I’ve been super stressed out and overwhelmed and weary lately. In a fabulous and much-needed conversation with the Marvelous Ms M, I realized (for, like, the 50th time) that I’m trying to wear far too many hats at once.

I eventually came up with the perfect solution to all my problems: All I need to do is hire a Hydra.

So I wrote a want-ad.

Wanted: one fully grown, well-trained Hydra for assistance with small business, in a Personal Assistant-type role. Weary woman has far too many hats and needs extra heads to share burdens.

Please contact me if interested; position needs immediate filling.

I’ve posted it to my creative writing site, and also on Craig’s List.

Maybe I’ll find one. Can’t hurt to look, eh?

I just spent an hour figuring out whether our website had been hacked into sending Viagra spam, so the least I can do is to share what I learned.

The panic started when Kyeli and I received 30 emails in the space of 5 minutes, all of them things like “Out of Office autoreply” or “Delivery failure notification”, you know, like what you often get when you send email to a nonexistent email address or someone who’s busy or on vacation. But the emails were all sent to random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com, apparently as autoresponses to emails from random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com.

Kyeli panicked and thought we had been hacked. I told her not to worry, that it was just email spoofing, that it happens all the time, and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

But how could I be sure? If our site was actually hacked, we could get deindexed, and it could totally hose our website and our business. So it deserved some investigation. Here’s what I found.

1. Don’t panic. 99% of the time it’s just spoofing, not hacking.

2. Check your sendmail logs.

Sendmail logs are in different places depending on your web hosting, so I can’t tell you where they are or how to find them on your hosting service. But if you’re hosted with a company that doesn’t let you access them directly, you can ask them to check the logs for you.

3. Check the mail headers of the emails sent “from you”.

Look for the Received header and see if it’s from your hosting company (e.g. something.lunarpages.com) or from some random place, in my example vorlagen.domain.invalid (h199.244.19.98.dynamic.ip.windstream.net [98.19.244.199]).
This will only work if some of the autoresponders are kind enough to include headers when they bounce back the email to you.

Thanks to @kristinab, @FontSiteDiva, @rose_w, @soupwiththefork, and @soniasimone for helping me figure out what to do and/or helping me stay calm. (:

People get me and Kyeli mixed up all the time. We work together so closely, it’s easy to do. This morning, Jessica Van Hove made a great suggestion to help out with this. (Thanks, Jessica!)

You know those speech bubbles at the bottom of each post with the picture of whoever wrote the post? We added those to the website so it would be easier to tell us apart. But lots of people read our blog via an RSS reader, and because of the way WordPress works, the speech bubbles and pictures only showed up on the website, not in the RSS feed.

Today I did some WordPress hacking and finally got it to work! YAY! *happy dance*

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll (hopefully) see my smiling face at the bottom. I’d appreciate feedback on how it looks for you!

We interrupt Iron Pentacle Friday for a special bulletin:

Today is Kyeli’s birthday!

(For those of you not playing along at home, Kyeli is my lovely wife. We’ve been married for three and a half years, and they’ve been the happiest and awesomest years of my life. So far. I’m sure the ones to come will be even awesomer.)

She’s a brilliant star, and this is her day to shine. She’s sweet, passionate, intense, fierce, brilliant, creative, powerful, gorgeous, clever, sexy, and caring.

And so, on this special day, I could do no less than to hire a potato to send her special birthday wishes.

When Google Chrome came out, I was inspired. I read the comic and thought to myself, “This is awesome. This is what a web browser is meant to be.” So I switched. I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser since it came out, and I’ve only been using Firefox for FireFTP and a couple of finicky sites that don’t work perfectly under Chrome.

Chrome is slick and fast. It made me feel cool to be using it, because it’s Google and it’s a geeky thing to do. It also made me feel good about myself to be using it, because I was supporting design principles I believe in.

Today I switched back to Firefox. Here’s why.

1. Add-ons. Tab Mix Plus (Duplicate Tab!), Greasemonkey, Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, All-in-one Gestures (Right-drag to go back a page!), Googlepedia, Word Count Plus, the Remember the Milk extension, FireFTP, and many more.

Each one of these add-ons makes my life a little simpler and a little more pleasant. I’ve been getting by without them. But I’m breathing a sigh of relief now that I’m using Firefox again. I’ve been choosing the browser that was better in principle instead of the browser that’s better in practice. Today, I don’t need the browser that best supports good web development standards. Today, I need the browser that best supports me getting my work done efficiently and happily.

2. Compatibility. There are a few sites that don’t work perfectly with Chrome, like the registration for AmazonConnect, Neilsen BookData, and the pop-up window at the Kitchen Table. I sometimes ended up having both browsers open when I visited one of those problematic sites. But I’ve encountered zero sites that work with Chrome but not Firefox, so I won’t ever be using Chrome again, unless I really can’t remember a password I created during the last few months. (;

Chrome made me feel cool.
Firefox makes me feel happy and productive.

It’s like I’m dumping my glamorous, glitzy, Gucci-wearing girlfriend for a woman who wears overalls and has some dirt on her knees, but knows how to wrestle a pig to the ground, solve differential equations, paints watercolors in her spare time, can kick you in the face with her mad Krav Maga skills, and does a little sysadmin work on the side.

That woman is hot.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you, baby. I’m back.

12:12am, January 7th, 1998.

The most anticipated moment of my life, after 10 months of pregnancy and 17 hours of labor, my son was born. The tiniest, most intense, most amazing blue eyes I’ve ever seen met mine and we quietly regarded each other while the world kept spinning. Doctors, nurses, family members came and went, and we were oblivious, watching each other. He gripped my finger like his life depended on it. My breath and his synced for a moment, and I’m sure our hearts did, too.

My world changed forever. “Welcome to the world, Dru,” I whispered.

Today, he is eleven years old. The most amazing, whirlwind, exciting eleven years of my life, and I thank the gods every moment of every day for this kid. He’s my best friend, my sweet baby, my not-so-wee-anymore little man, my rapidly-growing-up son.

Happy birthday, Dru. May all your days be filled with light, may every pain bring a lesson, may every step take you where you want to go.

This year for Yule, we gave our son Dru a fun quest to complete. Y’all can join in the fun remotely. (:

The quest began when we handed Dru this piece of paper:

At first, he didn’t know that it was a clue, but when we told him we weren’t giving him anything else for Yule (it was technically true, because he was going to find them himself) he figured out that this clue referred to the game “Ticket to Ride” on our game shelf.

Inside Ticket to Ride he found an action figure of Hercules (he’s into Greek mythology) and his next clue:

He noodled for some time about what this could mean. “Nemean Lion crossing? Aegean Boar crossing? Hydra crossing? Dragon crossing?” but then he figured it out! “Unicorn crossing!” he said, and went outside to investigate the sign outside the front door of our apartment!

An action figure of the Cyclops was hanging from the lower nail. He grabbed the Cyclops but couldn’t figure out where the next clue was. After a bit of looking and searching, he pulled the sign off the fence find the following clue taped to the reverse side:

“The rats!” shouted Dru. He remembered the names of Kyeli’s new rats: Suki and Hikari. Love and light. So we all tromped upstairs to the rat cage! Hanging on the cage was… the key to our car.

Dru took the key, said, “The car?”, and we all went outside to the car. He unlocked it and found on the steering wheel an action figure of the Minotaur and a big sign saying:

So he put the key in the ignition, started the car, and…

Hold on a sec. This bit requires a bit of backstory. In September, we wrote and recorded a little song for Havi. It was a song about milk. (scroll down or search for “milk”).

Ever since September, Dru will occasionally randomly start singing the milk song. It’s so cool to hear our son sing “Selmaaaaa the duck…” while he’s in the shower. (: So that’s your backstory. Now back to today!

Dru started the car, and… this song came on.

After thinking about it for a few seconds, he shouted, “The fridge!” and we all ran back inside and we followed him into the kitchen. He opened up the fridge, and what did he find behind the soy milk? An action figure of Poseidon and the final clue:

We forgot that it had been so long since the last time we’d been geocaching that he wouldn’t immediately recognize a pair of coordinates. We gave him a slight hint by showing him a map of the world with longitude and latitude marked on it.

He figured it out, so we went geocaching! Dru entered the coordinates into our GPS and we got in the car. I drove while Dru sat in the passenger seat telling me which way to turn. Eventually we got close and Dru told me where to park. We parked there, got out, and walked across the street to the nearby woods. After a few minutes of bushwhacking through the trees and brush, Dru reached the final destination of his quest: a big gift-wrapped box filled with all sorts of goodies! Inside the box was an action figure of Zeus, the new Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, the Time Turner from Harry Potter, Glory of the Roman Empire, and a check.

Here are all the action figures of the Greek gods and other beings of myth, arranged heroically:

It was a nice haul and a fun adventure — for Dru and for all of us. (:

Several people have remarked that it’s not easy for them to identify which of us posts which posts. So we made a fun new speech bubble thingamajig! At the bottom of each post, the blog will display an icon of whichever one of us posted it, along with a speech bubble. It probably won’t show up in the RSS feed, though, just in the blog. So if you’re reading this in an email or a feed reader, click through so you can see the pretty new shiny thing! (:

NOTE: This is completely off-topic and will probably only interest you if you’re interested in recording podcasts or creating other audio products. Commence geekout in 3… 2… 1…

At this Tuesday’s Communication for the Holidays course, Calliflower failed to record the first two-thirds of the course. We re-recorded it ourselves using Audacity and stitched the two halves together, but it became super loud when it switched to the second half.

We tried using Audacity’s normalize function, but all that does is soften or louden the entire file by a fixed amount, based on the loudest part. Listen to how loud it becomes all of a sudden:

Normalized MP3 (13 seconds)

But The Levelator solved the problem. It softens or loudens the file smoothly, and can soften or louden different sections independently. So if a loud person is talking, it’ll soften them a bit, and then later if a soft person talks for a while, it’ll louden them. It’s awesome. Listen to how much clearer the first half is, and how much smoother the volume transition is:

Levelated MP3 (13 seconds)

You can see the difference visually, too! Normalized is on top, Levelated is on the bottom.

Hooray for the Levelator!

I’m helping organize an exciting project for the month of December, and I wanted to let y’all know about it. It’s the Triiibes Blog Project, a blog about leadership, community building, and modern-day tribes. I wrote the first post, but the rest will be written by other members of Triiibes, Seth Godin‘s social network, to participate and write articles — one post a day for the rest of December.

If this sounds interesting to you, check it out or subscribe for December. It’ll be fun!