July

What happened in July:

• I gave a lesson in church. I didn't realize it was going to be the entire ward (aka a 'combined' meeting). What clued me in was many, many people started coming through the door. I proceed to freak out a little. I had prepared but I hadn't written a lot of stuff down. I had many questions to ask but I was not prepared for the amount of people. I was able to deliver a good lesson through the help of the spirit.
• The other computer guy at work  was on vacation in Ireland for a week and half. That meant that I had to solve the majority of the computer issues. There were some things that I had to wait until Rick was back but I was able to do a lot and learned a ton. There was one intense day where our network had a complete meltdown. Luckily Jeff was there to figure it out while I helped in whatever capacity I could. 
• My little sister, Janae, passed her halfway mark on her year and half long church mission in the Phillipines. Usually we get an email every Sunday around midnight, but there were two Sundays that went by without any word. I wasn't worried, I figured there was another storm, and sure enough she finally was able to write and tell us about how a tropical storm ripped through their area and completely obliterated banana trees and power lines. They holed up in their apartment during the storm and did what they could to stop the water from coming in and they prayed really hard. It sounded like a crazy experience. They had spent the previous couple weeks helping clean up the mess and generally helping wherever they could. 
• There was a big dust storm in Phoenix and the missionaries called us and asked if they could come to our place to get out of the storm since they're on bikes. We played a game of Hanabi with them, which is a short little cooperative card game.
• A month or two ago, I had written a program which would log in to my works Shutterstock.com account and automatically search for and download images using any unused downloads which we may still have every day before the download count resets. Anyway, I think Shutterstock is starting to have server issues because they blocked my works IP address from accessing their site, and I was easily able to get around that using proxy servers, but a few days later their website went down for about 30 minutes. I think they may have been having issues and were looking at ways to increase performance and that's when they noticed how often this certain IP address accesses their resources. After that, I also decided to rewrite my program in an object oriented way so that it would be easier to make changes to as I find bugs or I have to change the proxy that I'm using.