Archive for November, 2008

What I’m Thankful For

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Jill and I watched about five minutes of the parade on TV.  We hadn’t watched TV in about six months, so it was weird.  I was struck by how little of the parade had to do with Thanksgiving.  It featured Spongebob, the Energizer Bunny, girls on a float singing about how cool they were, Hello Kitty, etc.  And the announcers were very annoying.  In fact, Jill JUST said to me from the kitchen, “The parade is really just a commercial event.”

I’m not thankful for TV or dumb parades, I just had to get that off my chest.

This Thanksgiving, a part of what I’m thankful for is what I *don’t* have.  Check out the following verses from Proverbs 30:

“Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die:  Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.  Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’  Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.”

Most of us think that if we had more money, we could be more generous.  But it’s very rare for more money to make people generous – it usually has the opposite effect.  Jesus said it’s more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God… perhaps this is why?

I am thankful for a lot of things.  I have a wonderful wife, a house to live in, awesome toys, and many luxuries.  I have everything I need and much more.  In fact there are times that I worry that I’m too rich.  Am I in danger of disowning God because I have too much, or putting my trust in my riches?

I hope that I can make the request in Proverbs my request.  Just what I need to live, and some luxuries.  Not too much, please, lest I be in danger of being tempted by things like pride, materialism, and envy.  That’s why I’m thankful that I don’t have more than I do.  I’m very happy with what I have!

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Shrink Wrap Your Stuff

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Normally, shrink wrap is one of my pet peeves.  I hate it.  You get a new CD or DVD, and there’s this annoying and wasteful plastic barrier preventing you from getting the disc out of the case!  On bigger items, it’s even sillier and seems even more wasteful.  Sure, it gives you that “new and sealed” feeling, but for all that waste and inconvenience, it’s not worth it.

Anyway, one *good* use for shrink wrap is preventing drafts.  Last winter, we tried sealing up our drafty AC unit with pillow cases and duct tape.  You can see it in the corner of this picture as well as my brother-in-law Steve putting in our new windows:

This method was still kind of drafty.  This evening we wrapped it up, and it has to be ten times less drafty than last year.  It’s a good thing too – the AC is right next to the heater, and it negates a lot of the expensive heat when it’s spewing cold into the room.

It’s 19 degrees Fahrenheit out right now, but we’re warm and cozy with the new windows and shrink-wrapped AC!

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Let’s Get Physical

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

This is the 400th post since our WordPress blog started!  I know we’re not prolific bloggers, but we’ve been doing it a long time I guess.  We have older blogs from previous versions of our site that you can see here.  It has posts since 2003.  I’ve been keeping a personal website since 1999 back when geocities was popular. You can see many previous versions of our site here.

Jill and I start karate again tonight after a long absence.  There’s a place down the road that is very cheap and very close to us.  The style is Kenpo, although with a different teaching style than our other school.

We’ve been looking for something physical to do for a while.  In the past year we’ve signed up for recreational volleyball and indoor soccer, and loved both.  But the sign-ups for the next season aren’t happening for a while, and we both feel like we need to get some exercise.

I have also been doing a nightly exercise regimen before bed for about a year now.  20 pushups, 20 situps, and 5-10 pullups.  It’s not a lot, and it’s not aerobic, but it’s regular – I’ve only missed about five days since I started last November.  I figure that’s 7,200 pushups/situps and 1,800 pullups that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.  Jill swears she can tell the difference in how I look (and likes it), but I’m not sure.  Sometimes I think I can, and sometimes it doesn’t seem very noticeable.

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Busy!

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

I’ve been very busy the past two days.  On Friday, I started my new job substitute teaching at the middle school in Acton.  I taught seventh grade math and it wasn’t that bad!  The kids all listened to me, and a few even thought I was geeky enough to deserve the epithet “cool” (because I knew Weird Al songs).

Then right after school I went to the Devens Community Center to help set up for the Young Life banquet.  I volunteered to run sound this year and play guitar.  It took a few hours to get everything there and set up the huge PA system and all the wires and such.

Then on Saturday after my lessons we had to go early to set up the rest of the stuff for the banquet.  Eric Wilder of Trinity church helped me a lot and let me use his MacBook, which was WAY better than the PC I would have had to use otherwise.  He helped me set up parts of the sound too.

The banquet was great – we saw people we hadn’t seen in years.  Jill gave a short speech and we both sang a song in front of 200 people with Katie Enlow.  Jill and I were there from about 3-10, and I have been sick the past couple days, so we were exhausted by the time we got home.  Fortunately today was the Sabbath – a day to just relax and enjoy.

PS I’m going through our pictures and restructuring how it looks.  We weren’t updating frequently enough to warrant so many albums, so hopefully the simplified structure will be easier to update and navigate.

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New Music

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

I’ve been collaborating with Katie Enlow a bit musically!  Katie is famous in the “mash up” scene for her singing, and she recently moved back to Boston after living in Chicago for years.  Jill and I know her from high school and Young Life back in the day.  These days, she’s on the YL committee with Jill and I and was looking for an outlet for her great vocal abilities.

I’ve been able to create a couple of songs to her melodies.  I like being creative in this respect, since I come up with chord progressions all the time, but can’t seem to write lyrics or sing them very well. We’re a good fit musically!  Here’s our latest:

Crush by Katie Enlow and Ben Holt

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Wisdom From a 6.9 Year Old

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

Today at my Mom’s house my nephew Matthew was showing off his newly earned bag of M&M’s that he scored. Only moments later, though, I saw him in the dining room walking around the table placing 2 M&M’s at each place setting. He explained that he was giving 2 to everyone at lunch today. :) I complemented him and told him what a good role model he is. I told him that adults have trouble sharing things that they love, or things that God has given them, with others. He’s very inspiring! Just imagine what wisdom he will have in 2 weeks when he turns 7!

In relation, Ben and I have each been reading this book, Money, Posessions, and Eternity. It is a fantastic book that causes one to look at their possessions, generosity, and motives around money. It is really making me think.

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Heroic Hacker Defense

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Last night I got an email regarding the Freedom Farm website I created and host:

“Hi Ben, I just tried looking at the FF website and I got a turkish anthem popping up. It was so strange. Is it my computer?”

Hoping it was her computer but dreading the worst, I loaded the site. Here’s what appeared:

picture-1.jpg

Woah. Immediately I could see that I got hacked. The perpetrator was a Turkish extremist group, and later down the page it said:

picture-2.jpg

Apparently our humble Freedom Farm site met their criteria for being “Anti-Turk, Anti-Islam, Satanist, and pornographic”. Sweet.

Well, I called the company I host with, and they were pretty unhelpful other than to tell me to check my permissions and that this kind of thing happens all the time with Joomla/CMS setups. So I was left to figure out exactly what the hackers had done and how to fix it.

The first thing I did was to use a backup to see if any of the files in the site directory had been changed. There are thousands of flies in this directory, so it took a while and I didn’t find anything. Then I ssh’d into my account and used the “find” command to check modification times in the past two weeks for all files. While doing this, I found a few thousand files in ANOTHER site’s directory that I hadn’t put there! I was being hacked from two different people at the same time!

After three hours of troubleshooting and testing, I found the following:

1) The Turkish hackers had probably used a clever search query or other venerability in Joomla’s install to somehow gain access to the configuration part of the Freedom Farm site. Then they changed the template file to their own code (source code here). That was it. Nothing major really, and no permanent damage done. I replaced the files from the backup and it was fixed. It’s just a bit unnerving that someone can do this!

2) Hacker #2 had used a flaw in my PHP code (an include statement) to upload thousands of files to my server. I fixed this flaw and deleted the unwanted files. Again, no major damage done and not that hard to fix. I had run into this problem before but never knew the extent to which it could be exploited. Hopefully, I have fixed it permanently.

My hacker defense was actually sort of fun. It gave me something to do (even though I was up until 3 AM) and really tested my own skills. If this kind of thing happens again, I’ll be able to fix it much faster.

I thumb my nose at you, Turkish hackers! Pbbbbtttt!

Posted in Geek Talk, General, Hobbies | 1 Comment »