In which I’m fucking bummed.

Microsoft Reader killed my Pocket PC!

A few weeks ago, Sin gave me some ebooks. Several were in MS Reader format.

I loaded one onto my PPC Saturday, then opened Reader to see if the newly-loaded ebook showed in the library. It didn’t, and Reader had the audacity to tell me it wasn’t activated. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to ‘activate’ Reader. It’s a total pain in the ass.)

So I navigated to the ebook and double-clicked on it.

Reader booted… and hanged. And hanged.

And hanged.

So I reset the device, which has worked in the past.

But not this time, boy howdy! Now the device itself won’t boot. It’s hosed. And it had my checkbook register on it, which I haven’t backed up in almost two months.

So I have a useless PPC, and no idea how much money I have. Grr.

Bread told me to go online today and shop for a new one. He wants me to print them out and show them to him, for some reason. (I think perhaps he actually listened when I told him he had to start giving a shit about my hobbies or I’d poison his meatloaf for real this time. Old dog, new tricks and all that.)

Update: I think I might get a Dell Axim, even if Dell is about to retire the line. It’s either that or an HP iPaq. Most PDA manufacturers are heading into the Windows Mobile market, and I don’t want a cell phone/PDA combo. *sigh*

In which there’s a happy ending.

Shegeki posted today about people who get Kanji tattoos and don’t know what they mean, and how he’d encourage anyone getting one to have it vetted by someone who knows better before committing it to their flesh for the rest of their lives.

It’s good advice.

The post prompted me to mention my own possibly-foolish Kanji tattoo to Vuboq, and one thing led to another and (as is often the case on the Internet) a digital picture of flesh was soon involved:

I got this tat from Fat Joe’s Jade Dragon in Chicago (they’ve done two of my three tats). I picked it off the rack, so it could mean anything. I thought it meant, “to serve, to work, to do.” I was beginning to fear that it might mean ‘dog shit’ or possibly even nothing at all.

But Vuboq found me this link and I’m so relieved. The tat does mean what I think it does!

In which I define “warm enough.”

When it’s warm enough that I not only don’t have to blow-dry my hair after my morning shower, but can drive to work with the jeep’s windows down and let the wind dry it for me? Then it’s Spring!

In which there are cute firemen.

As I walked up the street to India Cafe to get some take-out for lunch, I saw three fire engines, two cop cars, and three volunteer firefighters in trucks with blue flashing lights on their dashboards, all go screamin’ by, westbound on Burlington.

Apparently something large is trying to burn down.

I’m assuming it’s not a meth lab blowing up because I didn’t see any HazMat.

In which my three day-long outage is explained.

Yeah, so, goblinbox.com has been down for over three days now. Here’s what happened:

Somehow someone managed to upload PHP files onto the server goblinbox.com lived on. Some if not all of those files were placed in subdirectories of my domain. On April 1st, my hacker friend started running those malicious PHP files. On April 3rd, s/he tested the new Bank of America phishing site that was running in a subdirectory of goblinbox.com.

April 7th, Planet disovered the site and shut my domain down.

April 8th, I discovered I was down and contacted Keef, who told me I’d been hacked. I thought about it, then texted him to tell him that my guess was they’d come through my WordPress installation. (I’d had to reset my WP password twice on Friday.)

Keef told his partners what I’d said. I think they took that as an admission of guilt or something, but the reality is that I have no idea how the hacker got in and I want my site turned back on now.

I hate it when goblinbox.com is down!

Mysteriously my host has decided that the hack came through my domain and they won’t turn my site back on until they feel confident that my site is secure. If the hack did come through my apps, I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Right now my site is tighter than a virgin. I’ve spent hours on it. I’ve got .htaccess files all over the place. The thing’s so snug I’ll barely be able to move around in there… if they ever turn it back on.

Turns out that my site was not the only one compromised. My site was not the only one with world-writable directories in it. My site is, however, the only one on the server that is still suspended.

I think I’m gonna move my domain. Again.

Update: They finally turned goblinbox.com back on. I am so relieved. I get stressed out when my baby’s down.

Hopefully keeping this baby locked up will be adequate. I hear the admins have installed some nifty stuff too, and upgraded software here and there.

I wish I had a moral, but since I still don’t know how the hackers got in I don’t know if I’ve actually learned something or not. *shrug*

As you were, my babies.

(This post was imported from here.)

In which I wish I’d paid more attention getting dressed this morning.

In a recent visit to the restroom, I discovered a 2″ tear in the seam of the ass of the pants I’m wearing! The pants are brown, and luckily I’m wearing dark undies (instead of the orange ones I almost wore). But still. Where’s a damn safety pin when you need one?

In other news, I have a dental appointment tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. I love having clean teeth!

In which I ramble on and on about a bunch of different stuff! (Spring fever, yo.)

First of all, Spring! God damn but it’s lovely out this morning. Fields are turning green and everything. Air smells good. Sun is shining. Mmm.

Second, I love Jefferson County Mutual because when I went in yesterday to pay my property insurance bills and one of them was late, the girl looked in a drawer and pulled out some paperwork and said, “Oh, you’re fine. We haven’t done anything with it yet.” What this means is that they did not send a letter to the lawyers nor to the sellers saying the insurance had lapsed, thereby starting a chain of events that would prove to be a royal pain in my arse. (The last time I let the property insurance lapse — accident, not poverty — the sellers freaked out and hired their lawyer to hire the sheriff to come and serve me freakin’ papers. I have no idea why they didn’t just call, for chrissake. They’re really litigious, for hippies.) Anyway, the point is, one of my two payments was late and they didn’t even care. I hereby vow to open any mail from Jeff Co Mutual immediately so as never to let the damn insurance lapse ever again.

Third, I love my modern jazz station over at Pandora. Pandora fucking rocks, although I admit to hoping they build a stand-alone app rather than running exclusively through a browser. I finally figured out how to minimize the player, though, so that helped.

Fourth, I remember reading a mystery once in which an important clue had to do with the spelling of forty on a check. The check had been altered, and it was discovered because what should have read “forty” was actually “fourty,” which means the “ty” had been added by the thief. A glimmer of this thought passes through my mind each and every time I ever spell out the word four or the word forty, and this has been going on for at least twenty years. (Because the mind? Is a terrible thing.)

Fifth, I still hate DST and I want it abolished.

Sixth, is anyone else totally fascinated by Big Love, that new HBO series? I’m hooked. The whole thing is so totally foreign and weird and fascinating. I love how they’ve got their own strange culty jargon and behaviours, just like any other religion I’ve ever been around. I love watching the wives fight. It’s great.

In which I consider how I spend my time.

I almost always drive in the left lane when I’m driving through Fairfield. The outside lanes are cracked and pitted and I don’t like them because they’re so bumpy, so I spend an inordinate amount of time behind people who are waiting to turn left. (The main drag through town is four lanes; no turn lane.)

When I’m old and dying, this is the kind of thing that will flash before my eyes.

In other news, I can’t stop clicking on the random image box and reading old posts. There’s just something so neato about trolling one’s own archives!