Hackers and Other Fun Stuff

Have you ever had a brush of intuition? I get them on occasion, and I am learning more and more to go with the flow. I got one this morning. Normally, during the week, I do not go online in the morning before I leave for the day. You know, too busy chasing after half-dressed kids trying to pry them into the rest of their clothing, trying to tame the hair that is defying gravity by standing straight up off of my head, holding frozen meat on my eyes in an attempt to bring down the puffiness of the bags, gulping coffee down like whiskey shots. It’s kind of difficult to fit in the computer in between all of that. But, for some reason, something told me to just pop online to check my mail this morning. And wow…it was a good thing I did! Apparently, the entire server was hacked last night. Someone on the server accessing via a shell script left a nice big security hole, and some punkass jumped right in and replaced every single index file on the entire server. And to top it all off, my server has several automatic updates a day, which I ordinarily love, but it just so happened that an automated backup happened just before anyone discovered the hacking, and so all of the hacked index files were backed up. Isn’t THAT fun? So I spent a good 15 minutes re-uploading all of my index files (thank goodness I learned a long time ago to keep backups on my computer).

And speaking of intuition, as I said, I have gotten it several times, and on occasion it has been freaky enough to make me wonder if I have some kind of ESP (or laran, as they would say on Marion Zimmer Bradley‘s world of Darkover). Hush, don’t laugh. One time, when Gregory was about 2 years old, I was working at a group home for multihandicapped adults, and was having a hard time finding daycare/babysitters. One person I had had been an acquaintance of mine for about 5-6 years (and this person told me when I was pregnant…before I knew…lol). Her mother had become ill and she had to go to Florida to be with her. She thought she might be gone for about 2 weeks. Well, it stretched on to a little over 4 weeks. Then, suddenly, one night, I woke up out of a sound sleep at around 3:30 in the morning, thinking about her. I called her phone, just to leave her a message that I was thinking about her. And she answered. She had gotten home…get this…about a half hour before I called. Eventually this person and I drifted apart, for reasons not even worth going into, but she remains the first person (besides Gregory) that I had such a strange rapport with.
And yes, you did see me write Gregory up there. My little elven child, my changling, I call him. When he was a baby, if I was upset or crying, it didn’t matter if he was asleep, or in another room, he would cry, too. (and he NEVER cried as a baby for no reason – he was an odd duck, for sure.) If I read a joke, or thought about one, he would laugh all of the sudden. It was a bit eerie, but made me feel so very conneted to him as well. That connection has abated as he grew older, but I have a feeling it is still there, under the surface, if both of us were not so stressed or concerned with other things.
I’m not sure if I feel the same thing with Donovan. I thought I had, at times, especially when I was nursing, but he is such a very different, disordered kind of child. It’s hard to find some peace within him. But maybe that’s what I am here for. 🙂 Now, if only I could find peace for myself….hmmmm.