apropos of anything

Happy birthday, Bhaijan.

I thought of him in taraweeh tonight, of how totally different things would have been if he had lived, and what he would be like today, and how next year we’d be planning his 4oth birthday party, and how the pictures of him at 3 or 4 look EXACTLY like the pictures of me when I was 3 or 4, which is something I can’t say for any of the other boys, and how life doesn’t end up the way we plan.

Hmm, so in a nutshell: I suck.

See the post below, about how I ignored my blog and didn’t do the suggested WordPress upgrade and contributed to a DOS attack on my hosting provider. The other part of this story, the part I just recognized, is that I got hacked. I haven’t checked to see how deep yet, but it’s pretty bad, I think. None of my links are working.

It’ll probably end up with me exporting my posts, wiping out my database, and starting all over with an import of the posts I want to keep. And since I don’t have time to do this now, or until December, I’m not sure what the state of blog will be in the meantime.

The main page works. Hope you weren’t looking for anything deeper, though (like advice on where to buy Nabisco Chocolate Wafers… don’t laugh, it’s quite a popular post).

This, I suppose, is what I get for going AWOL from my blog, for not paying attention to it, and for not updating WordPress when they asked me to: a DOS attack on my hosting provider courtesy of a security hole in WordPress, which led to my hosting provider chmod’ing out my main WordPress php file so that it didn’t work anymore, which led to Dan asking why my Web site was down, which led to me noticing the WordPress-related trending topic on Twitter, which led to me upgrading, or trying to, which led to me discovering I no longer knew my database password, which led to me creating a new database user, which led to me upgrading, finally, which led to here, where my old theme doesn’t work and I am late for prayer so I don’t have time to look up a new theme.

So, ugly but back.

For now.