So, I thought I would put up one last post to definitively bring an end to the old Frog Bog. Some of this is cobbled together from emails I've sent out recently, so if you feel like you've heard it before it is highly likely you are correct. The review for this blog at humor-blogs.com actually never got published, so I was hoping Diesel could find it and I could skewer myself like I skewered the reviewers in this review, but apparently Diesel is dealing with something that has to do with the end of humor-blogs as we know it or a crusading attack virus that will infect every visitor to h-b or something similar.
Thank you again for even lots more emails and comments on your sites expressing concern/outrage/death threats against my hacker(s)/etc. Really. It's quite kind of you. At this point, I am not angry/upset/anything else about my hackage. It was actually a good thing. I am feeling better, but am still typing sparingly because of my tendonitis. So again, a nonresponse is not a nonappreciation of your kind words.
I met Sophia Rosoff yesterday to discuss my piano technique and she blew me away. Go ahead, Google her. She's the shizzle. We're a great match. I played for 90 minutes with her and didn't feel any pain. I mentioned Scriabin and a book of his preludes was on the top of the pile of books on her piano. Meeting her, getting an email from the father of a young girl I teach saying how amazingly wonderful I am and the blog blowing up during the same few weeks has led me to believe that I belong in front of a piano, not a keyboard. A typey keyboard with letters, not a musical keyboard. Obviously, a musical keyboard would go in the "Things I Do Belong in Front of" category.
Things can be wonderful yet finite. That is the case with me and blogging. It's been great. It's been a lot of fun. I've made some friends I will keep in touch with. A good thing.
But I'm not a blogger. I'm gonna meet with Diesel in a month or so to discuss whether or not the Clay Pigeon is worth resurrecting, I have invitations from like a hundred people to write something and stick it up on their blog and I have had three requests to put together my funniest stuff and make it into a book ala Joel and Diesel. The last thing, however, requires a little something I like to call "effort," so it might not happen. It is likely that you have not heard the last of me, but where or when or how much blogging will be a part of my life in the future is still way uncertain.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Those of you who were regular readers know that it's been a kooky year and a half since we left California. You guys made it an awful lot easier.
I am at karlmuzik.com and karlos(at)karlmuzik.com.
Great news! According to MR JANDY SMITH, Email: jandysmith01@hotmail.com, Phone: (+44) 7011138649 +447011138648, I've won a million pounds!
Thanks for even more kind emails. The emails seem to come in three categories. 1) Oh no I hope you can fix your blog. 2) Hurry up and fix your blog. 3) You are so hot and sexy (boy, if I had a nickel).
I cannot fix my blog. My blog was being operated by someone with the same administrative permissions I had. I'm just lucky they didn't lock me out before I could pull it out by the roots. There is no blog. There is no Wordpress. There is nothing in my frogbogblog directory but this 6 kb html document. I do have my old posts, but they are in an Excel file and look like this: "Because this is a story about being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Get it? And I said I needed to vacuum. It's like, a relevant tangent.Â" Plus, all the posts have the malicious code in them. All of them. I do have an SQL backup that's a couple of months old that I could recover a fair amount from, but not all of it, and not without starting to build this thing from the ground floor.
Over the last couple of days I have been nursing my tendonitis and reworking my music site, karlmuzik.com. As far as any kind of resurrection of the Frog Bog, I'm starting to think it's not gonna happen. I'm a music teacher/performer with tendonitis. It's taken me some time to get my feet wet in the greater NYC area, but I do have some contacts now, and music has always been my first love. In addition, I am getting older, and in order to be able to give what I want to piano, I may have to curtail my typing.
It would require redatabasing, reblog softwaring and retyping 60% of every post to reassemble the Frog Bog. I may feel differently in a few days, but as of this moment, I am not inclined to take that task on. But I am very, very thankful for your well-wishes. I really am. I think I'll figure this out pretty quickly. Blogging is a unique thing, and the principle of inertia is so important. Having had my inertia stopped has definitely made me think about where (or if) blogging fits in my life. I'm sad that "I" sent out emails with all kinds of heinous stuff in them and I'm sad about getting my blog pulled out from under me, but I'm not sad when I think about not blogging. Of course, I may change my mind in 24 hours. I will keep you posted. In a really funny twist, my referral score at humor-blogs.com is higher than it has been in a few months. For those of you still unsure because of the Alanis tune, that really is a wonderful example of irony.
I have never begged my readers to click on my humor-blogs links (for you non-blog types, referrals to this site, the best humor directory on the web, count for half of your ranking score over there). But I do think it would be awfully funny if a blog that didn't exist any more got into the h-b top 5. If you think that would be funny too, by all means, click away.
Yeah, you've come to The Frog Bog. This is all that's left. I got hacked. Biiiiiiiiiiig time. You must mark my old email address, froggy(at)frogbogblog.com, as unsafe. If you subscribed to the Frog Bog you must delete all emails without clicking on any of the pornographic links in them, even if you like pornography, because these links are bad news. Bad, harmful news.
I'd write this in blog post format, but my blog has been compromised and is not safe. Posts- gone. Pictures- gone. Comments- gone. Wordpress- gone.
I don't know what I'm gonna do now. Building a blog up to the level this blog was at takes time. I don't know if I want to do it again. I do have a good perspective about this whole series of unfortunate events (hey, I should copyright that). Recent real-life events have reinforced in me the belief that there are things that are a whole mess more important than my blog's hijacking. But it still stinks.
As to your inquiries about how this happened and whether it can happen to you, well, I don't know. All that changed from two weeks ago to today is that my hosting company, IX, moved their servers to a new data center. I'm not pointing fingers, because obviously IX would say there was no way the two were connected and I can't be sure anyway. I also was lazy about downloading new versions of Wordpress, even whey they said, "Download this because it contains an important security fix." I think it's also possible that a comment on the blog contained some sql injection code that Askimet didn't recognize as spam or dangerous. I should have kept better track so I could warn you, but I didn't.
I'm not in the mood to write a big long thank you list. Thank you to my readers, regular and irregular (yes, I have discussed the importance of regularity here), thank you to those of you who have watched this blog implode in the last four days (that would be April 8th to 11th) and said, "It stinks that your blog is imploding," and thank you to those of you who found me witty enough to ask me to put something up at your blog. Most of the people I thank are over at humor-blogs.com. It's a great place to find some really funny stuff and some cool people too.
PS: Thanks for the kind emails. I've been typing too much and slouching in front of the computer a lot and have rekindled my tendonitis. Kind of a big deal for a piano teacher. If it takes me a while to respond to you via email, it's not because I'm not thankful for your well-wishes.
You can reach me at karlos(at)karlmuzik.com.