A Study in Scarlet


Backyard after the great snow, January 14, 2012. (Using the cutout filter from Photoshop.)

I have been incredibly lackadaisical in regards to posting here as of late, but much of that has more to do with technical difficulties over pure laziness. But this is said from the person who only took down their holiday tree on January 31.
To not put a too terrible fine point on it, several things occurred:
  • All of my domains were infected with the same malware injection not once, but three times
  • The same week as the last injection infection took place, my provider was dDOSed.
  • Though I was ritualistic with backups of my WordPress databases across all of my domains, I apparently missed a crucial step as when I restored the databases, none of the content populated through the WordPress GUI. Ergo, logging into PHPmyAdmin shows me all of the lovely, lovely entries from many, many years and logging into WordPress shows me posts = 0. That’s sobering.

So if you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been and why every single one of my domains is empty – here is that explanation.
While I took massive steps to protect myself from future attacks and did everything by the book (supposedly), the best recourse seemed to be to wipe everything, including SQL tables, across the Lisa network and start fresh. A week after I blew everything away, I remember thinking how much relief I felt having no presence (or virtually no presence) on the web. How long has it been? 10 years? Maybe 12? Actually it’s been 16 since my first page up on Geocities and wrote my first entries, wondering if anyone would ever read them? And even when I was not writing, there were bits of me always present. But during that semi-glorious week in January, there was nothing. And that relief turned to emptiness.
So the cycle starts again, as it was in the beginning and so too shall it go forward to the future.

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