repel the attack. I wouldn't be surprised to see that reduced to less than a minute. At some point, people will decide that it just isn't worth the amount of time and money it takes to secure a machine and keep it secure, while still running the risk of having their personal data compromised or stolen, just to be on the internet.

I guess it's been fun. When we get old, we can talk to our grandchildren about it like I talk to teens today about Compuserve: in the past tense.

And that's it.