Catharsis of the Bogue

Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Category: Blogging (Page 1 of 26)

Time Marches on at a Whirlwind Pace

January 26, 2022 / / 1 Comment

I sat here this morning and realized that despite all intentions, I have not written on here for nearly 4 years. 4 years of “I’ll get around to it.” 4 years of apathy. 4 years of slacking! I could come here an make all sorts of grandiose claims about posting all of the time now and getting a regular schedule, but the truth is, Why? Who reads this? Will any of those people that read my ramblings before still be around? Will subscriptions still exist, or will anyone still remember that this is even here? Some I know will not. Covid has taken too many.

I know I won’t keep the schedule. I don’t have all of the free time I used to when I was a stay at home dad. My life is as busy as ever, and the motivation just isn’t there. Sure there is plenty of free time to watch TV, and hang out. Sure there is time to sit and write, but have I taken advantage of it? Obviously not.

It was also back in 2018 that I got a story published in a League of Utah Writers anthology, and have not done much writing since. I have put words down, but I haven’t finished anything. I have thought about stories, but, as the kids say, Meh.

Cut forward to the train wreck dumpster fire that was 2020. You would think I would have tons of time to write….I didn’t write. I did work the whole time as my workplace was deemed an essential business. So Money wasn’t an issue. Just motivation. Things started to look up a bit toward Halloween, but then my Mom passed away and, well, crap. I wrote the obituary for her with my sister and damnation if that wasn’t one of the hardest things I have done. That was harder than writing the eulogy for my aunt. I still can’t read that obituary without tearing up.

Cut to 2021, my son decided that it wasn’t worth it anymore and ended up in a psych hospital due to suicidal thoughts, and then in another for an actual attempt. I am just now figuring out how to do the real author thing and take that pain to make a story. April brought my daughter her second kidney transplant which is a wonderful thing, but I was getting worked up to donate a kidney to her, and with the transplant I just hit a brick wall at 70 miles per hour in that. I wasn’t needed anymore. Well for the kidney at least.

May brought us a fun time moving when we got kicked out of our house because the new owners wanted to renovate and rent for more. No we were not behind on rent or anything, but we wanted to stay a bit longer, with a new kidney transplant and all. But anyway, we frantically searched for houses to no avail and ended up living in a friends house, where we still are….way longer than we planned on. But we are helping them get the house fixed up and repaired so it is good. But I still didn’t write.

I have made a lot of adjustments over the past couple of years, but it is finally at mid January of 2022 when I have actually got the bug again. Write Justin, just do it. This blog is called catharsis for a reason. Spew forth all of the crap that is going on in your head. Let the dumpster fire of your mind flow through your fingers to burn quietly in a corner of the internet and leave your head in peace. Damnit, just write.

So that is where I am this morning. Sitting here vomiting words on my shiny new laptop that Santa brought me. I will write here more. It won’t be on a schedule. It won’t be as often as it could be. Yet, it will be here. It will be real. It will be all me.

And it will be spectacular Cathartic.

Until next time,

-Justin

What a waste of a weekend..

March 27, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Well now it is time for me to get back into some regular blog writing, now that my blogs are working properly again.  It has been a while since all of my sites have been actually loading and working correctly.  Apparently there were some problems that have been brewing for a while that I didn’t realize were problems.  I have all of my sites hosted through Hostgator (no I am not posting a link here, for reasons that will become clear) and they sent me a message about high server use last year.  I thought it was all taken care of after I killed a bad plugin on one of my WordPress sites.  

Apparently, it was not fixed.  Earlier this year I found that my .htaccess file had been held for ransom  modified by hostgator so that I could not write or edit the thing.  This wouldn’t let me install or run any security plugins or caching plugins that THEY RECOMMENDED I INSTALL!  I found this out but the sites were still working for the most part so I ignored it.  Sites would load slowly and I would get 504 (Gateway Timeout) errors more and more often.  I finally decided to start blogging regularly again and I had a hard time getting to this site to do it.

It was last Tuesday, now a week ago, that all 13 of my sites would not load and were constantly getting the 504 errors.  I contacted Hostgator and after about an hour on chat, I was directed to an open ticket from a year ago that I had thought was closed.  Well, after some back and forth and me reporting 2 different times about not being able to get into my sites, they finally ran a scan on my account. To my surprise, the scan covered 130,872 files and 13,936 of them were infected with malware.

Well that set up an exciting weekend at the computer for me, and not writing.  The malware was in the main wordpress .php files, plugin files, theme files, pretty much most of the .php files in my account.  After all of the fun, I had found 3 different forms of the malware, all of which were designed to create backdoors to my sites.  A fat lot of good it would do for anyone to break into my sites, with all of the state secrets and tubs of money that go through them.  Oh that’s right, THEY ARE ALL FREAKING BLOGS OR INFORMATIONAL SITES!

Ok, deep breath.  That rant will be over at CantankerousOldCoots.com later today.

Back to the fun, I found that reinstalling the .php files was the best way to get rid of the virus.  WordPress wasn’t a problem, and some of the plugins were easy to install.  Other plugins were not available, but replacements were, so they got installed.  Some of my theme files and plugins however, were no longer available.  You may  say, “Just find something else then.”  But here is the rub, over the years I have done extensive modifications on most of those themes and some of the plugins, so it wasn’t easy to replace them.  So I didn’t.  I ended up going through what seemed like 10000 files (I know it was less but I wasn’t counting) and manually deleting the malicious code from each one.  

It was a huge deal and took me most of the weekend to do.  Finally, on Sunday night, I finished and all of my sites loaded like they should have.  I spent Monday updating and working on plugins, some of which still had issues, but finally got all of them finished and working like they should.  And I got my .htaccess file back.  And finally the security plugins that I needed.

Hopefully, and I really hope so, all of this is finished and I can get on with my sites working and doing what they are supposed to do.  There are some very painful and creative things that I would like to do to these people that created this malware and got it all over my account.  I should write a book about that, it would rival a Stephen King.  But I digress, I will probably just leave it be and write more posts.

And again we Start…

October 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Hello all.  Well here we are again.  A new start.  It seems like that I am always trying to get to that new start again and again.  I haven’t posted anything new for quite a while on here, why?  I dunno.  Laziness, apathy, too much of life getting in the way.  I have a bag of excuses that I could use, let me rummage around in here and get tot he best one.  I think laziness is probably the best one.

Tapping a Pencil

Tapping a Pencil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started this blog quite a while ago, just to get writing and put some things out there.  I had some moderate success, people were coming by and reading, and then I just kind of faded into the wastelands of the blogosphere.  That is what much of my life has seemed like lately, just fading into the wasteland.  I haven’t cared.  About much of anything.

Finally, now, there has to be a point of that old adage to either $#!^ or get off the pot.  Well, I think (read hope) that it is time to start grunting with wild abandon.  I figure a few posts and some interaction and maybe I can rely on some good folks to help me figure out what this book I am working on should do, and where it should go.

Continue reading

All this internet $#!^….

March 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

You know, I love the internet for the most part.  Information at your fingertips, satellite pics of your house in seconds, news almost as it happens, hour by hour weather, and idiots.

I have been here working on the net since 2008, and I have learned and changed a lot during that time.  Lately, I think I have grown complacent with internet as the rest of the world has.  My kids don’t remember a time without the internet.  They have somewhat of a hard time going without it on vacation.  I have posted before about what good it does the family to just unplug and get away from the screens.  My 4 1/2 year old is dying to go fishing and camping.  He loves the outdoors.

So this brings me to my point, some internet providers and domain registrars suck.  Big huge deep sucking holes of darkness.  The first of these I had issues with was justhost.  Don’t go there, do get a site from them even though they are cheap.  They will drain the soul out of you after they cancel your domain name.  I had one of their packages with justinsbrainpan.com registered with them.  All fine, until I outgrew the service tier and decided to go to a decent provider at hostgator.com.  (you can go there).  The problem was my domain was registered with justhost, and they didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use it after I didn’t have their service anymore.  so I lost justinsbrainpan.com and ended up with catharsisofthebogue.com, that I registered independently with 1and1.com. don’t go there either.

Recently, 1 and 1 internet and I have been in some fun battles for my domains.  There was apparently an issue with billing on my account, and they decided to cancel my account, making my sites go down as they expired.  First was Ameliasmakeawish.com, followed by bkmnursing, and then catharsisofthebogue.  Skip forward to a bunch of fighting, and I got most of my domains back active.  Amelias make a wish and Catharsis of the bogue are gone.  registered with some company in china and japan, that has nothing for content.  But i am pissed.  I have ported the sites to this one, catharsisofthebogue.com and Amelias is ameliasmakeawish2012.com.

But don’t for one minute think that I registered those new domains with 1 and 1.  I have registered them with haylestorm.net/clients.  Ok, I am biased as this is partly my site, one that I partner with Bob Hayles on, and we are now resellers of Enom domain registration.  Not a bad deal either, $12.95 per year for most top level domains.

I digress.  Now, I have a list of times that I am going to be transferring all of my domains away from 1 and 1 and then warning everyone to stay away from that company.  The moral of the story is, watch your domains.  If you are not the owner of your domain because it is free from your hosting company, do whatever you can to make sure you end up owning the domain.  Then keep track of the billing and renew dates.

All in all, I guess it is ok to change domains.  I did lose all of my page rank and alexa scores, and it is going to take time to build back up.  So I am glad you are here reading.  I did it once, I will do it again.

Thanks for reading, share the links like crazy!

-Justin

 

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