Rewind to before that. Did you print business cards already? Did you buy a website template? A common mistake I find among small business owners is a beleif that branding is the first step when setting up shop. On the contrary, you should prolong branding as long as you can. Getting on your feet is the first step.

Now fast forward. After you’ve had some time to work with a professional designer, you should start to see some brand unity. The colors should flow. The shapes should fit. The font should jive. More importantly, your brand should be everywhere, and it should have good unity. These logos, for example, help convey more than just the name of the company…

Technology, Servers, Computers, Uptime, Reliability

Connected, Global, Evolving, Swift

Elegant, Fancy, Classy, Trusted

Background Checks & Balances
Located in Denver, CO, BC&B offers screening services for future tenants, dating partners, or employees. For $65 you can grab a detailed background check of whomever you’d like. Read what Background Checks & Balances customer’s have to say on their testimonials page.

Southglenn Acupuncture & Allergy
Located in Southglenn, CO, this acupuncture and laser relief center can help with a variety of health issues. Noelle, Casey, and Kimberly are great people to work with and would enjoy your business.

Expert Garage Doors
Giving excellent garage door service to residents in Columbus Ohio and sourounding areas, this company is the go-to place for anything garage related. They run specials to help make garage door installation and accessories affordable too.

I’m a much better photographer than videographer, but this is an attempt at splicing together a video the briefly sums up the trip. Enjoy.

Little Bear, Blanca & Ellingwood from Trent Gillespie on Vimeo.

The first was Rivé, a startup company thats focus is “Hydration Made Elegant.” They make glass water bottles that not only work well, but look awesome too. Interested in what Rivé version 2 looks like? Head on over to www.riveusa.com.

The second major project I completed was for the roller skate manufacture, Sure-Grip. I was contracted to completely redesign their Internet presence.

Both sites are now public, which is the biggest step of development. If you’ve got comments or feedback, let me know. We should be adding features to each site in the near future.

Most of you are aware that my parents own and operate a veterinary clinic in Westcliffe, CO. My father, Dr. Scott Gillespie works on both large and small animals. Even my little buddy Grizz.

And to the point… their website is now online. If you head on over to www.sangredecristovetclinic.com, you can read more about the practice. If you live in the Wet Mountain Valley and have animals, give the vet clinic a call :)

1. Capture video from camcorder using Firewire into Adobe Premier. Easy – Fast
2. AVI file on PC is playable.  Success
3. Searching Google for free software to burn AVI file to DVD. Hard – Painfully Slow
   This step often requires the downloading of many shareware programs that promise the world, but deliver nothing. The process is as follows: Search Google > Download > Install > Program looks promising > Blasted “PAY NOW” screen pops up > Uninstall > Search Google
4. Not this time. I struck gold with DVD Flick. Success
5. Not only did the program convert my AVI file into DVD format, it added a navigation menu as well. uber Success
6. But that’s not it. How often do you run across free software that actually works… but also includes a free game to play while your DVD is encoding? This one time, I actually feel like paying for shareware
   
7. You rock DVD Flick.

1. After spreading a fresh coat of wax on my snowboard before Saturday’s trip to Copper Mountain, I hopped on the PC and quickly discovered my server repeatedly going offline.
2. My initial thought was the Slashdot effect. Nope. My forums/blog had their usual number of concurrent users, which is 60 to 100 at any given time. Was the server being attacked?
3. I headed to my router, which was struggling to keep up with the required data being requested. After taking it offline, I disabled it’s protection schemes, and put it back online.
4. This caused the server to bottleneck, being that all the traffic was now being passed directly through.
5. Heading to the Reliability & Performance section of Server Manager, I discovered that this immense traffic influx was coming from one user.
   
6. With over 90mb of data being request per second by one user, the fix was simple. Block the IP and move on.
7. Blocked. But seconds after, another attacker on an entire different subnet appeared, which made wildcards unusable and manual IP blocking useless.
8. Having mod_security already installed on Apache, I had to find a more advanced protection method. I found mod_dosevasive, which is a bit dated, but still useful.
9. The result was positive, however CPU/memory usage spiked and Apache was still struggling.
10. After taking all of my virtual hosts offline, I ruled out the idea of a script exploit and looked into stopping the traffic on the server level, rather than Apache.
11. I needed to harden the TCP/IP stack, which lead me to making some registry edits, enabling Windows SynAttackProtect. The server was operating again, with a small increase in CPU usage, being that the server was now playing Mr. Firewall.

Thirteen hours later, the DoS attackers were gone and my Saturday suppose to be spent snowboarding, turned into a sleep day. I hardly consider it a waste of time though as I picked up a lot useful information pertaining to Windows Server in a web based environment. I’m not switching back to a Linux distro, as I don’t consider this a Windows problem, but poorly configured server setup. The longterm solution might be looking into a software based firewall server, or dropping some cash on a router capable of dealing with such attacks.