Being Amber Rhea

…because I’m too tired* to do anything else. Sometimes cop-outs can work, though.

• As you may have seen if you follow my Twitter updates, I got into a little fender-bender yesterday morning. To be specific, I freakin’ backed into a parked car. :P Oh well… not much damage was done to either vehicle. Mine is getting repaired Thursday, and it costs less than my insurance deductible, so no need for a claim on my part. If the other driver has an issue, my insurance will take care of it. J. put a silver lining on the situation by pointing out that my new car would inevitably get dinged up at some point anyway, so at least I’ve gone ahead and gotten it out of the way - actively!
• We’re going to court Thursday. That’s all I’m going to say right now, but I’ll say more afterward. It should certainly be interesting, one way or another.
• This is also happening on Thursday, and Rusty and I will be there. I’ll need to remember to bring my “I’m Blogging This” T-shirt with me to change into, in case we don’t have time to go home after court. Other ATL bloggers, come on out! It should be a rollicking good time, especially if Susan Capaluto (sp?) shows up. (And is it just me, or does anybody else wonder why the Equifax guy is on the panel? That seems random.)
• On Friday I’m heading to Boston (well, Cambridge) for the Women, Action & the Media conference. The keynote speakers are Helen Thomas and Haifa Zangana. I’m excited! I’ll get to meet some bloggers I’ve read for a while, and Dacia and I will be sharing a hotel room so we can be shut-ins when the socializing gets too overwhelming. And I’m looking forward to Dacia’s session on sex workers and media representation; after the past couple weeks, she should have plenty to talk about! (Not as if she didn’t already!)
• Apparently my site, like a lot of Dreamhost sites, was down for a few hours today. One of these days I’ll actually switch hosts, I swear. Anyway, this means my del.icio.us links didn’t get posted today, which annoys me, because I had some good ones. I’ll probably post them manually tomorrow, but in particular I wanted to point out that this post really resonated with me, and I might have more to say on it later.
• I cross-posted my “Why I Quit Download Squad” treatise on BlogHer.
• Be sure to register for Sex 2.0 by Friday if you want to pay $40 instead of $50! Meanwhile, I will try not to freak out too much between now and April 12.
• I swear I’ll blog about the manicure thing one day. I have lots to say, oh yes. Dacia and I are getting manis and pedis Friday night in Boston. So maybe I’ll blog about it then!

* I’m a naturally sleepy person, but the Lexapro has made me feel downright fatigued. I don’t like that one bit. So this morning I cut the pill in half, and it seemed to help a bit. Hopefully that’ll be the way to go.

Just reposting what Thomas wrote, since it applies to this site as well.

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Got a notice from Dreamhost that the web server that hosts my blog (that’s this blog, this one right here) is going to be undergoing a physical move from one data center to another on Friday night, from 10pm PST until 6am PST the next day. In all likelihood, this isn’t going to be a big deal and everything will be right back to normal by Saturday afternoon.

Of course, if the Prius (or Mini Cooper or Yugo or some other mode of vehicular transport) carrying my web server gets a flat tire or something more detrimental … well, we’ll just try not to think much about it and hope for the best.

Until further notice, anyone who needs to email me should do so at my Gmail address, instead of my gapodcastnetwork.com or tangerinecs.com address. The latter two are forwarding-only addresses that forward to Gmail, but because of the reasons outlined here, it’s been taking hours or days for me to get messages sent to either of those addresses. That being said, if you’ve sent me any emails in the past few days and I haven’t responded, this is probably the explanation. (Or, laziness on my part.)

Yep, my site was hacked. So was my other domain, sotsforum.net. That one is still in its hacked stage as of this writing. I have two service tickets outstanding with Dreamhost, but in the meantime, I found that I fortunately had a generic WordPress installation saved on my work computer, which is how I was able to get my blog back up.

Basically what happened was, someone accessed my FTP account illegally (I have since changed the password) and replaced my index.php files with pages full of ads. In the case of beingamberrhea.com, the site wouldn’t load and instead showed a MySQL error, but viewing the file on the server showed that it had indeed been modified at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. The same thing happened in the wp-admin directory. I renamed both of the hacked files index_HACKED.php for Dreamhost’s reference, when/if they get to my support tickets (I’m guessing they’re swamped, ’cause this kind of thing happened to other accounts too) and uploaded the correct index.php files from the WordPress folder on my hard drive.

Meanwhile, amber.tangerinecs.com has its own problems; it was also hacked, but I had a full back-up of that as well, so I easily replaced index.php. However, I had inadvertently let the domain expire and had to renew it. :P It was registered w/ GoDaddy instead of Dreamhost, and I was not getting emails about registration. Hopefully all should be well, and Dreamhost still has my MySQL database with my 5 years worth of blog posts in it.

Side thought: I need to find a way to backup a site in its human-readable form, not just as a SQL dump!

Anyway. I don’t know when sotsforum.net will be back up, and I feel bad because I had been taking a pretty hands-off approach with that site lately anyway. But it seemed to be a self-sustaining community. Thank god for my WordPress stuff saved on this computer! I was feeling so weird and violated without my blog. I still feel weird and violated because of the hacking, but at least now my blog loads and I can tell y’all what’s up.

Add to that the fact that I woke up with a headache and stomach ache, and it just has not been a good day so far today!

As for my hosting situation after this… I’m not sure. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for over 3 years and have been satisfied for the most part, and I know security breaches can happen to anyone despite the best laid plans, but still… I’m considering switching. On the other hand, I don’t know if I want to deal with the hassle of switching hosts. Will laziness win out? I do like Dreamhost’s web panel, and I remember back when I switched sotsforum.net from its previous home at HostReflex, what a pain in my ass that was.

Anyway… just wanted to let everyone know what’s up. Gotta work now. I wasn’t on the computer at all yesterday, so I’ll try to catch up w/ email and blog reading today as time permits (which it might not). On the bright side, Rusty and I had a great time with Figleaf yesterday. Photos from the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be posted tonight.

Update, 3:45 p.m. - Still no word from Dreamhost. It’s a good thing I had a WordPress backup! :P This means sotsforum.net is still a spam page, though. I’m sure Dreamhost is really freaking busy right about now, but damn, it’s been all day.

Our fellow hostees at DreamHost have declared that the Georgia Podcast Network shall be the DreamHost Site of the Month for May 2006! What do we win? Several things: 1) a nifty banner to put on the site, 2) a shout-out in the DreamHost newsletter, and 3) the respect and admiration of web users everywhere (or at least somewhere).

Thanks to everyone who voted!

(Cross-posted you know where)