Fay’d out, files fixed

No that isn’t a duck on a lake.  It is a duck in our back yard.  If my rain gauge is accurate, we got almost 10 inches of rain in a 24 hour period.  Here are some pictures of the result.

The storm itself wasn’t as scary as Wilma since the wind gusts probably topped out somewhere in the 60’s but it still did a pretty good job of messing up or property.  The combination of massive amounts of rain that soaks the ground combined with high winds is a recipe to knock down trees/plants.  Both of our oak trees up front have slight leans to the south.  The trees in the orchard, the banana trees, the tree on the corner of the house mound and the huge cactus took more of a beating. 

We also had more pool cage problems.  The cage was intact but 1 screen panel totally blew out and four others (that I can see) ripped along an edge.  This really pisses me off.  Remember I had the pool cage guy come out to replace the one panel that had a tear from just normal wind?  Well all of the panels but one that ripped were along the same back side of the cage.  I wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about it if both of our neighbors cages had some damage as well.  The one house had ONE panel knocked out and that was a panel that the owner replaced themselves.  Otherwise both of their cages survived Wilma AND Fay without losing screens.  My $17,000 cage, supposedly built to the latest code was the only one to have such amounts of damage. I had half a mind to call up the pool cage guy again and bitch him out but I know it would accomplish nothing and I don’t want the guy even touching the cage at this point.  For what we paid I expect that cage to be bullet proof.  I think I will write him a letter though letting him how I feel about the quality of his work.

I was positive we would lose power during Fay, we always lose power during major storms.  We had tons of quick power hits where the house would go dark.  Each time it did I held my breath, knowing if power didn’t kick back on within a few seconds we would be dead in the water.  Amazingly, it stayed up the entire time.  Stranger yet was our neighbor across the street and the neighbor next door lost power for a good portion of the day.  There must have been a very isolated local problem on their circuit.  The only thing we did lose was cable/internet and that was only for a couple hours until it came back.

Once internet came back up I waited out the rain by working on getting my web site repaired.  My attempts to have IX web hosting help me were pointless and a waste of time.  Since they only keep a back up a week max and flush their server logs daily there was no way to recover via their back up or find out exactly what happened since I didn’t notice the hack in time.  I was at my wit’s end on how I was going to fix it all.  Luckily I had a back up of my duf.net stuff on my D-link NAS from early July so I started the LONG process of uploading that back up to my host.  There were over 30,000 files to upload. However I still had a bunch of stuff that would need to be manually cleaned.

As I was searching the internet for some way to automate this process and having little luck, I saw Charlie was online.  Charlie is a programmer by trade and he has helped me out many times before with various issues.  I wasn’t really sure if he could help me out in this instance or not.  I described to him what the hack did, namely inserted code to display links for viagra and other limp dick products into ALL of my html and php files.  I sent him some examples of corrupted files.  I was floored when he said he thought he could whip something up to fix the files in a batch manner.  Wow. 

The next morning in my email I had the program and did a small test.  It worked!  All I had to basically do was download my hacked files from my web host to my pc, clean them and then reupload them to the host.  All of the transferring back and forth took a lot of time but it took a fraction of what I would have spent manually fixing everything.  Huge kudos go out to Charlie for saving my ass once again.  He rocks.

Once the rain finally stopped we went outside to clean up a bit and put most things back in place.  I wanted to address the damaged screens so our lanai didn’t become a mosquito haven.  The panels with only 1 side ripped were patched up decently with some duct tape but when I tried to duct tape the totally blown out panel in place it failed shortly.  I went out again and strung some fishing line through the top of the screen and attached the line to some of the bolts on the cage and then hit it again with more duct tape.  As of this morning it is still in place.  We have a real redneck looking pool cage right now.

I uprighted the huge cactus by the lanai and secured it to the metal pole next to it.  I couldn’t believe how much the sucker weighed.  It was tough to push back to the upright position.  I tried to straighten up a few of the other leaning trees but the ground was too saturated so it was wasted effort.

The newly installed, painted front door passed with flying colors.  No water found it’s way through and the paint looks unscathed on both the door and stucco trim.  There is still more clean up for us to do.  I am debating if I want to try to repair the pool screen myself.  I think it is at least worth a try. 

I was not in a great mood yesterday due to sitting through another near hurricane and it’s end results as well as the huge mess I was dealing with with my web hosted files.  Ali tried to soften the blow by making me THE chocolate cake, the one my mom makes.  It turned out great and did make me feel better.