A tiny problem

I had a good weekend, it was eventful and charming and a few things happened that will never happen again, and that’s always good. First, I “swept” my first training ride.

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That’s me and Jen and the two other sweeps who were very gentle with the newbies. “Sweeping a ride” is when you agree that you’ll ride slower than the slowest rider to make sure that nobody get’s left behind.  On the long rides (this one was 83km) two sweeps ride bikes, and two sweeps travel in a car, driving the route over and over again, making sure that all the riders are ok. Jen and I had a first aid kit (we didn’t have to use it, thank goodness) and water and a pump, and all the riders did really great, except for one guy who hit a pothole and got two flats 30km from home.  (We drove him to the subway.) Jen and I have to sweep three more rides, but we’re ever so grateful that we got our first one done without anybody calling 911, which I think was absolutely our biggest fear.

I got home, washed the dirt off of me, and headed over to Lou’s house, which is really Kate and Carlo’s house (on account of they are the adults, and they hold the mortgage, despite the way that the worlds most charming two year old runs the place.)

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(That’s Lou’s first selfie. What kind of a person gives a two year old a smartphone so he can take a selfie? <raises hand slowly> I did. Clearly I value his fun more than my phone.)

Last week, after months of work and study, Carlos became a Canadian citizen.

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We’re all so proud to have him, and so there were Canadian presents and Canadian food, Canadian drinks (that would be the magnificent cocktail known as the Ceasar. Virtually unknown outside of Canada, and the worlds a poorer place for it.)

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There was everyone dressed in Canadian clothes, and flags and posters and good wishes and nobody could have been happier for him.  Carlos has spent the last few weeks asking Canadians questions from the citizenship test, and then demanding they turn over their passports if they don’t know the answers. It’s funnier than it sounds, and highlights how very hard it is to get that precious passport, if you weren’t lucky enough to be born in this safe, prosperous and beautiful country. (Sorry. Some national pride leaked out there.)

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It was a wonderful day.

Today of course, is another thing. This morning I woke up and discovered that I had about 10 000 bounced emails. (That number isn’t a joke.) I called Liquid Web right away (they’re awesome, if you’re ever wondering) and found out that while I slept my email had been compromised, and a really, really, really huge number of emails had been sent from my server. We changed my password, said some unbelievably unkind things about spammers,  the dude cleaned out the thousands and thousands of emails waiting to be sent from the server, and assured me that things would be okay now.   I went for a bike ride.

When I came back, I had about 20 000 notifications of bounced mail, and as I sat down in front of my computer wondering how I was ever, ever going to delete all that, I noticed something AMAZING if by amazing, you understand that I mean completely horrible.

I was getting 256 emails per minute.

You can bet your stash that I was back on the phone with Liquid Web in about two shakes of a lambs tail, and found out that while everything is going to be okay, it’s going to take a while to be okay.  Turns out my client can only download 256 per minute. That’s the cap. There’s so many waiting to be downloaded (ones that already belong to me as a result of the overnight incursion) that it’s going to take three days to stop. THREE DAYS – and during that time my computer is going to be so busy I might as well forget I have email.

I got 4000 emails while we were talking about it.

Dude gave me some information on how to deal with it, advised me that the best thing I could do was wait for it to stop, and then sort it, and said I was going to have a “super unproductive day.”  He sounded genuinely sympathetic.  He suggested I have a beer and try not to think about it.

That’s totally what I’m doing, and let me tell you this.

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There’s no such thing as unproductive around here.  No email? That’s cool.  I have something else to do.