In the previous post we resolved to communicate more. Yesterday, I set out to do that and two and a half hours and one panic attack later I went home mentally exhausted. It appears a glitch in an update locked me out of the website administrators page. It also gave the appearance that it had been hacked since I couldn’t access it. Needless to say, once I got back control from the glitch thanks to some great support from the WordPress.com support team and they confirmed it was a communication error and we recovered everything. I set about making some changes to prevent it from happening again.
I am telling you this little vignette from my day yesterday to illustrate how we just expect things to work and when they don’t it can spiral out of control. In this case a 5-10 minute task never occurred but getting the ability to do it today took nearly three hours. Which means that everything I hoped to accomplish in those three hours never happened as well. That included at least two client phone calls to set up meetings as requested. Those get added to today’s tasks.
My work day is usually centered around three key tasks a day. Some are regulatory in nature having to do with compliance, others are routine things to keep the business up and running, and the bulk of them are working with our clients – solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals. If I get my key 3 done then I focus on the support tasks that allow me to better serve our clients. This is often research into planning strategies such as how the new tax law will impact the families we work with.
Here is a good example; two new computer vulnerabilities were discovered named Meltdown and Spectre. They affect virtually every computer chip processor in use today. Patches will be available for meltdown but come with a price of slowing performance. Spectre requires replacing every processor with a more secure processor that to my knowledge hasn’t been invented yet because its flaw is in the way the chip is designed. Exploits are being announced already. Am I affected – Yes. Are my clients affected – Yes. Solution to Meltdown – apply the patch and take the performance hit. Advise my clients and friends to apply the patch when it is available. Solution to Spectre is to buy all new equipment when it becomes available. Monitor all cloud based services we use to find out how they will mitigate the problem. Will I spend a lot of time on this issue? In all reality no I won’t but I am aware of it, I already have to buy new equipment to replace some that is aging out and I will just have to postpone it until a more secure system is available. The economic and security implications are huge but not my responsibility other than as a concerned citizen. Expect chip stocks to take a hit as well as computer manufacturers. Until secure chips are available most companies won’t want the hassle of knowingly installing additional security vulnerabilities.
When the patch is available for your device make sure it is installed.