Archive for the ‘General’ Category

According to a study published by the Journal of Social Science & Medicine. Researchers in Montreal found out that unemployment will shorten your life span. The findings that analyzed data over a forty year span, in fifteen countries and millions of individuals say that 78% of men and 37% of women face the likely hood of premature death. With our unemployment rate at nearly 20% that means millions of Americans are at risk of an early death. Right now our representatives are wrestling with our budget trying to cut out programs that help unemployed as well as under employed citizens. The easiest thing to do would be for Obama himself to invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt ceiling where they do not have to cut out programs that are essential for the unemployed and poor people who comprise about half of the US. The Republicans darling, Ronald  Regan not only raised taxes in his term but he raised the debt ceiling eighteen times while he was in office. However Obama and the rest of the democrats are trying to make the Republicans look bad so they can insure that they win big at the polls when Obama comes up for reelection. I know we need to do something about this runaway debt we have accumulated but why does it have to be done by cutting out programs for the less fortunate citizens who need these services the most. Why not cut out the corporate welfare we have been dishing out with nothing in return? These tax breaks and bailouts were supposed to keep these companies in business so they can create more jobs. But that is not what they do. Instead of creating new jobs they gave huge bonuses to the very same ones that got them in such hot water financially. How did that help us out? Those huge billion dollar bailouts could easily have went to fund the very same programs the Republicans want to make deep cutbacks in or it would have went a long ways to an actual health plan that would work for all Americans. Those who do not like what is offered can always buy their own health care policy. Of course no one actually wants that as they have their greedy pockets lined with lobbyist money.

I am very proud of my son and he is a very good musician and I would say that even if he were not my son. He, like the majority of these people who keep us entertained does not have health insurance. Besides being a talented musician he is also blessed to have other talents as well. He also has taken the simple html we used to start his first website and blossomed into a first rate webmaster for himself and others. He now owns DragonTreeStudio and creates websites for others too. I am getting off subject but what he does for musicians has started the Musicians Project and they are trying to aid others to get health care information and services.

Where I was going when I started this post is that on their facebook page they have posted about a prescription assistance program. You can find them on their web site Partnership for Prescription
Assistance I am going to copy their mission statement off their home page:

“

Prescription Help is Here

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance brings together America’s pharmaceutical companies, doctors, other health care providers, patient advocacy organizations and community groups to help qualifying patients without prescription drug coverage get free or low-cost medicines through the public or private program that’s right for them.”

If this post helps even one person gain some independence from exorbitant drug prices then I have succeeded in helping them get their message out. I am proud and lucky to be a veteran so I can get almost any help with my health care from them but that leaves my wife and daughter along with my son uninsured like so many of our citizens. Most qualifying patients will get free or vastly discounted drugs.

Right now there is a petition drive being sent to Congress requesting that Congress establish a law to make it illegal to not report a missing child. I have seen two versions of the petition. One of them is to make it against the law to report a missing child that has been missing for 24 – 48 hours. The other version is to make it a felony to not report a child missing if it goes over 30 days missing. I personally think they could combine the two petitions together to create an even tougher law. The links are at Petition2Congress. Everyone who cares for the welfare of helpless children should visit there and sign the petitions.

I just watched them read the verdict in the Anthony case in Florida a few minutes ago and am stunned. With all the evidence against her the jury found her not guilty. Maybe she got away with it, maybe not. All she is guilty of was providing false information to a police officer. If her mother did not kill her then who did? I personally feel that it is a miscarriage of justice, but I was not on that jury. So I do not know what the jury saw that I did not. So once again it proves to me at least that as long as you can afford a good attorney you can get away with murder.

I have been away for quite some time and procrastinating about getting started again. I have been busy building up my Ebay store and maintaining my Power Seller with top rated classification. I full intend to start posting at least several times a week if not daily.
There has been a lot going on with my passions with one of my top concerns being health care for all. They fight, grumble and complain that if the United States were to go to full coverage of all citizens then we would then be a socialist country. I do not believe that France, Great Britain and Canada are socialist countries and they have health care for all. I am lucky that I am a veteran and as so eligible for medical care for life by them. My solution for health care for the US would be to simply expand the roles of Medicare and Medicaid. Then you have the politicians clambering loudly that your health care would not be as good as you could get if you had your own health care. They forget that they have free health care as Congress men and Senators. My opinion is that if you do not like the limitations that they may set on your health care then you can still buy your own health care from anyone of the many health care insurance companies that themselves are complaining loudly about the possibility of health care for all.
More to follow later.

A new method of phishing attack is starting to rear its head up to try and gain sensitive information from unsuspecting users. This new method goes back to the warning I have given out for years now. Do not have a sensitive page (ie, your bank, paypal..etc) open while browsing. What this new threat does is it will attack a vulnerable website and injects a javascript code into the site. When you visit the now infected site and have a window open to your bank it causes a popup to come up that tells you that your session has timed out and you need to relog in. Make sure you log out of sensitive sites before browsing. If you have a website make sure you are secure and check for any changes in coding. That is what happened to this site and some others I am hosting. It wasn’t a threat to capture your information but we did get attacked by the yahoo counter script. The first things we noticed was the fact that our rss feeds were broken. Then doing a source search we found yahoo counter starts at the bottom of the page before the closing body tags. I do not know what the exact code is that this one places into websites but will attempt to find it. I feel as a responsible website owner I should try to stay on top of the situation and even moved my sites to a more secure server.

Here is what Trusteer.com explains about the sophisticated attacks:

“An in-session phishing attack occurs while the victim is logged onto an online banking application and therefore is much more likely to succeed. A typical attack scenario would occur as follows. A user logs onto their online banking application to perform some tasks. Leaving this browser window open, the user then navigates to other websites. A short time later a popup appears, allegedly from the banking website, which asks the user to retype their username and password because the session has expired, or complete a customer satisfaction survey, or participate in a promotion, etc. Since the user had recently logged onto the banking website, he/she will likely not suspect this popup is fraudulent and thus provide the requested details.”

To protect themselves from in-session phishing attacks, Trusteer recommends that users:
1. Deploy web browser security tools
2. Always log out of banking and other sensitive online applications and accounts before navigating
to other websites
3. Be extremely suspicious of pop ups that appear in a web session if you have not clicked a hyperlink

I’ve been busy yet again moving things on servers. I was not happy with the one I first intended to move everything onto when I found out that you can not have folders or files with write permissions (666,or 777). That and the fact that I still have not gotten all the releases for my other domains to move and remove the yahoo counter script from them as I migrate servers. I did find 9 instances where we had missed getting it all off the server and therefore out of the files. A couple of readme.html files and7 places where the entire code was not removed. Thank goodness for TextCrawler it has been a life saver. This script, that begins; “Yahoo! Counter starts” is either placed into js,htm, html or shtml pages that I have found so far. It is more complex code that is placed into php pages but it then generates the same code that can be found by viewing the pages source code. I tried in my last post to insert an image of the code, but that fails to give you a good idea of what to look for when removing it from your site. I am reluctant to post it online but will gladly share it with anyone who needs help and asks for it. The code is rather lengthy also so to place it into a post would lose you my readers. I tend to get lost in that much code myself. One of the easiest ways to remove it is to copy the entire text into TextCrawler. Then use a comment something like this and replace the code. This will work for all your web pages and takes only a few minutes. If you do not have that many infected pages you might wish to open them up individually and remove the code from each of them. But if you have something like a gallery I had been testing that ended up with over 3000 files infected I doubt you want to fix each file. I am not even going to replace them I am going to drop them when I move everything else. You can not even delete folders full of the infected files off your webserver as they are chmodded to 444 and the ownership is changed from your account to HTTPD. Without fixing that the only recourse is to delete them individually then replace them. A lot of work that my soon to be completely former host IX Webhosting will not help with or even acknowledge is their fault. You can get them to change ownership and even chmod the files back to 755 but if you do not get it fixed right away it will change back. Even if you do get everything fixed back but leave it on their server it puts the bad code back into your pages, or at least it did mine that way. If you need any help, or just want to vent over IX’s lack of help shoot me a line or comment. I’ll help what I can.

Our twenty ninth anniversary was on the 28th of December. We ended up staying at home just enjoying the day and never left the house though we probably should have gone on to church like I first had thought. It was in the exact same church we go to that 29 years earlier I had stood at the alter and said my “I do’s”. Then on our very first wedding anniversary she gave me a gift like no other. She gave me a son, so it is his birthday as well as our anniversary. I am so lucky to have found a woman who would stick by me even when I did not deserve it. I could never find anyone else like her and wouldn’t even consider trying. I would be totally lost without her. Hopefully I can stick around on this earth to make another twenty nine years with her.

Yesterday was a momentous occasion for us. Our son got married late yesterday afternoon.I wish them the best as they are made for each other. Watching the ceremony brought back memories of when I took his mother for my bride. Its been almost 29 years but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I stood before the preacher and said my “I do’s”. Then exactly 1 year later she gave me the best anniversary gift one could ever get and that was a son. The lord blessed me with a wife who could put up with me and a great son and daughter, and now I have another daughter. Truly I am blessed. May they share many years to come happily.

I was watching NCIS last night as I usually do and just had a feeling that something wasn’t just right and popped online to see how my friends were doing. It must have been a psychic feeling cause sure enough my friend Connie over at Brain Foggles was having trouble with her new blog Conniesview. It had stopped displaying and was reporting an error instead of showing a page. We had this error ;
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘<' in /wp-includes/post-template.php on line 734
She of course was panicking so I jumped right on it. I host her blog and give her hands on support something we plan on being able to do for others who wish to blog but have no knowledge of being a web/blog master. A quick search showed it was being discussed on the message boards of wordpress support. The post-template.php file was only supposed to have 733 lines of code instead of the 734 it was reporting though in dreamweaver it showed about 6 lines or more of apparently undecipherable code. A quick ftp of the now fixed page had her up and running in no time. Everything was lovely once more, or so I thought until I checked this blog and it to was reporting the exact same error. wow quick fix or so I thought. After fixing the file I got another error in the comment mailer plugin, seeing as how I don’t use it anyhow I simply deleted it ,and once more the world is revolving and everything rosy again. If you have problems with yours or need some help maybe this will help you out. I did post the fix on wp support forums too in case you need to look.