Virginia Is For Families

One of the blogs in the blogroll here is Pumping Your Muse Prompts and it is a collection of photos and simple writing assignments.  I recommend it to those of you who are interested in writing more and exercising your imagination while you do it.

For example this morning I chose to do an exercise about a parked car and was asked to focus on emotion, smell and sound. In keeping with my present dark mood I set the scene before dawn in a rundown city area.  And here is what happened!

He sank down in the seat of his Chevrolet and waited for the morning light. He had spent most of the night in the bar up the street and only left because he felt uncomfortably close to an altercation with the stranger in the corner booth. Why had the man approached him as he was leaving? What did he want?

His car was strewn with empty Budweiser bottles and the smell of spilled beer and cigarettes mixed with the sharp odor of gasoline. The car wouldn’t start. He had flooded the feeble carburetor.

And suddenly his mind was flooded with fear as he saw the door of the bar swing open and the man burst through it and head down the sidewalk in his direction. The street was silent except for the sound of his purposeful walk.

“I need some help” he thought. But there was no one near and the hulking shadow under the street light continued in his direction.

“I am lost” he whispered to himself and he once again checked all the locks on the doors. But the sudden loud report of glass cracking into hundreds of tiny islands desperately hanging together came a second later.

“I should get out of the car” he said and suddenly rage filled him like a spark that threatened to turn the interior of the fume filled vehicle into a ball of flame.

He reached across his body with his violently shaking hand and released the lock. And with his left hand he pulled up on the handle. His feet hit the pavement and his weary frame suddenly weary no more stood up to meet his assailant.

He picked up the rock embedded in his windshield and thought about heaving it in the direction from which it had arrived. But a rock is a feeble weapon when pitted against a rather large handgun.

And this he could see as it was raised in his direction.

“What have I done?” he thought as light began to color the lonely street of this old and often violent city. “Why did I come here ?” and the answer came not in words but in the flash of the gun and a loud sound that somehow was all mixed up with a brief moment of pain as the street, his car and the shadowy figure now just a few feet away all exploded.

And suddenly he was looking down on a man lying in the street next to a green 1975 Chevrolet while another man turned and ran down the sidewalk.

He turned and looked in a window across the street because he heard a baby crying. And he suddenly knew that the small child was hungry and afraid and wanted his mother. Because he dreamed of ghosts in the night.

The child’s dream was disturbed as the light crept through the tattered shade of his bedroom window and he wanted to be held by his mother who was just coming out of the bar across the street.

She screamed as she saw the body of her friend lying on the pavement over a dark stream moving towards the gutter and the parked Chevrolet.

And slowly lights began to come on up and down the street as residents held their heads and turned their weary bodies towards a familiar sound and the beginning of another day.

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You can start something like this and really not know where it is going for awhile. Just put yourself in the scene as an invisible  bystander or one of the characters.   Imagine somehow you dropped out of the sky and there is this unfortunate man sitting in his car.   What is he thinking?  What is going to happen?

I probably took this exercise somewhat far afield but no one is going to grade this thing.  We are not in school anymore.  Please let us not bring our teachers home with us!

OOoooops. I left my PlugonHogDetector on for a few hours while I was off getting lost in my bookmarks. That’s not good. It leaves all these funny numbers on your blog and on top of other stuff. But all it is really doing is discovering how fast your blog is loading. So you don’t use too much CPU.

So your host doesn’t shut you down in the middle of writing a post…

Here is where it lives in case anybody would like to try it. Just please remember to turn it off after you are done using it so it doesn’t make your blog look like it was hacked.

Nobody has commented on my new poem I see. And probably NOBODY EVER WILL. Why?

I wonder. . .could it be the subject matter? No. Not possible. I see this stuff every day all over the television. Maybe it’s just a lousy poem. Or maybe everybody is outside doing fun things like I should be doing.

Are you having any trouble with plugins lately?  Do you ever feel like you have too many?

I received an email from HostGator this morning and it stated that my post on NewsLinkBriefs.com about John McCain caused my CPU usage to grossly exceed the limits set for it.

Here is the post at my old Wordpress.com blog Shoot The Virginia Breeze

http://davidlind.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/senator-mccain-in-good-health-this-week/

So if a post every does become truly popular around here it will never be seen because the host will shut it down. Unless, of course, you rent your own server in anticipation of that day.

It all seems like a catch-22 proposition at this point. I am hoping someone can explain it a bit better.

Update: Once again plugins are in the news. I went to my lovely friends at the Aussie Bloggers Forum

and they were quick to come up with some suggestions. They pointed me to the PluginHogDetector

and by loading it and picking out a few plugins I substantially decreased the loading time of VB. Probably it is loading at least one half to a second faster. All of that time eats up CPU.

But in their message HostGator noted that this problem has been going on for awhile now and they didn’t cut off service until now. Why not drop a note and some advice to the blissfully unaware customer?

“Say there, guy! You are using a lot of CPU! We may have to cut you off if you don’t do something. Why not take a look and see if you have some plugin hogs!”

They could clean it up a bit. But the message would be appreciated. Instead we wake up one day to find we have been disconnected from the Blogosphere! That’s like disconnecting a patient from his life support.

And I am a patient! As well as impatient! The Gator wants business and he doesn’t care if neophytes apply. The more the merrier! Why not give them a helping hand and set an example for all the others out there?

It could mean more business and bigger profits!

My blog was down for three hours this afternoon. I have no idea why it happened. HostGator suspended my blog but according to the person I chatted with on LIVE CHAT they don’t have enough information to give me a reason why this happened. It has to do with CPU usage. My little blogs were using too much CPU? LinkTiger ran through my three blogs and espied all the broken links. Could that have shaken the Gator?

Somebody has to be KIDDING me.

So finally I had to sit on the doorstep of some unfortunate individual who is working on Memorial Day.

And refuse to leave.

Refuse to be tossed into the giant black hole with everybody else who has a problem. And wait 24-72 HOURS for a response. Three days with a blog that has a stupid smiling gator for anyone who comes by to look at my blogging effort.

We have discussed smiling reptiles with big teeth several times already. Long time readers understand that when I was a small child I had a recurring nightmare. I would wake up and look at the window of my bedroom. And there would be a smiling gator with saucer like eyes out there looking at. . .

me. The petrified boy who was unable to move in the bed.

Maybe I was abducted by aliens as a child. That’s one possible explanation.

But when did they decide to take over a hosting company?

Just kidding. In any case after I talked for awhile with this nice person she helped me. Because she wanted me to go away I guess. She realized i wasn’t going away. The brush off wasn’t working anymore.

And now my blog is working again. If there really is a problem I want to know about it. But probably it is related more to this. I was minding my own business yesterday when I got this email. . . .

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We’ve recently done an audit of HostGator’s web hosting services and have found that many
of our customers have a weak password.

In an attempt to secure your hosting further we have changed all of our customers
passwords to a randomly generated password that meets our guidelines. (my emphasis)

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The email you have received from hostgator with information regarding the forced password update is in fact real. You can confirm this by hovering over the url and seeing that it links to us at ****

“I have included more information in this post about why we did this and why YOU SHOULD NOT change your password back to what we had on file.

We have over 150 employees currently and have had dozens and dozens more come and go over the years.

We had one employee that is no longer with us from a few years ago that we are in the process of suing. He will be served in the next few days. He was operations manager of hostgator for a brief time period and could have very easily taken a username / pw list home from the billing system. We don’t have any evidence that he did this but at the same time we can’t say 100% that he didn’t. I don’t believe it’s worth the risk any longer especially knowing he’s most likely going to be pretty upset about being served.

We had another employee that got another job and decided before telling us that he was going to do some damage. He logged into our ticket system and closed all the tickets in que. While we don’t have any reason to believe he ever created a list of usernames / pw we can’t rule out this possibility. I just got word that this ex employee is in the process of being prosecuted by the DA for this malicious attack. Again it’s just not worth taking the risk knowing that there’s a small chance he could have a pw list.

We recently had to let a very trustworthy / hard working remote employee go. She worked for us back in Florida for years and wasn’t able to relocate with us to texas. We kept her on as remote employee since she was unable to relocate. Just recently we discovered that the computer she was using to login with had a trojan on it. We don’t believe her hacked machine ever gave out any customer usernames / pws, but again we can’t positively say it didn’t. Due to this security breach of her machine we gave her the choice of either moving to houston to work in house or let go.

Not to long ago we allowed many employees to login to the ticket system / billing system from home using a vpn. It’s very possible one of their computers could have been trojaned and someone was building a username / pw list. We have no evidence this ever happened but it’s very possible as slim as it is.

I could go on and on about different incidents that could have resulted in an intrusion that we never became aware of. It’s that unknown that keeps me up at night! The billing system we currently use just isn’t safe with passwords displayed.

I repeat DO NOT change it back to what it was!!!!! If you do and you get hacked don’t blame the gator!

The new billing system we are about to deploy will never display a customers full password to employees. This will help protect you from a hostgator computer ever getting hacked as well as any ex employees looking to get “even” with us.

Our systems have been locked down with only office ips being allowed access. We use to allow employees access from home back when we were smaller.

Modernbill had a major exploit years ago that would have allowed a hacker to view all usernames and passwords. We patched this the same day it came out so there’s no need to worry about this particular incident, but what if there was another 0 day exploit that hasn’t been discovered? It’s just not secure having passwords in plain text without encryption as modernbill does now.

I’m sorry for the lack of notice on this update but if someone out there did happen to have a list the last thing you would want to do is give them a warning. I also apologize about some of the confusion that resulted from customers on the first few servers being updated.

Thanks for reading all!”

I got a password that was too difficult so I put one in that the cpanel said was “Strong” (stronger than my prior password). And when I tried it today my blog was taken away from me.

We deal with all the problems of having a Wordpress.org blog because it belongs to us. We are in charge. Today I found out that this is not the case. My blog can be pulled out from under me like a rug at any moment and for reasons that are not clear to anyone.

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I am a renter. Not an owner.  And I thought I got rid of my last landlord long ago. . . silly me.

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