So I finally splurged on some stuff the weekend before last. I got a $25 gift card from work for being awesome with an issue that had been harassing the IT department as a whole, and I got a 10% off coupon for Best Buy. Armed with these, me and Helen headed down to southcenter on Friday to check out TV’s. After browsing through their display TV’s, I settled on the Toshiba 32AV500U. I went home and did some research on it to make sure it was a good buy, which it sounded like it was.

Armed with this knowledge, I came back on Sunday to get it. The first rep who came up asked if we wanted anything, I pointed to the Toshiba and said “I want that one”. I’m guessing he wasn’t expected someone to be so decisive, so he said he’d be right back after pausing for a second. Unfortunately, we he came back, he told me they were out of stock

But! Instead, he gave me the Samsung LN32A330, which was ten bucks more, for the same price. I was really antsy about getting something else on the spot, since I haven’t gotten an LCD TV before and wasn’t sure what the big differences were. I decided to go with it since I could just bring it back, and Helens parents had a Samsung and it was damn sexy.  After we picked it out, we went up to the front with the guy, and they rang us up. I got the 4 year service plan (I get the extended one with expensive things), so it was 679+199, a total of $878, take off 10% to make it $790.2, and then another 25 off that, $765.20. Which was a damn good deal.

We took it home and set it up, I put it on the dresser so I didn’t connect the cable at the time. I hooked up my laptop and we watched Banlieue 13, in 720p. It looked so damn good

More later, as it’s dinner time.

So I figured out why Bluehost did a sudden server migration on me without any warning.

I sorta forgot to add a flag and exclusion to the full backup script. I didn’t tell it to ignore symbolic links and the backup directory. On the account site, it backs up all the directories in the home directory. There are a couple links to logs, cache, and then there’s also a link called www that points to public_html.

So not only did it backup public_html twice, it also backed up the backups.

I noticed this last night when I started the weekly backup on my machine that pulls down the backups and the full backup was 27GB.

A couple weeks ago a board on my dads site was hacked and pretty much demolished. Apparently it was hacked into on Tuesday/Wednsday. I didn’t find out until Thursday night when my aunt mentioned it in passing.

Friday after work I went and took a look at it real quick. I opened up the url to the board and it wasn’t functioning at all, php errors all over the place. At right about that time I got a call from Helen asking if I could pick someone up from the bus station and give them a ride down to tacoma for a board meeting they had this weekend. Faced with the decision of what was obviously going to be a long process that would stretch late into the night vs hanging out with Helen and the Circle K district board, I opted to go hang out with them.

Saturday morning rolled around. I got up extra early to work on it, I remoted into the server and started poking around. Files were moved around, odd names were all over the place. A quick check of the bash history showed they hadn’t gotten the password for the account. I changed the ftp password on the board account just to be safe. Right after that I got a phone call. Was an odd one, the number was 12 digits long. I answered it anyways. Turned out to be the man who ran the forum, he was in the UAE. I spoke to him briefly, he had a database backup from May 9, he was going to upload it so I could do a restore. I emailed him the new password (not very secure, but what the hell) and he started
to work on uploading it. I had a full site-backup from April 27 that I had made for kicks, since we didn’t have anything really backed up, it included logs, built-in mail account, site backups, databases, everything. I considered using the database backup in that one, but didn’t, since he forum admin had a more recent backup.

I continued to poke around the files, everything was in complete disarray. I restored the board files using my April 27 backup, so all that was needed was a database. I poked around a little, then bummed for a bit while I waited. I got an email from motasim, he was having trouble transferring the file up. the ftp client kept timing out. I recommended a few clients and he tried them all with no luck. Finally I suggested he compress it with winrar. He grabbed the client, compressed and uploaded the file quickly.

This is where the fun began. Everytime I tried restoring the database, I would get a duplicate line error message from mysql. I spent literally 2 whole days trying to get that database to restore. Finally Sunday night I grabbed my April 27 backup and tried that one.

Worked flawlessly.

Suddenly we had a perfectly functional forum. But motasim wanted to have the most up to date backup, so I tried merging the two databases. It sort of worked. The threads were all there but there were more php errors caused by incomplete tables and entries. Finally, I restored the April 27 database, uploaded it somewhere motasim could get it and let him play with it.

He finally settled for the April 27 backup. I posted on the forum softwares support site, contacted their support, after speaking with them it was apparent that Motasims May 9 backup was corrupt, there wasn’t anything we could do about that.

After having dealt with all of that, I started reading up on creating backups. I setup my own backup procedures overnight and implemented them. I quickly found out that bluehosts cron doesn’t like the $ $(date). I posted on their forum and someone helped me whip up a perl script. I’ll post it here in case someone stumbles upon this post devastated by their website having gone down without backups:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $fileOrFolder = $ARGV[0] or die “You forgot to specify a file or folder name!”; #The name of the file or folder provided during execution of the script
my $upper = “U$fileOrFolder”; #Convert the file or folder name to uppercase for the label

my $date = `date +%Y_%m_%d`; #Store the date in a variable
chomp($date); #Remove the new line that gets added at the end

print `tar—cvvzhlf “/foo/backups/$fileOrFolder-$date.tar.gz” /foo/$fileOrFolder—atime-preserve—label $upper`;

Simply put, I set it up to backup the individual sites based on the folder I specified when the script ran. I use another one slightly modified for full backups, and another for sql backups. There were a few hiccups with getting them running, but they’re working beautifully.

Unfortunately, one side-effect I hadn’t considered was that when these backups ran, they created gigabytes of backups. Our account was on a server that had a 50GB limitation. We had setup this account several years ago, and Bluehost had since upgraded the plan we were on with more generous limitations. The most recent being unlimited disk space. If we had wanted, we could contact bluehost and have them move us to another server.

The disadvantage of that would be downtime, so I never bothered with that. However, apparently when the backups ran, they got an alert of some sort. So without any warning, they moved us to a new server last night around midnight. All our domains went down for a good 8 hours, and when they finally came back up, php wasn’t functioning properly for another 4.

So the moral of this story? Schedule your backups, and make sure your host doesn’t decide to randomly upgrade you without warning by making sure you don’t randomly create gigabytes of files in the course of a day.

I went to the west seattle garage sale, on saturday. They had something like 140 garage sales going on the entire day, I whipped up a little circuit of them using google maps (I discovered that you can have a maximum of 25 locations on one map, only goes to Y). Me and Helen were supposed to go, but she ended up working, so I got up at 8:30, whipped up the map, and went hunting for two hours, then drove her to work and then returned for more yard sale hunting.

I got a couple sweet things. I got some fabric for random uses, a bookshelf, some plant stands and a couple pots, and a coast strawberry plant. There was a lot of stuff. After I picked up Helen, I took her back to the first place I went to, which was this woman selling a bunch of stuff because she was moving to Morocco, I grabbed a couple organizing bins from her and Helen found a really kick ass backgammon set with glass panels in wood frame. I took her to pegasus pizza where we had some really tasty pizza. While driving back we spotted another garage sale so we stopped there. I found some bindings that Helen could use on my spare board, so we grabbed them. I also spotted an Atari 2600 which I almost bought (had been reserved).

My room now looks a lot better since I put the bookshelf in, I unpacked 3 of the boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet (still have one buried in the closet) and we discovered that I had an outlet above the dresser. For the past 6 months or so me and Helen had been wondering why they didn’t put an outlet up there. Well it had been there, I just had a box sitting in front of it for the past 6 months or so.

I’ve also decided to start a little fruit/veggie/herb garden too. I’ve currently got Cucumber, basil, strawberry, and tomato. As you can see, I have no idea what I’m doing. I used a really cool little soda crate I got from a garage sale for the plant bed. I’ve since moved the tomato plant to a larger pot that Ann gave me when she and Cal found out I was starting my own garden.

So far, I’m not very good. For some reason I had figured that the recent rain was enough, so the leaves near the bottom of the tomato plant starting going yellow. I moved it to the big pot and since then it’s doing a lot better. Before it was sorta leaning to one side, not it’s growing really strong and straight up. Someone from something awful linked me a bunch of pdf’s for each of the plants I’m growing, so I’m reading them and learning how to care for them all. The native coast strawberry plant in it’s own little pot doesn’t bear fruit, it’s sorta there for play I guess. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with it. Probably have another little garden for random play.

It’s take your kid to work day at Alaska. There’s kids all over the place.

This has begun to get irritating.

The Pudget Sound blood center just called me 3 times within an hour. I didn’t recognize the number so i ignored it the first two times, expecting them to leave a message. They didn’t so the third time I figured it was important and answered it.

I pick up the phone and they say they’re from the blood center. I do my usual answer and say that I’m not there and take their number.

I’m in class for fucks sake, Call once and leave a message! I’ve actually been turned off from donating because they constantly harass me with these phone calls. I like getting calls from them, but they are way too aggressive.

You know all those warnings on plastic bags that say to keep them away from kids so they don’t choke?

They should add cats to that warning.

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Will smith a scientologist

My entire existence is suddenly called into question.

I’ve just been a bit busy. I’ll start fixing the errors in the blog after the last WP update.

To keep you entertained, here’s a picture of my Kitten:

Was driving home from Work today, I was on the West Seattle bridge when I noticed a motorcyclist behind me (I tend to look around me when driving). He had a passenger and they were kinda close, I noticed him wave his hand or something to the passenger, then they took off weaving between cars. I had to accelerate quickly to keep them from clipping me it seemed like.

Anywho, I sorta just watched them weave between cars, mostly on the lane divider, and as they were hitting the big turn at the end of the bridge, they lost control and I saw them both go flying in the distance (I was still way back). As soon as I saw this I sorta started changing lanes to get there quickly (signaling the whole way!). I got up there right behind a honda, turned on the emergency blinkers, then got out and walking to the nearest person on the ground, The woman who was driving in the honda in front of me got out her phone and was calling 911. I got to the nearest person, who was the driver.

As soon as I got to him I could smell the alcohol, there was a mini-shot laying on the ground near him, he was moaning and screaming in pain, and I immediately put my hands on him to keep him from moving. I just kept telling him not to move and to stay still. I looked around me and could see pieces of the motorcycle on the ground, and the motorcycle in the distance leaning against the highway divider. The passenger was about 15 feet farther up and there were people running to him.

Some guy walked through and tossed things over to one side of the highway then got in his SUV and drove through, I was a bit disturbed by this, but didn’t do anything about it.

A detective popped out of nowhere and sorta did the same as me, and a police officer quickly showed up soon after, the ambulance was coming and we sorta just stayed there and made sure he wasn’t dying. In retrospect it seemed like we were all a bit nervous, I may have been a bit freaked out, but I couldn’t tell. I just made sure he didn’t move himself and stayed still, didn’t want him injuring anything else. There was a good chance he had hurt his back, he was wearing a leather jacket and what looked like flannel pants (the pull-string kind).

It was all a very surreal experience. The medics showed up, and as soon as they walked over I just stepped back and let them do their work. I walked over to the woman from the Honda who after calling 911 had sorta just stood there and talked to her a little bit, she had seen what occured and so we both just chilled for a bit and let the medics do their work. A police officer finally came over to us and talked to the woman. Since I didn’t actually see the crash happen, he didn’t need me and said I could go. They had begun to back everyone up so they could take the Admiral Way exit, so I went over to me car and waited. One guy in the car behind me asked if I wanted some hand sanitizer, and I accepted it, so he kinda emptied half his bottle onto my hands, which was a bit excessive.

Anywho, that’s the event for the day, In retrospect there are a couple things I probably could have done better, but I think I did okay in just making sure he didn’t hurt himself anymore.



And this is a huge spider that had attached itself to my coat as I walked into my room.