New Digs

http://welshpixie.efx2blogs.com

Wooh!

EFX2 Blogs Back in Business!

In a fashion, at least...

http://efx2blogs.com/

Watch this space, as it were!

Yay All Over

The office didn't burn down. Yay!

I got asked to write a story for a friend's magazine - and I'll get PAID! Yay!

Facebook is quite fun. Yay!

Am a happy pixie.


Yay!

Blah blah blah

I joined Facebook... eugh *involuntary shudder* - I feel like I need to take a hot shower with lots of disinfectant! (And it's all because efx2 went down... harrumph)

In other news... I left the heater on in work today when I left early at 4. I'm hoping the boss checked the room before he went home, but I tried phoning between 4 and 5 and didn't get an answer, even though he was there when I left... hrm. I'm sorry if the office burns down overnight >.< (Not really sure who I'm saying sorry to... but I'll feel bad!)

I got N3 (Ninety Nine Nights) delivered today from Amazon Marketplace, for £13. It was as new, without the wrapping. I played a demo and it was mad hack 'n' slash fun. The game itself is no different! Nice glossy anime characters, army units to command, goblins and orcs to attack, and hugely overpowered attacks to kill 'em with. Wooh!

And now, we're watching Scorpion King - because neither of us are of sane and present enough state of mind to deal with anything more intelligent!

The First Day

... Was good!

Kinda quirky place. It's a small office in a converted mid-terrace house on a hill. It's kinda wonky and shambly, hehe, which gives it a good character. We're on the first floor and there's another company on the ground floor (or if you're an American reading this: we're on the second floor and there's another company on the first floor). It's a very laid back place. I got there at 8:50 and the front door was closed and locked. At 9am, I got let in by the guy who I guess owns the downstairs office. I went upstairs and sat on a chair in the hallway until my boss showed up at 9:05, hehe. He apologised for his immense lack of organisation, gave me the smaller of the only two office rooms (aside from the teeny kitchen and bathroom complete with bath tub) to set up my PC in. Yes, I had to set up my PC before I could start work - and by that, I mean take the brand new PC out of the box and get it set up with Vista, MS Office and Sage Line 50 accounting. The boss left me to it as he had to go to a meeting at 9:30, and said he'd be back for 10 - meanwhile his manager arrived and was in the other room at his desk.

I got the PC set up and running by about 10, then twiddled my thumbs until the boss came back finally at around 10:30. He got me a few software CD's and I was installing stuff until around 11:30. Then, he showed me briefly around Sage and what I'd be doing, and I went on lunch at 12:15. The rest of the day (1:15pm - 5pm) was spent transferring the bank statement of April 2005 onto Sage and reconciling it. o.O

So yeah, it was good.

Meanwhile, I've been working on some photos that I took ages ago but hadn't formatted from RAW or uploaded... anywhoo, here's a few.

Back To Work

So tomorrow, after living for the past few weeks as a lady of leisure, I'm back to work for two weeks. I'll be doing data entry onto an accounting system for the office of a company in Inverness who provide social care in the area. This menial (in comparison) work will be at £7 an hour, whereas for utilising a significant percentage of my IT knowledge in the last place on an IT helpdesk I was earning £5.67 an hour. "£5.67 an hour?!" I hear you say. "I thought the minimum wage was higher than that!?" Yeah, me too, heh. Ah well - all over now! Meanwhile, another agency are putting me forward for a Project Manager role with the NHS. It sounds promising, what I know of it so far - but I don't know much as it's a new position they're creating so they're kinda sussing it out when they see CV's. I'm confident enough in my CV that I'm sure I'll at least get some serious consideration for the post.

In other, more interesting news...

I was browsing some blogspot blogs today and came across this little bit of funny:

Overheard Lines

Check it out. Made me chuckle a few times. Yes, people really are that stupid (note the country of origin!).

There haven't been any more developments with the neighbours. I sent the abridged version of the note (by 'sent' I mean 'crammed through the letterbox'), but we've had no reply. This morning, we saw an ambulance taking the woman's drunken mother away strapped into a wheelchair, so I don't know what was going on there - later on, the woman was carrying a plate of food through into her mother's house so she must've been back. Maybe she had a seizure because she ran out of booze, or something.

Kilty's almost at the end of bioshock - he has some two chapters / missions left, the second of which is the big boss fight. Right now, he's... ah, I won't say as it'll be a bit of a spoiler to those who haven't played!

I've ordered a couple of games from Amazon... one was Ninety Nine Nights after playing the demo, and er... I think the other was Bullet Witch (I looked at a few and can't remember which I ended up ordering). Bullet Witch sounds like hacking slashing fun, which always has a place. Ninety Nine Nights was purrrrdy!

Oookay, this is turning into a fairly significant post! Will be calling it a night soon - for the past week we've been staying up until 3 or 4am and getting up at noon, heh... but not tonight, since we're both back to work tomorrow!

Anyway. Byeeeeee!

The Latest From Keith

"(It's) better if we just get our own server. I plan on doing that in a few weeks.

I am not giving up on EFx2. :D

Here is some information some people may or may not know depending on if you were forwarded some of my recent e-mails.

My blog script on EFx2.com was exploited and a phishing scam was put on the server through our site. Apparently this is the 3rd time this has happened in recent months. The problem is this is the first time I have heard about this. If Martin would have said something to be the first time I could have done something to prevent it from happening again.

So now since its the 3rd time in recent months it violates the main hosts TOS so that single server was canceled (he has a total of 4 servers with that hosting company) so he is trying to work with them to get it back.

I personally feel he is no longer going to host us though .. even though its not exactly our fault this happened. It is not something that was done intentionally.

This whole thing completely sucks and is the cherry on the top of my crap cake this past month ..

Because or script is exploitable and I don't have the time to redo it all over again I am going to try out Wordpress MU. Wordpress MU is a multiple user Wordpress script and is developed and tested by professional and will be the fastest way to get back up.

http://mu.wordpress.org/

Check out the FAQ there. It has all the features of EFx2 as well as some we never had. Some of the cool ones include multiple authors per blog and the ability to post from a 3rd party software. Almost all the wordpress plugins work for it as well as all the wordpress themes.

I will pass on any information I get to various bloggers so they can pass it on to everyone else. :D"


Have faith, oh faithful followers of EFX - all is not lost! ;o)

Want To Know What's Up With EFX2?

Here are the emails I received, for those who don't know what's going on:
________________
I was just informed that the whole server was taken down because someone exploited our site and was using it for a phishing scam. I have no idea if or even when the site will be back up. I am going crazy because I don't know what to do now. I need to figure out what my options are for the site or if it needs to be removed completely. Martin our host got a message from the main server hosting company about the phishing scam and told Martin that the site needs to be removed in order to resume service.

I am trying to work with Martin in order to get the site content and database content so we have an updated backup and hopefully we can continue blogging soon .. but not sure exactly when.

I still have efx2blogs.com domain if efx2.com is no longer usable if we need to start over as a worse case scenario ... we would still have the same content but the actual blogs themselves would have to be very restricted to prevent further exploits.

Man this is the worst thing that could happen right now and totally caught me by surprise. Please pass this information around and I will keep you updated so you can keep the others updated.
_________________

OK I have had a few e-mails asking about some information. At this time all I know is that the phishing came from our domain efx2.com. It happened within one of our cache directories. I don't believe its someone from the community because most of the time when it comes to phishing its usually done by bots looking for exploits.

I have been going over my options and after the restyle and now going back to work I would hate to have to recode the site once again especially with less time then I had before.

So I am looking into some other blog hosting scripts that we could possibly use and most cost money so as of right now those are out of the question.

I would like to give Wordpress MU as go and see how it works but currently don't have access to a server to check it out. Wordpress MU is completely free and open source and if you need some more info be sure to check out the FAQ on this site ... http://mu.wordpress.org/

As I said I don't have a lot of time like before and Wordpress is a very nice blogging script and it would be nice to have something up and running quickly once we have access again. Of course I will work with everyone to get your posts back if we end up going with a completely new setup using Wordpress MU.

It has all the features of Wordpress and developed by the Wordpress guys so it will come feature packed and from what I read all the good plugins work with it so that would be fun for everyone. I can also customize it once we are up for future stuff such as alerts and other things.

I will e-mail back once I have more .. still waiting to hear back from Martin about the final decision on what to do with the domain.
________________

I'll keep you updated if I hear anything new.

When Circumstance Calls...

Well, efx2 is down for who knows how long - and so I'll post here until a resolution is found. It's been a while since I've used blogspot - but I'm glad I still have this set up! In fact, if you have a gander at my profile page and scroll to the bottom, you'll see I have a few more blogs here...

Anywhoo, I'll pick up from my last post on efx that detailed my proposed response to the bird haters. Well, we sent them a letter, but it wasn't that one! It was a more civilised (though less fun) version:

_____________________________

Dear neighbours,

We are sorry to hear that you are having problems with the birds we attract to our garden.

I took the liberty of contacting both the Environmental Health Department of the Highland Council, and Albyn Housing, on your behalf to advise them of your complaint and to enquire as to whether we were in breach of any rules or regulations regarding the feeding of wild birds in a residential area.

The Environmental Health Dept. responded that if a formal complaint is made, they will visit the area in question to determine if there is an issue with the provided food (mostly loaves of bread and other large items of food) attracting vermin (namely large numbers of seagulls and / or pigeons) and would advise the residents to instead use a bird house and small feeders. I explained the set-up we have here (namely one bird house and a number of bird feeders designed to only accommodate small birds), and mentioned that the majority of birds we get in the garden are starlings, house sparrows and finches; Environmental Health don't believe there should be any problem with this.

Albyn Housing stated much the same. I explained the set-up we have and the birds that visit, told them of the nature of your complaint and asked if they have any policies about feeding wild birds. They stated that a formal complaint has yet to be made - but if one were made, they would expect the residents to reach an agreement between themselves, and would offer the same advice as the Environmental Health department; they also mentioned that they can't foresee there being any issue as so many people now have bird feeders in their gardens, and with the general bird population in the area, it would be difficult to distinguish if the droppings are being caused specifically by the birds visiting our garden. However, the above being said - we will soon be the sole owners of this property and such matters will be out of the hands of Albyn Housing.

We also checked with our downstairs neighbour, thinking that as she is closer to the bird house and feeders than yourself, she would have the same problems (if not more so) - but she hasn't noticed any bird droppings on her washing, windows or garden and barely even notices the birds.

Again, I am sorry that you feel offended enough to want us to remove the bird house. By all means, please make a formal complaint to both the Environmental Health Department and Albyn Housing - I have advised both that I will suggest to you that you do just this if you feel so strongly about the issue.

Meanwhile, as a temporary gesture of good will until we are the sole owners of the property, we will take down a few of the small bird feeders.

____________________________


We haven't had any response yet. I'm eagerly awaiting one!