A tight lie off the eighth green at Green Mountain National Golf Course.

A tight lie off the eighth green at Green Mountain National Golf Course.

If you are reading this, it's a good thing... because it's been a rough week.

As I reported Thursday, my internet hosting service provider, Network Solutions, has had a terrible week. And by association, so have I.

After reloading the blog site on Thursday, the site was hacked again at 6:40AM on Friday morning. Dutifully, google was putting out warnings that the site was compromised. While I can take issue the wording of messages that google was putting out, as it implied that killingtonblog.com was at fault, I accept that they were providing a service which hopefully prevented people from having their computer systems compromised. For good, or bad, google painted thousands of websites as guilty of internet malfeasance....when their only guilt was by associating with a particular company, with a good record of reliability, which provides internet hosting services. The technical journals have picked up on Network Solutions problems, and the problems web sites are having with malware reports by google. If you are interested in a few more details just follow the links. Computerworld had a good synopsis of the Network Solutions problems and Sucuri Security Labs has a blog post on how many sites were detected by google with the problem.

For now, I hope that the current problem Network Solutions is facing is behind them. I would like to get on to some more productive work, or play, whatever the case may be.

Speaking about hacking, I thought I would share the tight lie I found myself in on Wednesday during a round of golf at Green Mountain National. To set up the shot, I drove my ball about 230 into the fairway. The wind was in my face. The pin was on the left back corner of the green. I had about 120 yards to the green, around 130 to the pin. I initially grabbed an 8 iron. As I approached the ball, the wind was howling...so I decided to take a 7 iron and hit a knock down shot to play the ball into the wind. 2 years ago, before my shoulder injury..piece of cake.. But todays picture shows the result. The knock down shot got a little too high, causing the ball to sail in the wind. It hit the back corner of the green and bounced 5 or so yards into the junk behind the greens left corner. Probably just a little too aggressive a shot for my second time out this year... but so it goes. No pain..no gain...

With a wedge in hand, my inner hacker made a nice shot from this lie to within 10 feet of the cup. Of course I missed the putt...but hey it's still only April. We are supposed to be skiing in Vermont this time of year, not playing golf. It could have been a lot worse..I escaped with a bogey 5...not happy at missing par...but it was a nice sunny day and the world was good.

Speaking of skiing, the Killington Resort announced that they will be suspending operations for the 2009/2010 season tomorrow (Sunday April 25). They had hoped to make it one more week until May 2nd, but based upon their review of ski conditions, and this coming weeks weather forecast (damp and dreary for a few days), they have decided to pull the plug. Given that we had no real measurable snow since late February, which is really unusual, the resort has done great work keeping open as long as they did. The resort will be back in action shortly when their golf course opens in May. In the mean time, we will try t get a few more rounds in at Green Mountain to get back into golfing shape.

Spring has definitely sprung...Keep it in the fairway and don't forget your sunscreen.