Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Archives for May 2008

Sun setting on Lake Ontario

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Last year we had a big family reunion and as part of our reunion adventures we took a Toronto Dinner and Boat cruise.

Just before dinner Chris and I decided to take a walk on the deck and it turned out to be perfect timing. We were able to get a good view of the city scape with the CN tower and the sun slowly setting behind it.

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A few minutes earlier the scene was more like this:

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Just as our dinner was ending the water got a bit choppy. Now I love canoing but I’ve never spent much time on large boats and as the boat rocked in the waves I think I turned green! That was the only downside to the evening. I felt better eventually … but it was iffy for a while. Anyone else have motion sickness?





Dumbest Survivor ever?

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Did anyone watch Survivor last night?

We didn’t watch it last night, but we did tape it.

I just saw the show and man wasn’t that stupid? I can’t believe the last guy is gone and only because he was dumb enough to believe the girls and gave away his individual immunity. I knew as each and every one of the remaining women picked up their pens that they were writing Erik’s name down.

I don’t know if he’s really the dumbest survivor ever, but after seeing the women back stab and trick several of the other guys he should have known better.

I’m hoping that either Amanda or Cirie wins on Sunday. Natalie and Parvati are just too evil to win. Even if either of them are in the last three I think they’ll have too many enemies on the jury to win.

Missing out on another weekend away

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Chris and I were supposed to go to Brantford again this weekend. It’s Chris’ father’s birthday and there’s also a big party honoring him on Saturday night for all the years he put into training kids to play hockey.

Well … as I said we were supposed to go. Now it will just be Chris.

You see Chris’ father booked a bunch of hotel rooms for all the family that’s expected to descend on Brantford this weekend. We had been planning to bring our Lab puppy with us. We were going to bring her crate so that she could be kept out of trouble when we were out of the house at the party.

Now that we’re supposed to be staying in a hotel with the rest of the gang we can’t bring our dog. It’s not a pet friendly hotel … so that means I can’t go. I’ll have to stay home with the dog. With all the people and the chaos that surrounds Chris’ family it was going to be difficult enough bringing the puppy. Staying in a hotel (especially a non pet friendly one) would be worse.

I had wanted to go. I was also curious as to whether Walter Gretzky might show up at the banquet as he used to coach hockey along side my father in law so chances are good that he might be there. He’s a friend of the family too. I’ll make sure Chris brings a camera with him just in case.

Save up to 200 dollars on in stock furniture

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With inflation going up and the economy going down I think most people are interested in saving money, especially when it comes to major purchases.

I’m sure that some of you have been contemplating getting new living room furniture, or perhaps completely redoing the bedroom with all new bedroom furniture. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the items you wanted and save money at the same time?

Wholesale Furniture Brokers, a furniture store, is have a sale on all their in stock furniture right now. You can save up to $200! This sale is only going on until tomorrow – May 9th though, so if you’re interested in getting a new platform bed or perhaps a comfortable recliner visit the site now and get your order in.

Wholesale Furniture Brokers isn’t just an online store. They have several locations throughout the United States. If you visit the site you can see a list of their locations in the left hand menu. I know when it comes to buying furniture it’s nice to see it in person, sit on a couch or lie on a bed to make sure it’s comfortable – right? Well if you live near one of their retail stores you can take a look at their bedroom furniture or living room furniture in person.

WordPress and PHP based sites have altered and extra files – check yours!

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If you use WordPress or any other website platform that used PHP you should take a look at your files to see if any changes have been made to them in the last month.

A month or so ago I noticed that three of my WP sites suddenly said that they were using version 2.5 … heck they really weren’t even using 2.3.3 yet! Remember I was behind in my updates. So I decided to use my FTP program in order to take a look at the files on my server and much to my amazement I found that a lot of files had the date 10/4/2008 as the last time they were modified. Oddly enough I noticed the change to wp 2.5 on a few of my sites prior to all the file changes on the 10th of April. I wrote a post about it (see link above) on the 8th of April.

In addition to file date changes I found extra files some with PHP extensions, others with pngg and jpgg extensions.

I also found that a line of code had been added to the top of many of my files. Just go to your WordPress theme editor and take a look at each file for the current theme you are using to see if there is code with MD5 and debugger in it at the top. If there is you can remove the code with ends at exit >.

I went to WordPress.org to see if I could find anything about sites getting hacked or attacked and the first time I searched wordpress.org and did a Google search I didn’t find much, but last weekend I found lots of info. You can learn more by reading this WordPress security issue discussion.

Apparently a number of sites have been hit. That’s why I’m urging you to take a good look at your files to see if code has been added or if new files created.

Like I said I discovered changes on my sites shortly after they were hit – maybe April 12th or so, but I didn’t realize how widespread the problem was until I started digging deeper and got more information. I’ve basically spent a good portion of the last two weeks going over EVERY file on my web hosting server – even the /TMP directory.

It took me so long because I’ve got a lot of sites.

I even went through my Joomla CMS sites directories as well as my HTML based websites directories and I found extra and altered files there too, so if you run a few different kinds of sites don’t forget to check everything.

I also changed the passwords on all my sites as well as my server password. Every password for each of my sites is different.

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