Hacked again.

For the second time in one week, someone hacked into my website. What it looks like is that they left themselves a backdoor to get in even after the username and password were changed. This time, though, instead of running up charges on my credit card they put up a different page. Not just any page, mind you, but a page with the the Saudi Arabian flag and a whole bunch of stuff in Arabic.

After a couple of hours of rooting around, we were able to find any traces of their two visits and deleted them. In all of the time I owned my domain but didn't have a site, nobody bothered me. In the four weeks after my site goes up, I've been hacked twice. With their backdoor closed and the password changed (again) the site should be secure for a little while, but keep your fingers crossed for me.


Saginaw Spirit in the OHL Playoffs.
The Spirit went into the playoffs as the #4 seed in a very tough western conference. The good news is that they will have at least one home series. The bad news is that if they manage to beat the Soo Greyhounds in the first round, it only gets tougher and tougher the rest of the way. I'd love to see a Saginaw-Plymouth Whalers matchup, but we're nowhere near that just yet. The series is even at one game apiece after we split with the 'Hounds this past weekend.


Great Lakes Loons getting ready to take the field.
The season is only about ten days away and I have a TON of things that must be done in the next few days. The season tickets and schedules are all done and they came out great, but now we're into the big projects. Game program, media guide, etc. The biggest hold-up is that we won't know who will be on our team for another week, so there will be a lot of last-minute scrambling on my end. Once I drop the program off at the printer, though, things should lighten up a little bit and I will get to relax a little bit. But only a little.


I was hoping this would be a better entry, but I'm running on very little sleep so I guess I should probably hit the rack.


I'll try to do better next time.

Frustrating start to my week.

I was working late on Sunday night (like I do on so many Sunday nights) and started receiving e-mail from my web host. One invoice after another was coming through and showing up as paid. I logged into my account and saw that someone had run up a bunch of charges by registering and changing domain names. In addition to the charges, they changed the contact information, but apparently it took too long and some of the e-mail made it to me.

I called the people who host my site and the woman was very helpful. I changed my username and password and she started a billing ticket to have the fraudulent charges removed from my account. I thought that this was going to be a pretty painless operation.

I was wrong.

Come Monday morning, my website was down and had a placeholder page saying that my account was suspended due to a billing problem. As if it's not bad enough that they decided to take the site down, they also add insult to injury by putting that message up. So now everybody that goes to my site (all four of you) thinks that I'm a deadbeat who doesn't pay his bills. I am not really worried about current clients visiting the site, but what about prospective clients? What kind of a message does that send to them? And what are the chances they're going to come back to me at a later date?

I made phone call after phone call after phone call, but I tried to be pleasant. Nobody could give me a straight answer. Everybody kept passing me off to somebody else, having me leave voicemails, or having me call back for people who never answer their phone. By the end of the day I was completely frustrated and my site was still down.

It's finally back up and running today, but I am really disappointed in the service I received. There was no good reason to take my site down in the first place and there was certainly no reason for such a ridiculous temp page. I have been with Globat for years, but I think I'm going to have to give up on them. They made a frustrating situation ten times worse.

In closing...stay away from globat.com. The prices are great, but the service stinks.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Marathon Runner

It's been a pretty long day. I sat down to work last night right around midnight and here it is--seventeen hours later--and I'm still going. I almost said "still going strong," but that wouldn't really be true. I'm starting to run out of steam, but I feel pretty good because I have accomplished quite a bit so far today. I still have a few things that I want to get done before I crash, but I have already finished with most of the heavy lifting for today.

I'm out of the house right now because I just needed some time out of the studio. I had a couple of errands to run, so I decided to grab a cup of coffee and spread my work out on one of the big tables at Harvest House. I wish I had room in my studio for a big table like this because it really helps my brainstorming. I could use the dining room table, but I couldn't leave my things spread out for very long because...you know...dinner and stuff.

I should probably get going pretty soon. I've gotten some good work done here, but I need to get home to take care of Spooky. She had surgery on her cruciate ligament last Thursday, so she's all stitched up, stapled up and cooped up. We can't let her out of her kennel without somebody nearby because she wants to be up and running around, which could re-injure the leg. As long as we can keep her pretty stable and calm for the next couple of weeks, the rest of the healing process should go smoothly. Two more weeks of almost no activity, followed by a couple of weeks of very light activity and then she'll be back to (almost) normal about eight weeks from now. It sounds like a long time, but the way time has been passing, I'm sure that she'll be up and running (literally) in no time.

The late sunrise threw me off today (especially since I was up all night), but the late sunset makes up for it. It's around 50 degrees again today, so my spring fever is at a fever pitch. It's going to cool off again later this week so I'm going to try to enjoy the temperatures for as long as they last. It won't be long now, though.

Okay...breaktime is over. Time to get back to work.

Busy week.

989 had a pretty good week. I had a couple of really productive meetings, I had a great pitch meeting with a potential new client, I managed to keep my head above water with all of the jobs I'm working on, plus I finally got www.989design.com launched. The website was the big thing because it's been something that's been on my TO DO list for over a year. Hell, I've never really had a site worth speaking of, so I guess it's been on my TO DO list for over five years.

Anyway, the site is up and running and even though there are GAPING HOLES that I need to fill in, it's there. My big project for the weekend is fleshing out the writing in a couple of sections and working on the portfolio pieces I want to show. Currently, I have a portfolio up there that you can view or download, but the portfolio section is where I really need to be focusing my work.

The space I was looking at to open my design studio/record store is being rented, which is a little disappointing. The space is perfect, but I'm so busy right now that the timing is just awful. On the bright side, though, the guy renting it is my doctor. And he's looking to open up? You guessed it, a record store. We're going to talk about doing something together and I might even be able to still use the space for the studio, which would be awesome.

Okay, I'm looking at the clock and realizing that I still have a lot to do before I think about relaxing tonight, so I should get back to work.

I need to start pushing the site and the blog because I'm really curious to know if anybody is even reading this.