September 29-30, 2001 — The longest nights

I knew as soon as I woke up on Saturday morning that I'd picked up a cold while at the show the night before. I drank lots of fluids. I used up all my Kleenex. I ended up in bed at 11:00 pm, with a roll of toilet paper subbing in for Kleenex, unable to sleep.

I lay awake for over seven hours. I'd nod off for maybe twenty or thirty minutes every few hours, but that was as good as it got. In between vague hallucinations and banging my head against the wall, I got to thinking about Web sites and Web site back-ends and security and whatnot. I thought a lot about Makeoutclub.

I finally fell to sleep in between 6:00 am and 7:00 am. I woke up at 11:30 am and started my day. I told Johnston that my goal for the day was to find a security flaw in Makeoutclub's setup. Because it's good to have goals, and I needed a distraction from setting up the Bran Van 3000 message board.

Ten minutes later, I could change the password of or outright delete anyone on Makeoutclub. I emailed Gibby, the fellow who runs the site, to tell him as much.

It turns out that they had been working on security upgrades for a long time. They rolled them out that night, and now it seems as thought the site is much, much more secure. It's scary to think about how long that hole must've been open, though. It would've been fairly short work to erase everyone on the site or to change anyone's profile to anything you might want it to be.

My interest in site security waning, I went back to the Bran Van 3000 message board. It's now online and more or less working properly. And as pink as ever. The Grand Royal message board is supposed to die as soon as Monday, so it was a bit of an eleventh-hour site update, but at least it got done in the end.

People are already starting to move to the new board, which is nice. I worried that it might lie empty for a day or two, but people seem to be taking to it quite nicely. It turns out that my server is a lot slower than I'd expected it to be, which is a bit disappointing, but I guess you take what you can get...

Speaking of the server, I was told that I'd be given a credit card number to pay for it a couple of weeks ago, but I never did get it. It's now on my credit card because the Grand Royal one would've bounced when the ISP tried to bill it today. I'll just keep telling myself that it's all about the love...

Maybe these entries'll eventually be a bit less nerdy. Unless you like them this way?