Many Congratulations

This last Saturday, The Chronicle was honored at the annual Society of Professional Journalists banquet at Meydenbauer Center when it was given 20 awards, including seven first-place wins for its coverage of the December floods and other stories from 2007.

Our entire staff was awarded a first-place win for the Wednesday, December 5 edition of the paper, "It came so fast." I remember waking up on the day of the floods to my phone ringing. Living in Olympia, I was safe. But I knew that work was going to get very hard for the next few days as others, who were in the flood zone, were not safe. I was certain our entire staff was ready and prepared.

I wasn't wrong.

I remember getting directions to take a back road into Centralia with I-5 closed. Our original plan was to have me update the paper from home, especially with the looming concern that the office could be flooded. Thankfully Centralia's downtown was all-but spared. Working from home, however, turned into an elusive dream when internet connection into and out of the county was bogged down by broken lines. The only way to get news on the web was to be at the server itself. I knew how important it was for those who still had the Internet to be able to get the latest updates. I managed to get to the office around 1:30 in the afternoon, two and a half hours past deadline.

Our editors were updating the paper's website with up-to-the-minute breaking news coverage and should be commended. I remember, after getting that day's paper online, heading over to the Buzz to find that the community was active in organizing relief effort already and letting everyone know what roads were closed and who was helping victims. For cyberspace, the whole event was quite awe inspiring.

I'm glad to see so many individuals here at The Chronicle awarded for all their hard work. So much of our younger staff was recognized for their creativity. Hopefully we'll see the hard work our dedicated web staff put into the website recognized this time next year! Congratulations, again, to everyone at The Chronicle.

The Trouble With Turkbots

You may have noticed a severe lack of new postings on "the Tubes," as my co-workers have begun to call this blog. The Tubes' writer has noticed this trend, too. I can assure you that I have two excuses I intend to employ: The firewall went up killing the blogs and I have had writer's block.

I shall now explain each to it's fullest.

The trouble began two weeks ago the day after my last entry. On Friday afternoon chronline.com was hacked by a PHP exploit that we were able to fix fairly quickly. I believe the hacked page was online for around a total of a minute-and-a-half. Take that, hacker! Turns out these hackers, these Turkish Hackers, are usually just robots from Turkey surfing the net and looking for PHP exploits.

I always imagined hacking as kind of a hobby for some people. If you get a robot to do it, what is the point? It's like watching a game of soccer where both teams are robots with no affiliation. Could it possibly get any more boring than that? Only if you replaced the word "soccer" with "sitting on the couch".

Jon quickly surmised a solution to these Turkbots by implementing the firewall to block Turkey. We somehow felt worried about blocking an entire nation of people from being able to access our website until we realized there are about fourteen computers in Turkey (all being used to run Turkbots as far as we know) and that none of them probably is too concerned about the events happening in Lewis County, Washington State, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere.

I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt it.

With the firewall up, however, we didn't realize the folly in being able to post blogs until a few days later when our co-workers attempted to update their own. That was an easy fix, however, by simply allowing the Blogger Software to connect to our server through the firewall. Once we added that (and Blogger, knowing this was a common issue, made it easy for us), everything was hunky-dory.

Well, except that I had the flu. Influenza does a strange thing to a person; once you're done retching and feeling as if you're slipping into infinity or that strange monsters are surrounding you, you're left in the recovery feeling very unmotivated. I spent most of last week and the beginning of this week in a stupor. And as soon as I was done with my bout of illness, my daughter and pregnant wife both came down with it. They're both feeling better now, but the Pierce Household has been a proverbial wasteland of illness for some number of days.

I didn't stop coming up with topics to write about during my absence, though. Looking back now, I'm almost glad I couldn't convince my fingers to type because the topics I did come up with are somewhat... lame. Here's what I had:

Anonymous, an anonymous group on the internet (shock!) has declared war on the Church of Scientology; not over their religious practice but over the ways the Church has dealt with dissenters and critics. I'm remaining fairly neutral on the issue, saying that everyone should have religious freedom. But Anonymous does make a point.

Voting for the caucus is the 9th (Saturday). You probably already know this.

Standards Compliance coding is fun, but extremely difficult. I've decided I'm going to stick to Transitional for at least another year. At least this time when I tried, I was able to build an entire Standards site until I needed to actually include content. One step closer, I suppose.

The Buzz is alive and doing well as we ramp-up towards the political season. I've decided that it would be best for me to leave my opinion out as much as possible, but feel that I can still post links to Snopes when some stupid e-mail gets circulated as fact. We're still waiting for vBulletin 3.7 to be released officially and then I will start undergoing the process of upgrading.