Pappy
My dad was always a hard-ass while I was growing up. He was the same way with my little brothers as well. He was never mean, but he was always gruff, stern, and commanding. It was just his nature to be that way. If I had a skinned knee, he would tend the wound, but if I wanted to cry about it, I had to go to the nearest female to get sympathy.
That’s all changed with the arrival of my niece. She has totally changed my dad’s outlook on life, and it has amazed me. My niece is almost 2 years old, and she is the cutest little thing. She’s very smart, very outgoing, and a happy little child. She also has a bit of a mean streak, but I don’t think it’ll be bad enough to get her into trouble.
While watching her with my dad while I was in Texas, it almost brought me to tears. My dad has finally mellowed out, and has become the loving individual that I had always wished for while I was growing up. He is spoiling my niece rotten, and he seems to be loving every moment of it. My dad is totally wrapped around that little girl’s finger, and it seems to have made him a better person.
I only hope that he’s around for many years to come to help raise her and give her the love that she needs. I’m not saying that my little brother and his wife can’t do that. They certainly can (and are!), but I’m a firm believer in the saying that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Every child needs their own village to grow up in, and my dad is an important part of that.
For the first time in a long time, I’m happy to say that I’m related to my dad.
Live long, Pappy.
Caught Up On Email
I finally got caught up on email today. I had over 3,000 messages for work and over 500 for my personal email. It took me until about 2 PM today to finally get through it all. Most of the work messages were automated messages that I could mass delete, so I did that. Even after the filters, mass deletions, and randomly ignoring emails, I still had about 70 that I had to read and respond to. Some of them were important, but most of them were not.
The personal email was a little better. About 300 of them were from technical mailing lists, and I didn’t feel like going through it all. I hadn’t posted to the mailing lists recently, so I wasn’t expecting any replies. I just deleted those and moved on. Lots of messages were from my father-in-law, so I read his jokes and deleted them.
I have some automated emails from my server that tell me about “health issues” with the server. This includes break-in attempts. It was pretty much average (about 300 a night), so no big deal. However, one of the days logged almost 3,000 attempts from a single IP. I pushed all of the logs through a Perl script that I had written to parse hack attempts, capture IPs, do DNS lookups on those IPs, and publish results. It took a while for that script to run since it had over a week of data to go through instead of just 24 hours. I took the results and blocked over a dozen IPs that had more than 20 attempts to break into my server in the past week. I don’t screw around when it comes to protecting my server.
I may have time tonight to write up some blog entires about my vacation. We’ll see how it goes.
Vacation Stories
I’ve got quite a bit to talk about for my recent vacation. I’m going to work on some decent posts tonight, and I’ll start posting them tomorrow. Until then, you’ll just have to wait until I get some time to write.
BTW: Not checking your email for a week leads to TONS of work. I’ve just been doing email all day long. Over 3000 work emails and almost 500 personal emails. Gnah!
Family Warms The Heart
I spent most of Saturday, a bit of Sunday, and a bit more of Monday with family in Texas. I’ve gotten to see tons of people that I haven’t seen in years, and it’s made me really happy. I had forgotten how much I love being around these folks, but it makes me a little sad because I know how very little of them I’ll be seeing in the future. I see my Mom and Step-dad every year or so, and my Uncle Bub and Aunt Vernelle every other year, but I only see my Aunt Melba and Uncle B.T. at big weddings or big funerals. I wish I could see them more, but they live in Houston, and I really just don’t get enough time off of work to get down there all that often. I did get to see Melba and B.T. Saturday while I was in Stinnett, and it was good.
Everyone is eager to find out the sex of the baby that Kiara and I are going to be having, so I have to add a few people to the phone list on who to call as things with the baby develop.
