While it would be extremely naive of me to think that the days of being taken over by GHoST61 and others of his ilk are finished, I certainly feel a lot safer now. I finally ditched IXWebhosting, my former hosting partner, in favor of Dreamhost, and things are already moving a lot faster, smoother, and just plain better.

One of the major gripes I had with IXWebhosting was the way they kept moving files and folders and changing permissions, locking me out of access to my own files while allowing Turkish scum (and their whole ilky lot) to invade. My site was trashed and rebuilt more times than I care to count… it was home to phishing scams, malevolent viruses, hackers and uberhackers and scams of all sorts. It was a cesspool. A filthy, stinking, cesspool.

But those days are hopefully behind me. IX has been banished, and the site has found greener pastures. The only casualty in all of this was the Gallery, which was irreparably damaged in the transfer, but that’s okay. It was top heavy, laden with overcomplicated code and just plain a great big pain in the ass. And anyway, that’s what Flickr is for.

So, yeah. That’s that.

It is GHoST61, an apparently well-known hacker, who enjoys depositing a false index page into other peoples’ websites like a steaming hunk of cyberstool. I learned of this attack from my pal, Johnny K, whose own site was also attacked. Fortunately I was able to restore mine – at least for now – but something seems to have gone drastically wrong over at strangeattitude.

I can’t understand why people have to channel their creative energies through such destructive channels. It takes a lot of time and effort and creativity and yes, even love, to build a website and fill it with content, even if all you ever use it for is to bitch about this and that or to cover yourself in glory. And then some jackass has to come along and bring it down? For what? So the three people who actually stop by here can’t look at the pumpkin video?

Well, GHoST61, I managed to get this crappy little site running again. The whole world can now see my robotic pumpkin in action, and they can learn how to make a caipirinha, and they can read about what a good time the pig roast was. I know, I know… it’s anarchy! Run for your homes! Hide the women!

And while you’re at it, could you PLEASE just leave this site the hell alone?

Thanks. Jerk.

EDIT: Apparently this GHoST61 is from Turkey, and the taking over of lame websites is to let the world know that he/she/they has/have a problem with war in general and George W. Bush in particular. This site was hacked in a much more elaborate fashion than was mine, and all of GHoST61′s gripes are clearly enumerated below. Plus, bonus! You get to listen to that sick wailing the whole time you read. Seriously, dude, that’s never going to be a breakaway pop hit.

Well, guess what GHoST61? I don’t much care for war, either, and as for GW, well, I voted against him twice and against his clones this third time, so how about you cut me some slack and take your protest somewhere that it might do some good? The only Turkey I want to have anything to do with for the rest of this year is the delicious golden brown turkey I’ll be eating on Thanksgiving.

Of course, the Gallery itself looks like crap, but I’m almost afraid to mess with it any more after the last couple of attempts at customization led to the repeated premature demise of the whole freaking thing.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get my videos uploaded again. And I still wish death upon the phishers that initially caused the massive cascade failure of the site.

But for now, I am declaring this one a victory.

Go to the Gallery here.

It has taken a lot longer than I originally anticipated to get my Gallery up and running again – and even now I only have maybe half of my albums installed – but through no small effort, it is coming along nicely.

I don’t really understand why technology seems to have taken such a sudden turn toward the dark side lately, though. When I first installed the Gallery program on my server, it worked like a charm. This time, however, I installed and uninstalled the program no fewer than seven (7) times before I finally got it to work, and even then it required completely wiping out every bit of infrastructure I had in place in order to start from the ground up. It’s really very disappointing.

And now, the laborious task of uploading thousands of photos has begun in earnest. As I said, at this point I have maybe half of the albums uploaded already. This is partly my own fault; if I were willing to resize the photos things would go a little more smoothly, but I have thus far refused to do that. I may change my mind about this soon, however, since some of my pics really are huge, and there’s no reason anyone needs to look at a photo that’s any bigger than 1024 x 786, or whatever the largest size photo happens to be. Or even 800 x 600, which is what I think the medium photos are.

Anyway, that’s where things stand now. I am struggling through this, and hope to finish it within a week’s time… but then again, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, so we shall have to wait and see.

And speaking of seeing, the Gallery can be seen here: The Picture Perfect Life of Saru-San.

Slowly but surely I am bringing this web site back from the phishing attack that crippled it a couple of weeks ago.

What you are now looking at is Part the First in the process. Of course, this page isn’t what brought people to my site – no, it was the Gallery that people were looking for. And that part? Ha. It’s completely fubar. And the sad reality is, I had it working at one point, but then the phishers came back, prompting me to completely obliterate the site and start from scratch.

How frustrating it is, getting caught up in someone else’s pathetic schemes. I wish them death. Slow, painful death.

With any luck, I’ll have it all up and running soon.