My Blogs Aren’t the Only Thing Restarting…
I’ve had a lot happen in the past several weeks. As those of you that follow my Facebook account are aware, my mother landed in the emergency room the day before the Kickstarter campaign for my first book release, Resonant Blue, was set to conclude (successfully – the goal had been reached the Friday before). She was transferred to one of the best hospitals in the area, where she spent close to two weeks in a sedative-induced twilight zone – I put it that way because it wasn’t a coma – her brain and heart functions were fine, but her breathing had to be supported with a tube for a little while. Before the two weeks were up, the breathing tube was yanked (an earlier attempt had to be aborted when the doctors realized her throat was swollen, and they had to use steroids to lower the swelling before they tried again) and she was transferred to a private step-down room for the next six days, during which she was fitted for a pacemaker (while awake… OUCH!). The reason for all this trouble was because a few weeks beforehand, her now-former cardiologist had her sent to this very hospital’s Heart Hospital for some examination and was subsequently scheduled for delivery of a halter monitor so that they could monitor her heart’s functions. (I should note that back in February of 2003, she had to have a valve replacement, which up until the moment that landed her in the emergency room back on March 10, was the most tense health-related incident I had ever witnessed with her.) As part of the halter monitor procedure, they prescribed her two medicines, one of which proceeded to disagree with her kidneys not less than two weeks into a three-week monitoring period. Not fun. Thankfully, this major bump in the road was handled with a water pill (and, I presume, its injected/dripped equivalent during her time in ICU). As I write this, she’s been transferred to an accelerated rehab program at the same facility (she’s been there since last Thursday) where she first visited the emergency room back on March 10 – which is only less than five minutes from mine and my wife’s apartment – and she’s expected to be discharged and fully back on her feet before a week has passed. (There may also be cause for legal action against her now-former cardiologist, who was habitually and unnecessarily changing her regular heart meds for months before all of this shit happened.)
The whole time she was in ICU, my life consisted mainly of working more than I am usually expected to at my present day job (partly because my mother is also the store manager/bookkeeper there while I usually do a whole bunch of other administrative stuff and occasionally wait on customers), then heading home, dropping off my messenger bag and laptop at my apartment, and heading right back out the door with my wife to drive the 45 minutes from Hazleton to Wilkes-Barre, my wife at the wheel of her car and me with my iPad in hand either catching up with things or just taking my mind off of all the insanity as best as I can – often not getting anything to eat until after we’d visited for awhile. By last Monday or Tuesday, I was burnt as close to a fucking crisp as possible, and was wondering how soon I’d be landing in the hospital myself, either in a hospital room from exhaustion or in the Mariah Carey suite at the nearest mental ward. It wasn’t until the day after my mother had her pacemaker installed that I could stay home rather than have to do the drop bag/grab iPad/bail routine again.
Not surprisingly, this slowed quite a few things down – not just mine and my wife’s personal lives, but my blogging, getting everything ready for the people who participated in the crowdfunding campaign, and trying to get back into playing music live. By now, if all of this shit hadn’t happened, I was expecting to have already sent off the formatted manuscript (which I was in the middle of doing the final edit for on March 10th) and the final front cover with Chris Mendoza’s fine artwork to the printer, an e-book file to the people that are handling that format, ordered the T-shirts for those that pledged to get one with their book, and finished all the other premiums for people that wanted them. Fortunately, the night the crowdfunding campaign closed, I explained what had happened the night before and that things would be delayed a little bit. Now that the home stretch is here, I can start to resume my life all around.
Ray Mescallado’s retiring International Wota and starting Idolminded in its place gave me even more of an excuse to “restart” my blogging even while all this was going on, and I delibrately chose April 1st – which would have been the 54th birthday of the Minutemen’s D Boon – as the “restart” date, even though this finished blog post is getting posted after midnight on the 2nd – coincidentally a year after I last saw Mike Watt play live. (My own 5th blogging anniversary is coming on the 11th of this month, but honoring one of my much-missed heroes was a better target date for TGML’s relaunch.) I’m getting back on track with both the blogging and the prep for Resonant Blue‘s release and the pledge fulfillments, which leaves the last thing I mentioned… The getting back to playing music live.
As I mentioned back when I reviewed AKB48/BabyBlossom’s live performance of “Give Me Five” a while back, I’m a trained musician. For several months, on and off, I’ve been trawling Craiglist and local music giveaway papers in search of either a working band. A week before the medical incident with my mother, I had an audition for one of two guitar spots… and I’ll relate how all that went, and maybe a little more, tomorrow.
Returning to action soon…
Specifically, I’ll be back to regular blogging both here and at this blog’s sister site Music Is Like Oxygen on April 1st.
Update… We Were Hacked!
To make a long story short:
Friday afternoon, ex-Romeo Void singer Debora Iyall had discovered my overview of It’s a Condition at Music Is Like Oxygen and posted the link to it on her Facebook page. Since I’ve been Facebook friends with her for awhile and had participated in her Kickstarter campaign for her new EP, I knew about it because she had linked to my personal Facebook page in her status update about the post. I hadn’t told her about the post (I didn’t want to be spamming her page or whatnot) so I was happy that she had found it and was giving me props right back for giving her old band props.
For whatever reason (a bit of ego, maybe?), I went to click through the link on my iPhone (I was at dinner with my mother at the time) and found myself getting rerouted to a .ru page that was basically dead. What?
Thinking it was some odd Facebook quirk, once I got home I got on my computer and checked the link. Through Chrome, I got the same dead page. Through Firefox, I got a fake virus scan site that (thankfully) Norton had cockblocked before any damage could be done.
Yep – some fuckers — probably Russian hackers — had somehow gotten into the account that holds all of my music blogs (The Groove Music Life, Music Is Like Oxygen, my Reina Tanaka worship blog So Hot She Shits Fire) as well as the blog for Resonant Blue and a blog for a friend’s charitable work (Sounds For Scoliosis, a series of benefit shows in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area booked and promoted by my friend Lucia Peregrim). Going directly to the main sites was fine… but anyone clicking through a link from just about anywhere (Google, Bing, Facebook, whatever) was getting redirected to some Russian pecker’s malware festival instead – and making me look bad. So bad that one of Debora Iyall’s friend had gotten hit with that shit, forcing the link to be removed.
So, after a few phone calls to my hosting provider, here’s what happened – the hackers had gotten into a file called .htaccess that, in the case of these blogs, works within WordPress installations and makes sure whoever visits one of my blogs is seeing one of my blogs. The hackers had replaced it with their own version that, within its hardly-complicated code, tricks links from search engines and social networking sites into taking people’s browsers into the Russian assholes’s virus playground instead.
Thankfully, a little Google research – a few seconds worth, more than most Tea Party members do – turned up how to fix this shit, using only Notepad and an FTP program. But I had to do it for every WordPress installation on my account – a minor pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Now all links should be fine.
Now, I don’t know if this kind of thing can affect the “free” WordPress blogs hosted on their own server farm, but if you’re independently hosting your own WordPress blog elsewhere, here’s what you should do to make sure these hacker motherfuckers aren’t messing with your hard work. With your FTP program (like Filezilla), check the size of the .htaccess file on your server. If it’s a little more than 200 bytes, you’re fine. If it’s bigger than that – the hacker’s version was over three thousand bytes – delete it immediately, Google for “.htaccess wordpress” and you’ll find a proper code to get your blog back to normal. Boot up Notepad, cut and paste (or type it up) it exact, and use your FTP program to upload it to your server. Note that you can’t simply just upload the clean version over the dirtied one – some of their code in the dirtied one prevents that, so you have to delete just that file.
My apologies to anyone who had been affect by visiting one of my blogs – in fact, at the time of this writing there was still a malware alert for So Hot She Shits Fire, which I’ve already applied for a correction on with Google. (Right now a direct search in Google warns that the site might harm people’s computers, especially if they don’t have something like Norton installed.) Everything on all of my blogs should be safe.
