This morning, I went to the UPS site to check on the status of my iPad order. I was bewildered to learn that it was in Ontario, CA, but happy that it had cleared the border!
Then, I got an email update that my iPad was in Louisville, KY. Huh?!
Turns out that Ontario, CA means the town of Ontario, California, not the province of Ontario, Canada. Oops.
I can’t figure out what it’s doing in Louisville. If it could make it that far today, it could have made it to Lethbridge!
I just got in from the staff holiday party put on by the company for which I’m working this winter. This was quite a treat. I did get a dinner out from the crazies at the RV park in Oliver (which was rather shocking), but otherwise this is my first staff party since the 2003 holiday season. Oh, we got a staff party when I worked the government, but we had to pay to attend, so it doesn’t count.
We had the party at the Regent Restaurant, here in Lethbridge. They serve Canadian-Chinese food. The owners ordered a variety of dishes and we ate family style. It was very good! There were a few chicken dishes, some beef, assorted vegetables, noodles, and rice. Chinese food is at the bottom of the list of cuisines I’d go out for, but I don’t hate it, I just find that it tastes like junk food. This stuff didn’t. If someone was to ask me to recommend a Chinese restaurant in Lethbridge, I’d say I’ve only been to the Regent and I can recommend it.
Everyone was given an envelope and I didn’t think much of it, assuming it’d be a thank you/happy holiday card. I opened it in the car and, sure, enough, that was it. But there was something else in the envelope, too, something that shocked me so much it took five minutes for me to recover enough to be able to drive. I’ll just say it was the most generous bonus cheque I’ve ever been given and I was able to order myself an iPad when I got home.
I’m off to stare at my Amazon order confirmation for a while. I don’t expect delivery until the New Year, but it’s on its way. Amazing.
Well, I apparently didn’t catch all the little beasties the hacker put onto my server this week. I awoke this morning to find my entire webhost account suspended, right down to my email accounts. It took four messages and 13 hours for tech support to get back to me and tell me I was suspended for sending out spam.
I replied rather sharply that suspending my account and then ignoring my pleas for 13 hours was an inappropriate response since they knew I’d been hacked over the weekend and that I was working making corrections. Obviously, I did nothing wrong. It’s amazing how great 100 Megs was in regards to the original hacking issue, but how it completely missed the ball with the after shocks.
Today was a nightmare. I have had my @uskeba.ca email address for the better part of a decade. Changing it is really not an option at this point. I began to go over the steps for switching a domain to a new host and the work ahead nearly overwhelmed me. The blog had a recent backup, thank goodness, but none of my other sites do (guess what I’m about to do).
All day, I have felt like a a fire victim being kept away from her property and desperate to sift through the ruins to see what, if anything, was left. I don’t feel violated, just terribly angry that people have nothing better to do than screw around with people’s livelihoods. And I am also incredibly disappointed with my webhost, whom I praised so highly just the other day.
Finally, I am absolutely overwhelmed by the number of people who went out of their way to contact me today, be it through my .uskeba.ca address, Gmail address (I loathe Gmail…), Facebook page, or Squidoo profile. Thank you everyone for your support and concern. It means the world to me.
Earlier this evening, I became aware that my main site, uskeba.ca, had been hijacked by a hacker. There was a taunting message on the front page that made me sick with dread. I quickly tried to log into my control panel to discover that the password had been changed. The hackers had full access to everything under uskeba.ca, including my blogs and my email! Fortunately, the only obvious damage at that point was to uskeba.ca and its WordPress installation.
First order of business was to regain control. I emailed my webhost who responded surprisingly quickly (even though it felt like AGES). They reset my cPanel password and told me that the hackers got in through an old version of WordPress. I update the WordPress installations for my blogs immediately, but I rarely think to do so on the static sites.
The new password allowed me to get back in and make an inventory of the damage. I started by changing every single password–all of my email accounts, all of my WordPress installations, the cPanel, FTP, everything. The uskeba.ca WordPress installation had been compromised, so I scrapped it entirely and started from scratch (which was a nice reminder that I really need to work on make it look a little more professional).
The next thing I did was go through folders under uskeba.ca to delete anything that looked suspicious. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of files, but a list of recently access files provided by webhost provided breadcrumbs as to where I should search. I found several folders I could not delete, so I sent the list to my webhost who deleted them. Talk about stellar support! If you need good webhosting with solid support, you can’t go wrong with 100 Megs Web Hosting. I’ve been with them for years.
Finally, I made sure that all my WordPress installations were updated to the most current version.
I think/hope I’ve done everything needed. What a night!
It is about three hours past my bedtime. Thankfully, I’m not working tomorrow.
I got a comment from faithful reader Gary on my last post about my not posting for a week. I thought he was exaggerating. But no! I haven’t posted for a week!
With the week I just had, how can that be?! Oh, right, I don’t like to post too much about my jobs. Well, I will be sharing one anecdote shortly, but I’ll just say first that right now I am working about 30 hours at my outside job and at least as many for myself. That leaves me just enough time to sleep, cook, tease my cats, and keep The Apartment tidy. It doesn’t leave much time for bloggable activities. 🙂 Just hang in there, okay? This will all be worth it when I go south this spring and have new border crossing stories to tell. 🙂
So this week’s amusing anecdote is once again brought by some of the most laughable Canadian organizations, our telecom companies.
Try to follow this…
A new tenant called Telus to have his internet connected. A Telus rep came to do the hookup, but discovered that the wiring was bad from our box in my office to the tenant’s apartment. He told me to call Telus to have them install a new line.
“But you’re Telus, why can’t you do the work?”
“Actually, I’m a sub-contractor for Telus. I can’t do anything without their authorization.”
Oh, okay. He gave me the business contact number for Telus. I called and was told I needed to call another number. I tried that number and it was not available in my area. So I called back Telus and decided to try my luck with another rep.
“Oh, we can’t help you. Your equipment is with Bell. You have to call them and they’ll contact us so we can get a subcontractor to do the repair.”
(I swear I’m not making this up.)
I was given, again, the number that didn’t work. Thankfully, I caught the rep before he hung up and he was able to dig up another number for Bell that he said would work.
Next, I called Bell and explained the situation to them. “Well, yes, it’s our equipment. But why should we have to call Telus? Call them back and order through them. They’ll send us the information. Then call us to schedule the repair so we can schedule it with Telus.”
(So Telus can then schedule it with a sub-contractor, right? Really, I cannot make this stuff up.)
I hung up with Bell and called Telus again. This rep said the same thing as the last one, informing me that the person at Bell was completely wrong. Here, try this number, you should get someone smarter.
So, back to Bell I went. This rep agreed that Bell had to take my order, but she needed to do a credit check on the company, never mind that we have an account with them and that we’re asking for a line to be repaired, not a completely new one to be put in, yaddi, yadda, call me back when you have the mountain of information I asked for, bla bla bla.
I decided to go up the chain of command at my company and get some advice. It took some persistence on my part, but I was finally advised to have the tenant call Telus, tell them at the first install failed, and that they need to come fix the line.
The tenant looked at me like I was an alien when I told him this, trying to figure out how this was going to work since he obviously had no authority to have major structural work done in the building, but he went along with it. He came back a short while later to tell me that Telus had no idea what he wanted but they’d be sending a sub-contractor tech to talk with me the next day.
The sub-contractor arrived on schedule(ish) and discovered that there wasn’t really anything wrong with the line. The first technician missed something that was easy to repair…
As my best friend would say :::head desk:::
Next week, I have to go through all of this again to get three new lines hooked up for our intercom system. I’m starting to understand how some people end up throwing their phone through the telecom office window!