This is Why I Don't Scrapbook

My kids were not thrilled to be going back to school. They don't hate school. But we are not organized, nor are we morning people so getting to school on a normal day takes immense effort on everyone's part. Their dad leaves for work early so he asked me to snap a photo of the first day and I tried to oblige. I envy all the moms with smiling kids or funny faces and hand made signs indicating each child's grades. The brushed hair, the matching clothes, and the special Back-to-School breakfasts. We scarfed down some toast and cold cereal and as the kids were climbing into the van I said, "Wait! Your dad wants a picture!" My daughter (naturally) refused. I grabbed my phone quickly and managed to snap this before she climbed in and slammed the door. This girl will take silly selfies all day. She makes videos with her iPod Touch and wants her own YouTube channel. But when I want a decent snapshot, I get freakin' Linda Blair Hairy Eyeballs.

ID-10-T Problems

Someone tell me how I ended up an IT person. Not a paid IT person, mind you, but the person who has to troubleshoot the wi-fi, problems with the laptop and figure out who has hacked our Minecraft server?

Last week, our Charter internet wasn't working. Seemed like a complete outage and Charter was not very helpful about when they woudl be back online. I used my phone to check out Facebook and see what others in town were doing. A link to Reddit helped me find out what was going on. A Denial of Service Attack was going on with Charter's Domain Name Servers. The DNSs are the servers that sort out website addresses--if you type in web address, it has to be changed into a number address which leads you to the correct server where the information you want is hosted.

Since our wi-fi router was trying to go to Charters DNS address, we kept getting bupkis. But reprogramming the router to go to any number of other free DNSs out there resulted in a quick resolution of the problem.

Then the kids' Minecraft server got hacked. We pay Beastnode a small fee to host our server and provide an easy (ok, less difficult) control panel so our kids can play remotely with their friends. It's whitelisted, which means only the players we put on a list can access the server to play. However, we kept finding strange, rude, signs threatening players and then players would randomly get banned (only people with operator access can do this). I emailed support and they said someone was running a force op hack on the server--there are programs out there which allow you to force your way onto a private server and wreak havoc.

So I spend a few hours finding a solution--choosing a new server program that offered a command that would ban any person who tried to do run a force op hack. In the process of all these changes, I had to reconfigure the server settings and the whitelist got screwed up so I had to figure out how to fix that on the server console.

This is not in my nature. I am neither technologically inclined, nor meticulous about solving problems step by step. I like to push buttons until something happens. Which drives my husband bat-shit crazy. Software is not always perfect. The code doesn't always seem to run every program correctly all the time so you have to be prepared to try something different. My husband want to push the exact same buttons and get the exact same result every single time. In a perfect world, that would happen. But in a perfect world, I wouldn't have had to wipe asses for two years after I potty trained my last kid.