Anybody else notice a huge increase in spam between June 1 and June 18, 2009?

I have one location that normally processes between 24,000 and 30,000 emails a day, with about 500 to 800 being legit. The messages processed at that location have increased about 10,000 per day until the 16th when it reached about 80,000 messages per day (still having 500 to 800 being legit).

It got to the point where I had to contact Barracuda Networks tech support so they could change some configuration settings and help me adjust the MTA's settings to cut down the number of messages scanned, just so that the inbound message queue didn't get bottled up and swell past 15,000 messages. Since the changes, the barracuda interface itself is much more responsive.

I won't go into all the settings that were adjusted, but I will say that the techs I worked with were very helpful and we are now "weathering the storm" in much better shape than we were before.

We were getting creamed from IP addresses from jp, nz, au, br, cn, etc. We were also getting a ton of messages with bad user IDs. Emails with viruses normally run about 2% of messages, but we started getting a much higher percent with viruses, along with the massive volume increase.

Click on the little chart to see it full size.

I'm preparing for my surgery scheduled for Tuesday, June 23, 2009. This "robotic radical prostatectomy" should cure me of prostate cancer and eliminate the need for any further treatment.

I'll be in the hospital that Tuesday and then going home the next day. If things go well, I'll be back on email and cell phone on Thursday (Friday at the latest). I'll be unable to drive for 2 weeks, but will be working to get back to a normal schedule as soon as it is reasonable. This means I'll be working from home "as tolerated" until around July 7th. From that point, I'll be on lifting restrictions for a few months, but I should be OK to work, other than that.

During that Tuesday and Wednesday, if you need the "please do this whenever you can get to it" kind of assistance, you can just email me or leave a voicemail and I'll get back to you as I can. If I can't deal with an issue from home, I'll be able to schedule a tech visit from my backup team, as circumstances dictate.

Don't worry about contacting me during the two weeks I'm recovering at home. If things go as planned, I should be pretty bored.

I would appreciate it if you would remember me in prayer on June 23!

Regards,
sj

The Outlook auto-complete feature is kind of nice, but it can be unpredictable and strange when it starts to recommend certain addresses.

Here are a few tips to help get things under control...

Behold the amazing platypus
duck-billed, web-footed, and venomous
seems to have fun
having eggs not live young
more than one can be called
 platy-puses
  platy-pi
   platy-todes
    or just platypus

Ever hear somebody mention the size of a file in bytes, K, meg, or gigabytes and wonder how really big that file is?

Here are the definitions of each of these:

Which reminds me of a poem I just wrote:

THE YOTTABYTE
the yottabyte, is a lotta byte
the biggest of all the prefix
and to think! the biggest is just
1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176!

There is a lot to know about time, project, and work management. But, to me, it all seems to come down to one thing: the power of the list.

There are some great websites (http://www.43folders.com) and books (Time Management for System Administrators) about time management and getting organized, but the two most important things you can do to get and stay organized are to "commit to the list" and to "commit to the cycle."

Doing these two things keeps me from bouncing around, forgetting things, working on the wrong priorities, worrying about what I should be doing, and feeling stressed by incoming work that is exceeding the outgoing work.

Here's what I do...

All of a sudden, I've had multiple clients calling me today with problems from upgrading, or trying to upgrade, Adobe Flash. They can't seem to uninstall it from Add/Remove Applications in the Control Panel and then re-install it.

So far, though I don't know the cause, I've found a quick solution...

I finished Guy's book "Reality Check" (RC) a little while ago and must say I really enjoyed it. I'm in the middle of starting about 5 major projects and found RC to be a great resource as I work my way through these diverse "starts".

The book is written in easily digestible chunks (the book was admittedly derived from his previous book "The Art of the Start" (TAOTS) and his blog) and the chapters are well organized in related sections.

While there is some repetition and cross reference between Guy's other projects, I found RC to be better organized and a much easier read then TAOTS. It is also more current and, I felt, a little better informed.

I do a lot of design work. I'm better at systems internals than I am at UI, but I know what I like in a UI and can usually mimic it (especially within the confines of a predefined UI set of rules such as Windows MDI or Google Android, if you follow what I mean).

Anyway, I'm intrigued by product design, architecture, photography, graphics layout, video editing, etc. and they all require an understanding of design and design principles (or at least the ability to mimic them) so I'm often on the lookout for theoretical works on the subject.

I enjoyed reading Matthew E. May's PDF "In Pursuit of Elegance" for that reason.

This short 6 page work is really just a preview to May's book of the same name. As he says in the last lines of the PDF:

"there is only one matter left to discuss in order to bring the search for elegance to its conclusion, and that is an understanding of a technique by which the power of the missing piece can be applied in such a way that it maintains its power and place in whatever we attempt—an unpacking, if you will, from the travels through elegance.

"And for that, I’m afraid, you will need to purchase the book."

What makes this PDF worth reading (for the price)? It raises interesting issues about the definition of "elegance" and provides some interesting examples. He does trot out some rather worn stories (hasn't everyone heard that Michelangelo said carving the statue of David was "simply a matter of removing the stone that was not David"?) and there are a few typos, but I did find it an interesting read.

The definition he uses, that "Elegance is at once symmetrical, seductive, subtractive, and sustainable" is a good one and is, itself, elegant.

Good enough definition that I might even buy the book, or at least get it from the library. (Hey, if you click on that link and pre-order before May 19, 2009 or buy the book after that, I get some Ama$on.)

Well, I've had my Dev1 unit for a few days and thought I'd share my first impressions of the device and the Google OS. There are a lot of reviews already for the T-Mobile G1, so I'll mainly focus on the differences and my specific experience along with a basic run through of what I've seen so far.