Having uttered something recently to the effect that ‘I hate computers’ and all things related, the computing gods have retaliated swiftly, raining brimstone and fire on my humble little holdings.
Brimstone and fire in the form of excessive bandwidth consumption hailed from who knows whence. In my own paranoia, I wonder if I might be the one causing such havoc, with some sort of infection in my home LAN environment that is beyond my understanding and capabilities to detect and obliterate. I have a firewall! I do! It’s configured to protect me. At least, I think it is. I hope it is. I followed the instructions. I know it is. But what of the interim between this new firewall installation and configuration, and time as I knew it, before I’ve been running with a few different layers of protection. SpyBot Search and Destroy. AVG. AdAware. (I think.) Windows XP built in firewall. But that’s it.
The evil storm consumed over 300 GIGabytes in the last 9 days. NINE DAYS! I doubt I’ve had 3 GB in my entire blogging life. I recently installed my firewall. It’s too close for comfort and has left me squirming. What did I do Did I do anything I don’t think I did anything.
I’m so damn paranoid. How I hate it when thinks go amuck. I am very much pleased with the service I get from my hosting company. They’ve been excellent. What is happening now I can’t stand not knowing. And not being able to do anything about it.
One thing I can do is control comments. I’ve changed my blog properties to force registration upon commenters. I have so few non-spam visitors. I hope my blog friends won’t mind.
I may eventually turn off comments altogether. Why do people spam It makes me sick inside, that they do these malicious things that make life so unpleasant for the rest of us decent, simple, trying-to-be-kind people… I am SO exasperated!
I don’t blog for the general public, and I haven’t got a big ‘following’, which suits me fine. It does feel nice when kind people make kind comments, but if I must, I will shut it down or make it private or do whatever must be done to protect my good standing with my hosting company. I am responsible for some bonafide web sites out there, that real people, businesses, and communities use and depend on, and I can’t have anything that has anything to do with my own personal web sites bringing them down.
Blog spam may not be the culprit, but it is very annoying. I spend more time cleaning out spam and whinging about it, than enjoying the journey of writing out my thoughts and feelings and dealing with my day to day me-ness. Which is why I blog. At least, why I want to blog.
All that said, my web sites will all be down tomorrow, as their host servers are being re-located.
