For close to two months now, I've been rather negligent of this blog. The reasons are numerous, however the following is a list of the primary causes.

• My wife is back to work as a laboratory scientist, now that maternity leave is complete, so "free time" (if such a thing exists with two small children) is getting squeezed entirely out, and...
  
• ...Professionally I've been extraordinarily busy, pursuing some new business avenues and opportunities, making it very difficult to allocate time to finishing articles-in-progress. 
  
  A partial motivation in maintaining a blog/original content system at the outset was to get some "cheap" (if the time dedicated to creating content was valueless) PR to drum up some consulting/software development customers, however that necessity has largely disappeared (and it was only intended as a fail-safe anyways. I never had to actively look for clients, instead relying upon business contacts and word of mouth. I've actually had to turn away most blog sourced  business due to a lack of capacity). Furthermore, as a PR vehicle for 360notes.com, I think the product itself will earn far more attention than any pimping in these entries ever would.
  
• Lastly, but certainly not least, the incredible success of the DNS entries makes everything else almost seem anticlimactic.
  
  I remember when I first started posting online papers, getting giddy to see that a half a dozen people read them in a week (and I carefully did reverse-IPs to see where they came from, following every referral back to the source), which I knew by downloading and looking at the logs every 15 minutes. As time went on, however, and readership increased, the "dose" required to have any motivational effect inflated, such that having several thousand distinct viewers (e.g. 10,000+ "hits", however nebulous that metric is) in a given day starts to almost seem like a failure (I see newspaper articles gushing about whatever human interest blog of the day caught their eye, and it makes me cynical seeing that they only have 600,000 visitors in a month. "That's only 20,000 visitors a day!"). It's strangely discouraging to think that new efforts will yield only a small portion of the attention the disposable DNS entries did.
  
  I'm completely over the "hit craving" stage that most bloggers/original content producers go through, and almost entirely disregard the stats. From this perspective, and hoping that I can find a small amount of available time, I'm going to finish up some long-in-the-making articles, along with some other content that I've been wanting to explore. Through it all I promise to disregard the stats.

Thanks for reading along, and have a fantastic day and week ahead!

Dennis

I've harped on the idea of securing your data several times over the past month. Not only is it a theoretical risk, but the data vulnerability hits seem to keep on coming. This time it was an employee that had a production database, containing the identity-theft vulnerable data for tens of millions of Americans. Apart from the fact that production, critical data was on a roaming PC, it seems likely by the response that the data isn't encrypted or protected in any meaningful way.

It's sad given that this is hardly the first time this has happened, and it'll inevitably keep on happening.