Quick quiz:

1. Your computer has been infected with a virus, and it deleted everything on the server. What would you do?

   1. Send the server hard drive to a data forensic/analysis firm to see if they can recover your project data.

   2. Recreate all your marketing material from scratch, scanning your logo and everything else.

   3. File a law suit against Microsoft, Symantec, and Dell for letting this happen.

   4. Call your friendly computer technician who disinfects your computers and then restores your previously backed up data from the Internet.

I originally thought it was just a new type of spam not yet recognized by the filter. But then I looked closer and realized that the little signature my spam filter adds to each message was missing-these messages had not even been checked. No wonder they were getting through in such large quantities!

It's only when the tools fail that you come to recognize how valuable they are. In the 5 hours the server spam filter was out, I received more than 50 spams, and many of my customers also noticed immediately. The cause of the outage was a power flicker in the nasty weather Seattle was getting that weekend, which made that server shut down. Fortunately, we had this contingency (and many others) covered for our vacation, and were able to get everything back up and running.

Well, our home and office, along with more than 1 million other people in western Washington, lost power last night. Unfortunately that means our entire email system went down, for about 14 hours.

And wouldn't you know it, just when we got the servers moved over to one of our partner's offices, the power returned?

It's now 5 pm Pacific, and we're taking our servers back to the office. After a brief 15 minutes of uptime, they'll be down again for approximately another hour...

We'll write more later, but we're glad to have power back for the weekend!

Hi,

Lots of news this month, so we're keeping the feature short. We're starting a new feature called "Free Software of the Month." Each month, we plan to highlight a free software package. There are some amazing software titles out there that do cool things for your business, your home, and your communities. Some of these run on a server, which we can host. Others are complete operating systems or packages you can use to replace expensive commercial software packages. We're starting out with a simple one you can install no matter what type of computer you use.

Free Software of the Month: Workrave

How much time do you spend in front of a computer every day? The answer for many of us is too much. If you work in an office environment, chances are you spend many hours a day in front of a computer, and are at risk for repetitive stress injuries such as tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

While no software can reduce your workload, taking frequent breaks and doing exercises to keep your muscles loose can help prevent injury.

Enter the most annoying software in my arsenal: Workrave.