Within the past week, Turkish hackers losers decided to hack the Northumberland.us Forums using a simple exploit of phpBB‘s session handling twice. Why? I have no idea. There are only three forum members and hardly any activity, so why anyone would go to the trouble is beyond my understanding. Were they tired of popping zits in their parents basement or what? I respect people who know how to hack and do so with good or benign reasons, but corrupting forum databases for no reason at all? It’s not cool, it’s sad.
Month: March 2005
Five Days in Baltimore
I’m not going to even try to relate every detail of the last two weeks. It’s not really worth it. However, I do want to say that last weekend (as in the one before this past weekend) was nice. I visited Annie and stayed down there from Friday to Tuesday morning; I even took her to work and picked her up on Monday. So for a few days, it was almost like I lived in Baltimore. That might not sound that exciting, but when we’ve been wishing we lived in the same city for almost five years and that event is only a few months away, it’s unbelievably exciting for us.
I’m a Kottke.org Micropatron
It’s true. I put it off until the very last day, but I contributed my $2.50/month to help Jason make blogging his full-time job. For the sheer number of great links I’ve followed from his site, it would be worth it for me to help keep him in business. However, I really like the way that he went about the whole “micropatron” idea; it’s kind of like PBS doing their annual fundraiser in order to keep their channel commercial-free (or paying for HBO or satellite radio). It’s not a new idea, but bringing sponsorships to the blogosphere is just crazy enough that it might work. And then, there are the gifts. Mmmm… TextDrive “webhosting for life.” I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.
Catching Things
It’s rare that I brag about something I said, but I think that this time it’s funny enough to share. Yesterday, Dan was talking about how the photos/video of John Kerry trying to catch a football was hilarious and about how bad Kerry looked. I said, “Do you know what’s funnier than that? Watching Bush try to catch Bin Laden.” Laughter and rebuttals ensued.
All Shiny and New
I started doing a major update for this site yesterday, but it won’t be complete for a few days. It’s likely that few noticed it, but I moved mekosh.org from JiffyNet‘s servers to DreamHost. That came about after they changed a server configuration and it broke my code again. It seems that every month I had to email them to report an error or my site was down for extended periods of time; this time, someone modified PHP so that I could no longer include files outside of my domain and then the server went down for six hours. My account on DreamHost has space for three domains and mekosh.org is only one of those.
The second major update means that this site is now running on WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn. It represents some big changes in the WordPress engine and overall design. I couldn’t be happier with how it’s working out so far. What really surprised me is how smoothly the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5 went; once I uploaded the new files, I ran the upgrade file and I was done in 30 seconds.
There are still some major changes I need to make to this site that I don’t have time for at the moment. As much as I like Kubrick, I want to modify my design to match the WP template, so that I can switch it quickly. That entails reworking some CSS and XHTML to match it to WP’s theme style. A WordPress Codex page on upgrading 1.2 to 1.5 really simplifies the process.
Jim’s Big Ego
Last night, Dan N., Dave J., and I went to see Jim’s Big Ego play in the Wolves’ Den on campus. I had not heard of them before yesterday, but I did recognize a few of the songs that they played and thought it was a cool set in general. However, I wanted to talk about two things they did that I thought were great. The first is that Jim (the lead singer and guitarist) sang parts of the Bill O’Reilly sexual harrassment scandal transcripts as an intro to a song—I think—called “Porno Plot,” which was just hilarious. The second aspect of their show that struck me as a great idea was something they called “napkin poetry.” For this bit, everyone was invited to write words, short phrases, or a line or two of poetry on napkins with markers and place them in a pile on the stage. The bassist—upright bassist—and the drummer jammed while Jim took the random napkin poetry and used it to make a free-form song, completely unique, and never to be performed again. The song, as you can imagine, was pretty incoherent; nonetheless, it was amusing and we were a bit buzzed so it really worked out well.
I didn’t find out until right now that Jim’s last name is Infantino, as in Jim “WTFMFWTFAYT?” Infantino. Had I known that last night, I would have talked to him after the show. Hmm.
Another Design Thief
I must be getting popular: another person has stolen one of my designs. Mohammed Khan of Nashville, Tennessee stole the entire “Request a Proposal” form from my site and slapped it up on his site, Computer Technologies Inc., sans the style sheet. I’m surprised he’s not hotlinking the section heading images. Judging by the Whois listing, Mohammed Khan (1150 Vultee Blvd Apt #G106, Nashville, TN 27217) took less than two months to register his domain and steal my form. I think it annoys me even more that he didn’t bother to rewrite any of the drop-downs to fit his site. They’re all exactly the same as mine. By the way, nice work on the rest of the site, Mohammed! It’s so… colorful.
So how did I find out that Computer Technologies, Inc. of Nashville, TN stole my form design? Same way I did when SeeMonroe.com stole the old design for Northumberland.us: I check my referral logs. The only reason I didn’t bash them online is that they were modifying the design in an area that wasn’t live. I emailed them about it and they took it down. However, Computer Technologies, Inc. links directly to the form page; it’s available for all to see. Secondly, SeeMonroe is not for profit, while Computer Technologies, Inc. stole my design for profit. Oh, and last I checked, “Porposal” isn’t the way to spell “Proposal,” as it is in the URL. It’s only correct on the page because it’s ripped from my site.
Long Overdue
I’m long overdue on updates here, again. I’ve sworn multiple times to update more often, but it seems that as soon as my life gets busy, I ignore any and all online presence I pretend to possess. In my last post, I completely left out a much bigger event—relative to my life, of course—than Gmail or Google Maps. The previous weekend (February 2, 3, and 4) the play I directed and Matt DeSciscio wrote, Point; Counterpoint, made its debut. Roughly four days before the show, I was about two phone calls away from a nervous breakdown—not really, hyperbole is fun—and legitimately worried that the show would bomb. Thankfully, we put in three days of long hours and tedious nitpicking of everything and the show came out a great success. The cast party later that night was quirky but fun; especially after the rest of the cast showed up, right Matt? And, to top it all off, Annie was able to come to Scranton (after a bit of confusion) and see the show on Sunday. She loved it, but she’s biased, right?
The week after the show was rough; too much to do, too little sleep, too many missed classes. I spent the weekend playing catch-up on work and sleep. The next week went better and I drove down to Baltimore to visit Annie for the weekend. I picked her up at work and we cooked a nice rotini dinner in her apartment. Considering that I wouldn’t see her before her birthday (which is tomorrow) and the order from Amazon came way early, I surprised her with an early gift: MacGyver Season One, her favorite show EVER! I’m so thoughtful (and narcissistic).
I made it from Baltimore to the Northumberland County Arts Center about ten minutes before Lourdes’ play began on Sunday to see my brother, Jason, in the show. It started snowing, so I decided to stay at home and come back to Scranton on Monday, but that turned out to not work so well; I missed work and class by the time I made it to the U.
Since then, I’ve been busy with class, work, job hunting, and web design projects. I want to keep this site up to date, but as I mentioned, my blog is always the first thing I drop when I’m busy. I don’t like it either, but I have to keep priorities alligned.