How Does It Know?

Remember when I was complaining about the volume of TV ads here? Well, I just heard about a newish bill called the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM, that proposes to lower the volume of those annoyingly loud commercials. So someone (U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo) has noticed (and it’s not just me), and there’s a possibility something might be done about it! Government, sometimes you can be pretty OK.

I put up some new songs at Part Time Songs last night. Please check them out, they’re right at the top under “Check Your Pockets”.

I’m also sick again… bad cold and cough. Coughing frequently and loudly enough to not go into work. Right after my damn vacation, which was right after my damn car accident. Great timing, body. Grr.

Why are commercials WAY WAY WAY louder than the program you’re watching?

I know, I know. So they can sell their products. But really, the loudness turns me off completely. I doubt I even purchase any of the products they’re advertising.

I don’t know who the “in your face” type of advertising works on, but it really shouldn’t work on anyone. I do not understand people who are swayed by advertising.

Tonight it is incredibly snowy and stuff, so I spent a couple hours upgrading Wordpress, due to the security concern raised in my last post. I was .3 versions behind, and the previous commenter reminded me of it.

I figured it’d be easier than it really was. Turned out my old theme really hosed things up badly after I did the installation. I couldn’t access the dashboard, couldn’t log in at all, and the blog was all text. So I deleted everything (except the database) and did the one-click install my host provides. Clean slate. Good deal. Change the config to use the old tables instead of the new ones (this is kinda clever, I thought, it lets you specify a prefix for the tables to use… my original ones were “wp_”, and the new tables it made were some random string “wp_asdfa_”… this is so you can have more than one blog in the same DB… me, I never did that, and I’m kinda glad. It seems like I’d get them mixed up a lot).

ANYWAY, so the blog isn’t looking quite the way it used to… it’s using the upgraded version of the same theme I WAS using, but this is its original state, before the modifications I made. I tried just using the old theme after the successful reinstallation, and it screwed things up again. So, this is the theme for now, until I can make some time to do my customizations. I need to compare the stylesheets and see if I can use any of it.

Maybe the blog gods are just trying to tell me it’s time for a facelift on the site.

Good night!

Well, my first post about the Wordpress migration got deleted, because I hadn’t changed a MySQL server name in a config file. I backed up the old database, and restored it to the new database server. Then I made the post about the migration and then I deleted the old database. Turns out the posts were still saving to the old database, and I only realized that after deleting the old database (because of the “Um, there’s no database called that” error I got). Anyway, whatever. I think it’s all set up correctly now.

Another weird thing is that my blog at thelowhello.com got haxxor’d (or however the haxxors would spell it. Any haxxors out there?)… I got an email from Google saying that my site might be harmful to people’s computers. I did a Google search, and here’s what I saw:

So, yeah, stuff in German and French about a Caribbean online casino! Great! I opened up the last post I had made in that blog, sometime last summer, and saw that yup, there was that text and some other Javascript in there. Great again! So Wordpress somehow allowed a SQL injection somewhere… I deleted the offending text and saved the entry, but this actually came at an all right time, because I had been planning to stop hosting that blog anymore and letting the URL lapse. Because we don’t need it anymore and I don’t plan to use it (or that URL) at all.

Anyway, I guess I have some reading to do about Wordpress vulnerabilities. Should be an interesting project. Probably should check plug-ins, too. I haven’t written any myself, so at least I know it’s not *my* code.

I haven’t been writing much lately, partly due to not having a lot to say, and partly due to not having internet access at home. Comcast high-speed internet for us has been down since last Thursday. So this is day 7. I called them up on Friday. After an hour on hold and a service rep who suggested I change my Internet Explorer settings (I don’t even surf at home with Internet Explorer) to see if that would do anything, I had to settle for a technician coming out to our house.

The earliest they could schedule someone to come out was on Monday, so I asked my boss if I could go home for the second half of the day to wait for that. So I did that, and as soon as the guy came inside, he was getting off the cell phone with someone at the main office (or where ever it was), and announced smilingly, “It’s a Stage 2 Outage! I can’t do anything for you.” When I asked what a “stage 2 outage” was, he said he didn’t know, but “that’s just how they do!”. Ok. Fine. So, I eagerly await them repairing this outage. I chat with Comcast reps online from work daily, just to let them know things aren’t fixed and that I am expecting a good solution. Today, I am told that the Stage 2 Outage has been resolved and that everything should work now.

Too bad that it DOESN’T. So now, since we’re somehow not impacted by this miraculous resolution of the Stage 2 Outage, I have to schedule another technician to come out and look at things. Hopefully things will go better this time? I have no idea. It’s definitely frustrating and I feel very powerless in the situation. I am thinking about switching to WOW, but I’m not sure if they’re able to install in our condo complex. I filled out a form on their site and they’re going to get back to me on it.

Anyway… That’s the story. Wish me luck.