This week’s mildly nerdy event was installing firewall software. Even though I’m
on a dial-up connection, given the rash of loathsome Internet activity, I’ve been
thinking about installing a firewall for quite a while. Actually getting around
to doing it was another story. What brought on the burst of activity was an e-mail
this week that ostensibly looked like it bounced back from my own e-mail account.
The trouble was that I never sent it.
A close perusal of the header information showed that the e-mail was forged
and wasn’t, in fact, from me. But the whole episode was still a little scary.
Fortunately I have a great hosting company and I’m able to ask them about stuff
like this. (SecureWebs at http://www.securewebs.com,
if you’re wondering.)
Anyway, according to my hosting company, my creepy e-mail was actually a new
form of e-mail virus that takes the entire e-mail header and uses e-mail addresses
from it. So apparently I’m in someone’s infected address book. Yuck.
In less nerdy matters, to keep my mind off the latest dastardly online deed,
I’ve been working on refinishing some cabinets in the kitchen. Over the last
seven years of doing dishes by hand, we were apparently very messy and splashed
a lot of water on the cabinets near the sink, so the finish was extremely damaged.
I took off the doors, sanded them, redid the stain, and covered them with industrial-strength
varnish that I hope will hold up better that the stuff that was on there before.
In any case, it’s a HUGE improvement and was very satisfying to see the cabinets
go from incredibly ugly to beautiful. I guess it was really time for the cabinets
to get a little TLC after all those years of abuse 😉