Category: PerBloWriMo

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Back online

Well, that wasn’t as ugly as I thought it would be. The person who’s running this site from her server switched to a new web host and everything was back to normal (or as normal as my blog gets) within an hour. It doesn’t look like anything was deleted during the hacking process, the person just messed with the main page and the administrative dashboard. Awesome.

On another note, I’m sure most of you have heard about the Metrodome collapse, which forced the Vikings/Giants games out of Minneapolis and into Detroit. It gets worse. The Vikes have another home game against Chicago on Monday night and they might be able to use the University of Minnesota’s football stadium, but in doing so, it would force the Bears to find an alternate site to prepare for the game. An alternate site like, oh, I don’t know, the Gophers’ practice football facility.

Remember how I was talking about all of the soccer games being cancelled last Sunday due to all the snow? They were supposed to be pushed ahead a week to Dec. 17th, the day before the Vikings game and likely a good day for the teams to practice. What I may not have mentioned was where our soccer league is playing this season: the Gophers’ practice football facility. Guess who’s gonna have priority and who’s probably gonna get screwed?

Hopefully, we can work something out. Mad Dogs are currently scheduled to play at 1:00 that afternoon, but “last minute changes are a possibility.” *sigh* I hope I can see my team play one more game this year. If not, that’ll be one more reason for me to hope that the Bears lose by a bajillion points. That’s right, I said “a bajillion”. No mercy for those who steal our soccer fields, bitches!

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Mmmm, this website is hackalicious…

Okay, this is really weird. I went to the website itself and the “dashboard”—the opening screen for the site administrator—and both have been hacked. There’s a YouTube video on there about Muslim something something something… I haven’t taken the time to watch it, I’ve just been annoyed. Yeah, having a hacked website is definitely annoying.

But this is the weird part: I was able to circumvent said hacking by using Firefox’s history to go to one of the cached administration pages and it’s been working just fine (relatively speaking). I’ve been able to copy and paste all of my December entries that I hadn’t already saved on my laptop one by one—virus checker coming right up!—and navigate through the administrative stuff with no problems, but I just used a bookmark to get to the dashboard and there’s the hacked screen again.

I figure once I get this entry saved and “posted”—I’m sure it’ll appear somewhere eventually—I’ll try to poke around in here some more and see what I can see. Not that I’ve got a lot of know-how when it comes to WordPress, but what’s the worst I can do? Get the site doubly hacked? So it’s time for a little adventure. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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Crazy is seriously frickin’ crazy

Justin and WEDALI are currently in 27th place out of 49, in large part because they’ve survived so long—plenty of teams have had to drop out and/or be retrieved from the desert because they simply couldn’t keep moving. Here’s the description of today’s section according to the race’s website:

The Ruib al Kahli is no picnic on the beach. In fact, on any normal day, you wouldn’t expect to come here and do anything but lie in the shade, if you could find any… So trekking 116 km though the emptiest desert on the planet, after having completed an early morning biking section of 94km over a treacherous and unforgiving track, in daytime temperatures way above the seasonal norm while going “against the grain” of the dunes is no less than Odyssean.

In layman’s terms, the weather and racing conditions would make you sweat your balls off if you could retain any fluids in your body to produce sweat. The description continued through interviews from various racers:

Many of the teams thought so: “That’s the hardest trek we have ever done here,” said TRI-ADVENTURE (GBR). “Last year we at least had the advantage of getting a good night’s sleep before undertaking the desert stage…” they groaned. Jari KIRKLAND of NET COMPETENCE who managed 7th fastest time over the stage and are now in 5th position overall, sat pondering her own sanity: “That stage H was heinous, horrible, horrific, horrendous, hell…” pausing in her exhausted tirade only to gulp down some much needed water. Susanna SKYLV SORENSEN of Salomon Santiveri looked stunned by the measure of her accomplishment in finishing the course: “I died out there – about one kilometre from the end everything stopped…” “We ran out of water at H6+,” confessed team SILVA-GERBER, “and wondered if we would ever make it to the finish.” Salient words considering that many did not…

If anyone out there was wondering why I’ve deemed Justin “crazy” because of what he’s accomplished with his teammates… I can’t imagine myself even trying anything like that, let alone finishing. And finishing well, too. Under the circumstances, it’s approaching -10 degrees with lots of frozen moisture outside and I’m okay where I am.

So good luck and kick ass, WEDALI. Keep surviving out there.

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This weather is no laughing matter!

As it turned out, the voice on the CSC weather line was very calm and collected when I called at 10:00 this morning to let me know that all morning soccer games had been cancelled, but the afternoon games were still on. Then I called around 1:00 and everything was cancelled and all of the games will be played on Dec. 19th instead.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but I’m aiming to start getting back on the field at the beginning of 2011. Mom asked if I wanted to play in the game today—I answered simply: “Noooooooo.” I’m being realistic, especially since I’ve found out between using the Wii and shoveling snow this morning/afternoon that my right leg is still significantly weaker than my left. I didn’t think about it before, but when my right quad got sore or tired, I’d shift my weight to the left without thinking about it, something I’ve been doing for the past nine months.

And speaking of shoveling, we have an awesome neighbor named Rich Carron who is awesome. And when I write “awesome”, I mean AWESOME. Dad and I let Mother Nature do its dirty work yesterday because we live across the street from a lake. The wind blows across the lake, picking up velocity and throwing snow around wherever the hell it wants. If we shovel some away, the wind will replace it, quite possibly with the snow you just shoveled away. Mother Nature sucks.

It was still windy walking outside today, but we weren’t getting any more snow, so it was time to go to work. Mind you, not all of the house and driveway looked that bad because of the drifting. I looked at the upwind side of the Ford Explorer and thought it looked worse when we got hit with 14″ of snow earlier this winter. (Or is it technically still fall?) It didn’t look that bad until I got to the other side and saw snow snuggled all the way up to the level of the hood. On an SUV.

As I was clearing off the front steps, that’s when awesome Rich Carron showed up. In a Bobcat. He cleared off the front part of the driveway, along the sides, made some extra space in front of the mailbox and moved everything away from the fire hydrant. He got rid of hundreds of pounds of snow. Hundreds and hundreds. There are now five-foot piles of snow stretching at least ten yards down the block on both sides of the road. (Sure, some was already there, but it hadn’t been packed down by dumping more snow on top of it with a Bobcat.)

I have no idea how much time and effort he saved us in those ten minutes of work… heck, maybe it was just five… but however much it was, he is still AWESOME. So thanks, Rich. You’re a back saver.

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Games cancelled due to bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!

I’ve missed most of our Mad Dogs’ soccer games this season because of Mind Over Matt, but the final one is coming up at 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. I’m planning to attend since we play indoors during the winter, but the weather conditions aren’t really conducive to people driving to the field.

Cities Sports Connection, the group that organizes the league, has a “weather line” that you can call to find out if games have been cancelled. It’s probably used most often when there’s rain and lightning during an outdoor season, but Hennepin County (where the field is) shut down their plows earlier because blowing snow was obscuring the roads, 1/3 of city buses got stuck driving their routes and a few hundred accidents were reported during the day.

I wonder if I call the weather line tomorrow, will I hear a message saying games will be played, games will be cancelled or a voice saying, “You seriously think we might be playing today?! Bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!”

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Oh my God, it’s the worst snow ever!!!

I’ll admit it: I’ve accomplished almost nothing today since I crawled into bed last night. The sky has been dumping loads of snow on us the entire day—it started around midnight—and is still going as I write this around 6:30. Up to this point, I think we’ve had 15″; one area in the state is over 20″. With the snowing and the blowing and the drifting and the… rifting… today seemed like a good day to sit inside and accomplish almost nothing.

But there’s a problem. It’s the media. Actually, I think it started with the media and had a snowball effect [ba-dum-bum] that’s spilled out to the general public. It’s taking events like this and giving them names. Names that blow everything out of proportion. We’ve had plenty of snow here in Minnesota before. We’ve had lots of snow come down in a short period of time. We used to call this a “blizzard” or a “snowstorm” since it’s comparable to a “rainstorm”, but way colder and fluffier.

Nowadays, you see it on the news or read it on the Internet: a foot and a half of snow in a day has become “Snowpocalypse!” “Snowmageddon!” “Snowapalooza!” “Snownami!” (Yes, I saw that one on the Internet, too.) Everything is insane and crazy and if the weather gets the tiniest bit worse, you’re gonna buried be up to your nostrils in snow as soon as you walk out the door. Assuming that your house hasn’t collapsed from the weight of the snow, thereby crushing the door frame.

This is all I want to know: What happened to weather forecasts for “Blizzard”?