Daily Repoort: Ghosts In The Machine

I was chatting with Dave from Kimaya (Tyson's new father), who is earning a bit of extra cash doing some writing on the internet. He gave me some pointers of where to go and what to say to get work, which I have to admit were quite helpful.

Actually, with a little bit of effort, I theoretically could move back to Asia next week. But (a) if I quit my transcription job (which, although the pay has gone down since its' heyday is still good for $20 an hour) I'd be struggling to get by on the other income (probably good for only $400 or $500 a week), and (b) my focus and interest is now on (1) my wife getting to America and getting her American citizenship, and (2) developing a proper income — not just enough to "get by and have fun" as I've been doing for the last 20 years. Once Epril has her green card, we can travel back to Asia for a month or two at a time, work permitting.

I've been watering the grass — if you can call it "grass" — for a couple of days now. The piebald collection of green weed-like plants interspersed with blades of grass is an eyesore, but adding in large swathes of brown deadness gives the place an "empty lot" look to it. So, yes, I'm trying to grow weeds to spruce up the place a bit.

My e-mail account got hacked tonight. I'm quite surprised: First time in 20 years on the internet that I've been properly hacked. I really have no idea how it happened: I've got up-to-date ISP-provided antivirus software on all 3 of my computers, and I never click on or open stupidity. I've been using monthly changed alpha-punctuo-numeric passwords since 1995 too.

Being that my e-mail address is a web-based Yahoo account that has never been opened in Outlook or any other e-mail software, it most certainly means that my password was compromised. According to my web guru, the spam/virus e-mail my account sent actually came from Yahoo servers too, so it was a bona fide hack and not an address spoof. (But, amazingly, my Sent Items list showed no sign of activity and the thieves left my account seemingly as they found it.)

Well, sorry to the 700 of you who were spammed by me. I've changed my password and deleted the contents of my address book, and hopefully that solves the problem. If not, there is always GMail.

Ah, now that I give it some thought, I'm pretty sure I know what happened: A bit of software that I downloaded from one of the online work websites is a workflow aid, and I'll bet that it was hacked at the factory into a key logger. I accidentally left it open after installing it. Won't use that again.

I discovered quite a nice drink tonight that I copied off of ABC's website (and adjusted a bit), a "Green Ghost":

2 parts gin
1 part Midori melon liquer
1 part blue curacao
1 part peach schnapps
4 parts whiskey sour mix

Quite good!

I'm almost to the point where I need to do some grocery shopping. It will eventually take me more than a month of focused eating to finish all of the leftovers mom and Paul left behind: I've only spent about $10 on groceries since they left and I still have a couple weeks' of food to make my way through.