A Big Walk…

The Big Walk 20130426

Took place on Friday 28 April for Scouts Liam and Olivia Simes.  Taking five hours and travelling approximately 16 Kilometres from Wind turbine turn off on Ashton Fitchett Drive through to Owhiro Bay, travelling via the Brooklyn Wind Turbine, Hawkins Hill (and the Radar Dome,) Te Kopahou Peak, Abigail Bay, Sinclair Head, and Red Rocks!

20130426 Red Rocks

Reports are that they slept very well that night…

Large attack on WordPress sites – but we’re safe

internet_patch.png.scaled500Some of you may have read about a large attack on WordPress hosted sites.  We use WordPress to run brooklynscouts.org.nz

Fortunately, we also use CloudFlare‘s (free) service to protect us from harm, reduce our traffic costs and speed up content delivery internationally.  Predictably, the CloudFlare team were on to this issue very early and implemented the required protection:

We just pushed a rule out through CloudFlare’s WAF that detects the signature of the attack and stops it. Rather than limiting this to only paying customers, CloudFlare is rolling it out the fix to all our customers automatically, including customers on our free plan. If you are a WordPress user and you are using CloudFlare, you are now protected from this latest brute force attack. – CloudFlare Blog full entry

If our site goes offline, it’s going to be due to an admin stuff by me – not by this sort of attack!

pics: Hall rejuvenation – weekend 1

Wow – what a transformation already.  With fantastic support from parents and youth alike.

Ably led by Rex and Erina, a team of 15 adults and 4 youth worked shifts throughout Saturday and Sunday to blast, scrape, yank, saw, slap and dab their way an huge way towards our first goal: repair and painting of the South and West exterior walls.

Thanks to: Rex, Erina, Chris, Matt, Mel, Perry, Julia, Lynne, Dave, Donald, Marion, Dinesh, Richard, Bob, Denise – and Alaigne, Harriet, Harris and Sam.

How bad were things? Not terrible, but we uncovered some moderate rot around many of the windows and a bad patch on the South-West corner.  Rex went into battle with rot killer, power saw, and years of experience and by Sunday it had yielded!  We are getting quotes for window repairs.

Next up is finishing the repairs, completing the top coats, and then doing the window and edging in Scouting purple!

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