John McDonald

Blogging about politics, life, and the web

Crazy Summer Days

June 30th, 2009

Its been a while since I’ve had a chance to post here, but I’ve got some good excuses.

Also – welcome to anyone who’s ended up here due to the current down status of Undergroundpolitics.com. Here’s the whole story for those who care:

We left the USA on June 4th for a 10-day trip to Ireland. On about the 8th, someone managed to get access to Undergroundpolitics and began using the software and mail servers to send out tons of unsolicited phishing emails. What’s phishing? Well, that’s when someone pretends to be someone else in an attempt to gain your personal or financial information. In this particular case, he was using my email servers to blast his email list (don’t worry, no one who used or visited Undergroundpolitics would have been affected). Gladly, I don’t store any information about visitors – and I never try to collect emails from surfers. If you want to see what I’m up to, you know where the sites are at!

Anyway, we got back around mid month and it took another few days for me to get that server secure and back online. So although the rest of the sites on that host are back up in action, UP is still potentially a security risk. Really, the only good news for me on the tech front is that the sites making money are back online and accessible worldwide. Of course, sales are still week thanks to a global economic meltdown.

Now, with business (somewhat) back on track, we’ve dedicated a significant chunk of time to cleaning up around the house. We had almost cleaned up the living room when Aisling started packing up for the next art show/sale. Of course, that means it looks like we’re in the middle of moving out with brown boxes and packing popcorn everywhere.

The yard project continues with the gradual transformation of Florida jungle into something habitable. The potted peppers and tomatoes survived our time away and the next step will be building out a stone patio and building up a small garden area for more fruits & veggies.

In the next week or so, there should be some good posts coming up: Expect pictures from Ireland and more analysis of the unfolding economic crisis. Quite a few expensive pieces of legislation are being rushed through Congress, so I hope I get a chance to get a few words out about them before we get stuck with the bill. For now, all new UndergroundPolitics posts will be here in the Politics section. Why not check it out until I can figure out how to recover and secure whats archived on UP?

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