Thursday, 9/23

 Thankfully, today started out much better than yesterday.

When we last met I was on my way to the dentist after losing an outside chunk of one of my teeth. I'm now the proud owner of a temporary cap on that tooth, and awaiting the arrival of the permanent cap one week from today, which means my smile will be back to normal a mere five days before I start shooting “High School Bowl” for the first time in two years.

So if I needed to lose part of a tooth, this was the perfect time for it. Not that there's ever a perfect time to lose a tooth, but if it was going to occur I'm glad it occurred now. Let's just hope it doesn't happen again until, say, the end of February.

Not that I want it to happen again, but you know what I mean.

Now onto the other adventure of the week (so far)--the tide may be turning against the Russian hackers.

For those of you who don't know, Russian hackers had tied up the company upstream from the company that provides our phone service at work with ransomware, demanding $5 million to unclog their servers. Thankfully, the people at both companies affected are quite smart and outfoxed the Russian hackers, which means that for the first time since Friday we have working phones at the station. Good thing, too, seeing as how phone calls from listeners are a big part of what we do here.

That's not the only dealings with Russian hackers that touched us peripherally, either. The company that provides us with our traffic software—how we schedule commercials—had their servers brought down by a different Russian hacking group. Thankfully, that didn't affect us at all, because while we use their software we don't use their cloud-based services. They keep trying to get us to do that, but we have older equipment and we like to keep things local.

In this case, it worked out. Otherwise we'd be manually placing each and every commercial we play in the computer by hand. And trust me—as the only one working here, that's NOT something to which I'd look forward.

Really.

So all the little kerfuffles of the week (so far) have been taken care of. I'm hopeful that the final two days of the week will be kerfuffle-free. If you would, keep your fingers crossed that's the case.

My sanity thanks you for that.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)