Helen Back (As In, I've Been To)

I’m a lit­tle bleary-eyed, but I am here, awake, and still able to blog. I believe that I’ve exor­cized all of the demons (or dae­mons for the UNIX folks out there) that were putting in the SPAM in my posts and RSS feeds. I did locate code in my xmlrpc.php file that had a graphic of a spi­der (in ascii — how old school!) and then a bunch of what looked like Russ­ian. It had every­thing but ‘From Rus­sia with Love’ in it. I didn’t keep it around long enough to fig­ure exactly what it was doing, but after sev­eral tries at clean­ing out, I inevitably had to blow away my Word­Press install and rein­stall from fresh files. After all of that, rein­stalling and recon­fig­ur­ing plu­g­ins, re-entering and updat­ing pass­words, and ping­ing servers,  I finally appear to be back in busi­ness, and most of what I had is back (save a few plu­g­ins and other niceties).

So, by way of a test, here’s a video I took with the Flip Cam­era of our sec­ond visit to the Night Mar­ket in Rich­mond last night. This evening I had Bánh mì (the incom­pa­ra­ble Viet­namese sand­wiches of ham, paté and crisp veg­eta­bles on crunchy French style baguettes) and Tai­wanese deep-fried squid which was absolutely fan­tas­tic. Pam had a Green Papaya Salad with shred­ded beef jerky and a pip­ing hot waf­fle filled with red bean paste. Too bad the video can’t be smelled or tasted.

This is also a first attempt at using the quick and dirty Flip­Share soft­ware to make a movie from my short clips, and despite the rather ugly open­ing titles, I think it actu­ally does a pretty good job.  It’s cer­tainly faster than iMovie, but then again, I didn’t do much but trim a few of the clips. Let’s hear it for raw video, free of spam!

Apologies for the SPAM

Unfor­tu­nately, yes­ter­day my blog was hacked, and done in a way that I can’t (after a nearly sleep­less night) extri­cate the poi­so­nous code from it. After going round and round with no solu­tion, I’m com­ing to the con­clu­sion that I’m going to have to do a com­plete wipe of it and start from scratch. I’m hop­ing that I can retain my pre­vi­ous entries, but I can’t let this go on much longer, and have to find a way to get this garbage out. My sin­cere apolo­gies, and I hope that I’ll be able to get this run­ning again soon.