Tag: costa rica

Categories
El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Have I been hacked?

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Tuesday, September 18

I sent a friend a link to this blog on Sunday. He responded within a few hours.

“I tried the link but somehow got a text file downloaded to my computer. Do you mind sending me the link again?”

At first, I thought I’d copied the link incorrectly. But when I tried to call up the site on my phone, a screen came up showing a text file to download. That’s not what should be happening. I systematically started trying all the other sites I host.

Same message.

I instantly feared I’d been hacked. That happened once before, when some script kiddies from the Middle East gained access after I’d failed to update my WordPress installs quickly enough. WordPress pushes frequent updates to add functionality and repair potential vulnerabilities. The script kiddies watch for those, knowing many users don’t do the updates quickly, if at all. The vulnerability then becomes a revolving door for mischief and mayhem. When I was hacked, they just graffitied my home page with something in Arabic and an Iraqi flag. It was pretty easy to undo. Now I update WordPress within 24 hours of a new version release.

I went up to the Treehouse and switched to my computer. I couldn’t even see the content of the sites when I tried to view them via an FTP client or CPANEL. At this point, the adrenaline was surging while the fear of a malicious hack ricocheted around in my mind. The text file appeared to be innocuous enough. It was basically a comments section in PHP code indicating where the WordPress theme should load, etc.

So I sent a panicked note to my ISP, Hosting Matters.

I’m having major problems with my sites. All appear to have disappeared. I can’t even open a support ticket via your site. Affected sites include:

www.opposable-thumbs.com

www.athensbikeandbrew.com

www.2ndhand.com

www.missoulasprinklers.com

And basically every other site I have. Not sure what’s going on. I can see some things via CPANEL, but when you try to access one of the sites it downloads a text file and that’s it. Is this a hack? Something else going on? Please respond ASAP.

As always, they responded quickly.

No, it isn’t a hack. It’s a byproduct of the PHP upgrade on the server and something in the .htaccess file under each one creating the issue. We’ll have to go through the ones under each domain and kill it.

Within 20 minutes, the sites were back online as if nothing had happened. I’m a big fan of Hosting Matters. They’ve always been responsive and helpful, even on a Sunday night at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

Deep breaths. Much calmer. Though I had to read a lot of Middlemarch and listen to myriad versions of “Sweet Jane” to come down off the adrenaline rush and go to sleep …

Categories
Dog Bob El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

My other woman in Costa Rica (don’t tell Sunny)

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Monday, September 17

Misha, a study in perpetual motion

I had a little fling on Saturday with a girl named Misha. Total babe.

She’s a rescue dog who belongs to Gian, a friend of mine who kindly agreed to drop off some of the incredible bread his partner, Sara, makes. They’re both Italian and know their way around a kitchen. I usually walk to the farmers market on Saturdays, largely to get some of that bread, but with the ankle still swollen and gimpy I decided to beg Gian to drop some off for me.

More Misha

As a bonus, he brought Misha with him. She’s a high energy rescue pitbull who is insanely sweet. As Gian apologized for her frenetic jumping around, I stepped forward to get a face full of dog. What a great way to boost my spirits. I love watching dogs play on the beach, but they’re usually attached to their Tico humans so I can’t do much canoodling with them.

Misha ricocheted around the porch while Gian and I talked, chasing her favorite toy, a coconut. Each time I’d throw it for her, it would bounce hollowly across the patio with a series of clunks until Misha would chase it down and bring it back for more.

And one more shot of Misha

I felt a little guilty about playing with Misha while poor Sunny is sitting at home. But not too guilty. Lara texted me a photo of Sunny chewing on one of her favorite treats on Sunday and says she’s doing really well. Of course, Sydney the Cockatoo from Hell is being a royal pain. When I was there, I took care of the dog and Lara took care of the parrot, but with me in the jungle Lara is pulling double duty, and Sydney is completely ticked off that he has to share her affection with a lowly canine.

A photo Lara texted me on Sunday of a very content Sunny.
Still pretty swollen.

Foot update: Things are about the same. It’s still swollen and sore, but I continue to take solace in the fact that it’s not getting worse. I’m doing a good job of staying off it, but my impatience is mounting. Today marks one week since I sprained it and while I’d like to see the swelling down, everything I’ve read suggests it can take several weeks before there’s real improvement. I have a reliable taxi and Gian has offered to drive me around if need be, so I’m feeling pretty good about things. I do hate these sunny mornings though, knowing I could be down at the beach frolicking with the Tico puppies. We seem to be moving into the teeth of the rainy season. Mornings generally are nice, but around 3 clouds move in and it rains anywhere from a few hours to all night. The sound of the rain pinging off the metal roof of the Treehouse is soothing so no complaints there.

I’m closing in on the end of Middlemarch and I’m completely smitten. There are times when I want George Eliot to just cut to the chase and move the plot along, but her writing is so engaging and, at times, downright snarky, that I’m willing to indulge her. It really is a masterpiece of interwoven plots and character development. Initially, I was worried about how I was going to keep track of all the characters, but she breathes them so full of life that they rise up off the page and take a seat beside you. I switched over to my U.S. phone number on Sunday so I could call home, which also comes with a half-gigabyte of data. I sucked that down quickly downloading more reading material, including Bleak House by Dickens, Aristotle’s Poetics, the complete works of William Shakespeare and Turgenev’s Father and Sons. I’ve been heavily mining Project Gutenberg for items in the public domain, and I found several pretty cool bargains on Amazon’s Kindle store (i.e. 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die, including works by Conrad, Dante, Austen, Dostoyevski, Melville … the list goes on. Not bad for 49 cents.)

Breakfast selfie

I’ve also been listening to a lot of music. Saturday night was blues night, starting with East-West and The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw by Butterfield Blues Band and then Rory Gallagher’s first album with Taste. Last night I cruised through a playlist packed with music by Ike Reilly, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Bap Kennedy, John Prine and Gillian Welch. And oh, yeah, there might have been four or five versions of “Sweet Jane” in there, too. I’m nothing if not consistent. The Cowboy Junkies version is sublime, but I also love the live version from Cold Beans & Bacon and, of course, the Velvet Underground’s original.

And finally, I have been working on The Book. I bogged down in chapter 3 over details, especially a scene where the protagonist uncovers a stash of letters from the 1890s that will launch a parallel, epistolary plot line. It dawned on me I know little/nothing about what those letters would look like — the type of paper, the ink, the envelopes. So I’m doing some research along those lines.

 

The bread (and pizza) Gian dropped of for me. I have some in the freezer and some ready for breakfast this morning.
Categories
El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

The healing power of howlers and books

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Wednesday, September 12

Well, it’s been 48 hours since I tore up my ankle, and I’m encouraged by the fact that it hasn’t gotten worse. I didn’t expect much improvement in the first few days, but I figured if things degraded I’d need to head to a doctor. It’s swollen and hurts, but not excessively so on either count. I can hobble down to the kitchen to make food, and I’m spending most of my time reading and hanging with the howlers. It was almost as if the monkeys knew I needed a friend. They came around yesterday and hung out in the trees right next tot he Treehouse, where I watched them for over an hour as I felt sorry for myself. Then they woke me this morning and graced me with a few more hours of their antics before moving on via the arboreal highway through the jungle. They’ll be back.

I’ve already chewed through three books. The first, Cherry, is by first-time author Nico Walker, who I believe is doing time for the antics described in the book. The New York Times talked it up when it was published, and while it’s interesting it also annoyed the hell out of me. It’s a first-person account of a feckless kid from Cleveland who drifts into drugs and then the Army, where he ends up serving as a medic in Iraq circa 2005. (The troops call newbies “Cherries” when they first arrive in Iraq, thus the title of the book.) His descriptions of Iraq are mind-numbing. He returns after his tour and quickly gets caught up in opioids, leading to a career as a heroin addict and bank robber. I’m assuming the narrative is largely based on his actual experiences since he, you know, is doing time for holding up banks. The narrator isn’t terribly likable (even though he says he revised it in the editing process to make the narrator more likable), and the details of the junky life actually get pretty damned boring, or more accurately, predictable. If you’ve read one account of junkies being useless lowlives, you’ve read them all and this one does nothing to diverge from that pattern. (I’d much sooner listen to Ike Reilly’s “Heroin”; same general idea but distilled into 3 minutes and 20 seconds of heartbreak.) His Iraq experiences are interesting, but it leaves you hoping his account is specific to the types of people he gravitated toward and not all the young men and women who served there. It’s extremely depressing. But while he links his service to his addiction, I’m not convinced he wouldn’t have become exactly what he did without ever having seen the horrific stuff he witnessed in Iraq. He was heading down that path anyway, and the Army really just delayed his trajectory for a few years.

Next up was E.M Forster’s A Room with a View.As I’ve been reading and listening to lectures on fiction writing, Forster’s Aspects of the Novelpops up frequently so I downloaded it under a public domain license via Project Gutenberg. While I was digging up Aspects, I stumbled across Room so I downloaded that, too. It’s an interesting look at class, social norms, gender and mores in Edwardian England. I liked it much better than I’d anticipated. Very well written and plotted.

And finally, I’ve launched into Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Spring. I just finished the second section — where he describes his wife’s depression and overdose — with tears in my eyes. Thus far, the book is an extended letter to his infant daughter. It’s also part of a suite of books he’s created, I guess you could call it his version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. After Spring, I’ll probably chew through Autumn, Winter and Summer. I’ve taught Knausgaard to journalism students (a piece he did for The New York Times magazine on the doctors who do brain surgery) and I’ve read the first installment of his autobiography, My Struggle: Book 1. There’s a dark Proustian quality to his writing that I find irresistible, mining the mundane for large, metaphysical statements about the human condition. But without the pretense that the sentence I just wrote implies.