I have just moved away from the linux server and the company CIHost that my websites and the websites of my customers were on since 2001. At that time, for $99 a month, I had the independence and enough kung fu to manage multiple web sites with a new and fairly secure technology. At times I even made enough money to break even and even profit from it. After enduring one upgrade with that company and because of my ignorance, suffering from their benign neglect, I found that my own web site, olena.com had been cracked and was being used as a platform to send spam. Shortly before that, I had recognized that some spammer was watching over my shoulder. One of my sites, was getting a lot of spam from an email address that was not used publicly. The email that was forwarding to that address was the public one. So I changed it to something else. Within an hour I was receiving spam from that changed internal address. So I worried, but set my worries aside.

Here was my problem. I just didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing or learning more in order to keep that cash flow going. I have loyal customers, and I could still serve their needs without going much further with managing the server. But I got tired of receiving over 1000 spam emails a day.

So I went hunting, and decided to move all the web sites to a single host though not to another dedicated server. This blog is now on that server. The technology is better (newer), and the support is OK, even though there are some rules the host doesn’t mention for people who buy multiple sites. That’s OK. The server is faster, the controls are more powerful, the possibilities for developing interesting sites is really pretty good.

I am listening to Mae, emo rock. I saw that a young friend on Facebook liked it. I previewed it, and bought it. It certainly fits my mood at the moment. I have found myself worried about lots of things lately, and subsequently I have found confidence in God and my reality that it is all going to work out even if it means that things will crash. I don’t really care whether they crash or not, or whether my plans work out or not, but it is a matter of trust that I’m not going to hurt myself on that account. I am in the middle of my doctoral research, there are very few adjunct jobs for me to teach and the economy is still souring more every day as we speak.

It seems the quick reaction of the public is to draw back and ignore the world, but I think this is a mistake. In this era of uncertainty, we should try to know more about our world. We should read more broadly, experiment with our lives in a way that permits the possibility of substantial growth. This will require unsettling the certainties and stabilities and force real work on our own selves. We should not doubt our intuitions but try them out at every moment to see if they prove true. We will need to be creative to catch up with the chaotic shifts of dramatically growing pools of knowledge. We can’t afford to be still long enough to become stagnant.

Hatefully, this means we will only have little time to refresh and renew, recreate. If we make it part of our practice to renew by learning, then the exhaustion we feel will go toward increased capacity and competence, where we will be able to rest a bit.

This is my new wordpress blog. Since I moved the old one, I can’t edit it anymore. There’s something wrong with the data. I think it is my fault that the data is corrupt, but then it’s OK. I’ll survive.