Little off the top, insidious, facelift, Blind Sided, cancelled, passed
Well first off for those of you that actually visit my “real” blog as opposed to seeing the copy that is sent off to Facebook, you will immediately notice things look totally different. I installed a new theme over the weekend. I like the look of it. It’s modern, easy on the eyes and comfortable to read. However the theme didn’t change just because I felt the need to switch things up.
Late last week I got a call from my mom that when she tried to load my blog her browser popped up a warning that the site was known to be malicious. It was IE’s smart screen filter. I got a report from Joe that he saw the same thing. I immediately went into my site and took a look around, looking for obvious signs of a hack such as files with recent timestamps. I didn’t find anything obvious but I did remove a couple add ins that I read could potentially be problematic. After making the changes the site seemed to load normally.
Well on Saturday Ali was looking at the blog and all of a sudden had a flurry of shit pop up on her screen. When she told me about it I immediately recognized it as that damned bogus Anti-spyware shit that has been spreading like mad.
This stuff is insidious because it looks very legitimate to the untrained computer user. If you interact with the “program” it cripples your system and if you are unfortunate enough to be really hoodwinked you could actually wind up spending money to buy this program that is actually f’ing up your computer. Well now I had two problems, fixing Ali’s computer and figuring out why the f she got it while my blog was up.
Ali has been married to a computer guy long enough to know to not a touch a thing when something weird comes up. She swore she did nothing when she saw it. If that is true, it makes this latest iteration of this shit even worse because that means it managed to infect her computer without any other interaction.
I was mad. I was mad at the assholes that write this shit, mad at Sunbelt Software whose Vipre program I had running on her system let the malware through and mad at the idea of figuring out what the F was going on with my site.
Getting the malware off Ali’s system was arduous. As I mentioned, Vipre totally missed the malware and didn’t even notice that Ali’s computer had been infected with a full scan. The malware does it’s best to stop you from removing it by disabling your ability to run one of the best malware removers out there, MalwareBytes. I had to pull out a lot of tricks to get rid of this damn thing which I think I finally did on Sunday, hopefully.
When I turned my attention to my blog to see what went down I again did not find any clear signs of tampering. Both my site ftp password and blog password were strong, I can hardly imagine anyone got in that way. There is the possibility there was a temporary DNS redirection, I’ve seen that before. But I didn’t want to take any chances, hence the theme change. Changing the theme changes the majority of the files used to display the blog content. Since the change I have not noticed any weirdness at all. Using a fresh theme also has increased the performance of the site. The new design loads much quicker than the old design that was sort of patched together. Of course if any blog reader notices anything odd please let me know.
On Friday evening I worked on getting Ali’s new bike put together. Since it is the same model as mine which I also put together, putting Ali’s together wasn’t much of a problem. Ali liked the way it looked. I thought the pink was cool too, for a girl.
On Saturday we went to a big parking lot so Ali could get comfortable on the bike. The only bike she has ever ridden was the mountain bike I taught her to ride on back early in our relationship. She was a bit shaky at first but after about 15 minutes of cruising around the lot she was doing much better. She said it felt good. Later on Saturday we stopped at Sports Authority so Ali could get decked out with various accessories for her new wheels.
On Saturday afternoon we went to a memorial service friends of ours had at their home. Her brother died about a month ago. I was impressed at both the size of the house and the service itself. The pastor/minister that ran the service had everyone in the room introduce themselves and talk about their relationship with the deceased. I felt awkward since my contact with her brother was extremely limited at a Super Bowl party a couple years ago. I managed to get out a few sentences that didn’t sound terribly awkward. The service was touching. Even though I didn’t know him very well I felt myself feeling emotional various times. The whole dying/getting old thing, it just sucks ya know?
Over the weekend I mowed and weed whacked the property. Even though the grass hasn’t grown much in the past couple months due to the various cold snaps it still was looking pretty ratty in spots. Plus mowing is a good way to accelerate dog shit decomposition as well as mulching up the various twigs, leaves and other stuff that falls off the trees on our property.
I mowed Saturday and weed whacked Sunday. I had a weed whacker problem that had me on the verge of smashing it on to the ground violently. I have two weed whackers, an older Homelite that I bought when we moved in that was missing a primer bulb and a newer one I just got a year or two ago. The newer one would not stay running. It would only run in the half choke position and if I applied throttle it would shut off. I struggled along with it for as long as I could stand until I decided to try to get the old one running.
I stole the primer bulb off our roto-tiller. It took me awhile but I finally got the old one to fire up and I used it to finish up the work. I was right on the edge of having a dad-like meltdown where whatever was within reach would be in danger of being broken in two.
Speaking of dad, we received an email over the weekend that he officially had postponed the Ireland trip. Evidently dad has finally picked out where his next residence is going to be. The combination of moving in a couple months and a laundry list of immediate improvements he wants to make to the property made the idea of a late summer trip overseas less than practical.
I am certainly curious how this latest destination works for dad. It’s in some town in western PA, two hours NORTH of Pittsburgh. By my calculations that would put him right near Lake Erie. Horrible weather immediately jumps into my head when I think of that area. The place has a massive 18 acres of land for the various animals he plans to stead there. Again I don’t quite get it. When he was in New Mexico he dealt with the reality of maintaining lots of land and at least from afar, it didn’t seem like he particularly cared for doing all that manual labor at his current age and physical condition.
He also spent a small fortune in a short period of time fixing up the place in New Mexico. Again, it sounds like he is buying another fixer upper. Hey it’s his money, it’s his life, if he is happy there then more power to him. I just hope he is. Ever since he retired he has been searching for the situation that will make him content in retirement, he hasn’t found it yet obviously.
Wow Jessie James really has some bad timing huh? Hey tons of people cheat on their spouses. Not very many have that cheating exposed right after their wife wins an Academy Award. Way to go Jess. I told you Sandra looked like she had a lot of junk in the trunk.
So the health care bill actually passed last night. That is a pretty amazing thing considering the hundreds of millions that has been spent to defeat it. I read that over 4500 lobbyists were throwing money left and right in order to affect the outcome of the legislation. That is f’ing disgusting.
As I have said before the final bill surely is a huge compromise filled with many concessions that most of the public would find very annoying. Equally annoying is the process that lead to the final passage of the bill. But now that it looks to be a done deal I am trying to look more at the big picture. Despite the band wagon “it’s socialism” jumpers, there are many important, significant changes that will come about, eventually, from this bill.
Changing health care is something that has been talked about since Nixon yet Obama was the only president with the determination to not let it die on the vine like others before him. Despite being chewed on mercilessly by the republican spin machine, Obama never gave up. Now only time will tell if what he has fought so strongly for was worth it in the end. Now if he could fight equally strong to get us the F out of the Iraq/Afghanistan.