the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hello readers! I am dusting off my blog at least briefly to inform visitors of a good opportunity that has crossed by inbox. iChapters, a vendor of digital textbooks, has a sweepstakes where five students will win up to $1000 in free textbooks. Enter here, take a look at the rules, and good luck. Seems like a nice clear-cut opportunity to help with ever-rising college costs.

I would like to write a post on ways to save money on textbooks using some clever tricks that I learned (#1: LOVE YOUR LIBRARY) and will try to do that sometime soon too. Otherwise, the blogging might stay paused until I get to China.

As usual, please feel free to send me any questions or comments, and you can now call me too, if you’d like! Which apparently no one does.

Hey everyone, as is readily apparent, I haven’t made very many updates this summer. I’ve been having a pretty good time in San Francisco with Google, and will try to share some photos of non-confidential fun.

In the meanwhile, in the interests of testing out my employer’s neat products, here is a Google Voice call widget which will let you give me a call and leave me messages, in case somehow you read my blog and are too intimidated to leave so much as a comment (please!) but are less fearful of actually calling me. Anyway, go have a ball. Please don’t make your number private, because it will discourage me from calling you back if you leave an unintelligible voicemail. : )

So, given that I am rarely updating this site, it’s all the more frustrating that I have to keep doing this reactive work to cover up for the problems that come when it keeps getting hacked. I’m not sure where the vulnerabilities are coming from, honestly; I’m not prepared to say it’s a hosting problem, or a wordpress problem, but I’m not sure. In each case someone has had root directory access (not su root, but /* root), and has filled my site with garbage. I only notice each time because Google and their malware prevention partners then flag the site and some helpful users lets me know… eventually. Other times the user numbers went down, but this time, not even. Not sure what that says about the quality of my visitors, or their human vs. robot crawler nature.

Either way, I should have fixed the problem, but it will take some time for me to get out of their poison file. In the meantime I still rank well and my pages are indexed, but you may get warnings. What it was this time was less bad that last, which was masked .htaccess injections which redirected people to malware; this was just an attempt to steal my very juicy PageRank to help boost spammy, evil people.

I hate bad, mean hackers