Bring on the bots..

We've been having a lot of fun over the past two weeks in our boot land server.

It's been a long while since the last time we got offline for such a long period of time (2 years?), at the time was required for overcoming the attack that we move from a virtual shared server onto a fully dedicated server.

At the time, our growth just seemed to keep going up unexpectedly and suddenly we were having thousands of visitors from all around the world looking for boot disk solutions.

This was two years ago.

Currently.. boot land grown onto thousands of daily visitors and terabytes of monthly information being exchanged from the server.

We've been happy and busy working on the new things that appeared ever since. However, there is still one situation that is challenging our capacity to survive the test of time: bots.

Given the current position of boot land as a popular site, we are experiencing a mass wave of bot machines that visit our site and associated domains (winbuilder.net et al), causing our resources to be quickly depleted into what people would call as a DDoS. Typically, this is a obviously a good way to ensure that a competing site is sent for oblivion.

And a strong DDoS it was indeed. The server was not prepared and a massive black out got installed for 5 days in a row.

But.. we're alive. Sometimes slow at serving pages, it's true, but we're winning back our server to the bots that were sent our way.

So, if for any chances the person(s) behind this recent bot incursion wind up reading this blog post, do note one thing in particular about boot land: we're here to stay, bring on the bots.

Isn't the snow fun?

And I've arrived to Pittsburgh.

The snow is everywhere, the cold as well but life is fresh as it hasn't been for a long while.

Why? This is the first time that I actually saw real snow inside a city.


Temperatures remain below zero celsius and I've took these free days to visit the city and saw all type of things from America that I had only seen on television.

Pittsburgh is a relatively small town when compared to others, but still sized enough to host the tallest buildings that I ever seen. And while writing this post I can only think: what a simple guy, never moved away from the village before, and in many aspects, it's true: living in small towns does carry some interesting advantages that I truly love.


It's good to be here. A good time to shape up my English skills and try to see all there is to see around Pitt.

Money also flies away from your pockets at an incredible speed, life is nowhere as affordable as I'd expect and simple things like lunch, dinner and coffee are pressing a tough toll on my savings.

But well. I'm still adjusting and thinking a lot about the things back in Portugal. My employment is still an headache to solve, the savings to endure the following months are also a worry and top all this with the constant pressure to think about your work at the MSE program.

Life is amazing, I seriously wouldn't imagine how it could change so much in less than 12 months and be here today.