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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Last night, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, we suffered a couple of vicious attacks of our own. The first was from an Anonymous, and probably very lonely, hacktivist, hell-bent on spreading minor inconvenience throughout the developed world. My blog was unavailable for about an hour, which was obviously the headline event of the day, but millions of other websites were affected too.

It seems that GoDaddy, the domain registrar and website host, was subjected to a malicious DDoS attack, as a result of which, every GoDaddy-registered site was temporarily knocked offline. This blog isn't actually hosted at GoDaddy, but I registered the web address with them, and use their DNS servers to redirect to this domain. Those servers went down, and therefore couldn’t point anyone to this page.

If none of that makes any sense, you can always try the simplified version from Christina Warren, entertainment editor at Mashable, who described the event with these words: "The epicness of this sort of hack cannot be denied. I mean, hot damn. That's a huge get."

Yeah.

That particular problem now seems to be resolved, but sadly it wasn't the only vicious hacking we encountered last night. Amelie's face was cut to ribbons by her scooter. To be honest, we're still not entirely sure what happened. I was doing the washing up, Lisa was feeding Toby, and Amelie was tearing down the hallway on her Hello Kitty scooter with half her clothes missing. It was just your average domestic scene in the Gardner household.

Unfortunately, the relative calm was broken by a bump and a scream, and the sight of Amelie standing in the living room doorway with blood pouring out of her mouth. When a similar thing happened a year ago, Lisa was forced to exit stage left before she fainted with nerves, and twelve months on, things were no different. The sight of her daughter's bloody face was enough to bring the memory of Lisa's own trauma flooding straight back, and she had no choice but to leave the scene of the accident, and head off for a cry in the bedroom.

To be honest, it looked a lot worse than last time. The amount of blood was much greater, and the handful of tissues I held to Amelie's face was soon soaked right through with red. I rushed to get her some Calpol, and thought I'd be rushing her straight to A&E, but as it transpired, it was a similar situation again. She'd bumped her face on her scooter, and the impromptu handlebar moustache had cut the inside of her top lip on her front teeth, slicing it open and producing lots of blood, but leaving her teeth undamaged.

Within ten minutes she'd stopped crying, and this morning she cheerfully insisted that it's all better. She looks a bit like Angelina Jolie, but we can cope with that. Especially as Toby looks like Brad Pitt.

1 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

Oh dear!  I expect it was another bid to get you to stay home this week!