Where I’ve Been and Malware

I cannot believe that it’s been over two months since I’ve written a post. That is the longest I’ve gone in the ten years I have been writing this blog. I read somewhere that the average blog has the lifespan of a fruit fly – after 31 days most people give it up.

That seems to lead to a cottage industry in taking over dormant sites. This site isn’t exactly stagnant even when I am not blogging because people use it for reference.

I started getting emails about “a somewhat embarrassing page”. At first I was aghast that hackers had redirected clients to a porn site.

Fortunately, no, it was just a failed re-direct attempt that ended up breaking a link so you get a 404 page that literally says, “Well, this is somewhat embarrassing.”

The Invisible Developer spent a good bit of time while we were in New York deleting malware from the site. At first, I was feeling very guilty because I thought my cavalier attitude toward security issues with PHP was the reason, but we did clean up most of the problems pointed out in those comments years ago, so that wasn’t the culprit. I should admit here that Paul and Clint were right and I was wrong. Although we have no data of particular value to anyone on this site, hackers are interested in re-directing sites to get links and for other nefarious purposes.

As near as we can tell it was a plugin on another site that was hosted by us that had not been updated in years. We had several more or less abandoned domains of content we had created for clients over the years. They paid us, we created the content for their course or other purpose, and then just left it up. Kind of like all of that stuff you have in your closets that you just shove to the back because you have room.

That’s all cleaned up now. The site, not the closets. Those are still chaos. For all I know, there is an entire new civilization developing in that closet under the stairs. Or maybe Harry Potter lives there.

As for me, I have been teaching two courses during the past 3 months, where I usually only teach one in a year. After landing back in the U.S. in February, I have been criss-crossing the country. Since the beginning of the year, I think I’ve been in 11 cities, 3 states and 2 countries but I may have forgotten a few.

We also released two new games, Fish Lake Adventure , for the iPad, and a new version of AzTech: Meet the Maya, also for the iPad.

Get it in the app store

My lovely daughter, Ronda, headlined this show called Wrestlemania, which is why we were in New York. We have chosen very different careers , my daughters and I. The Perfect Jennifer, or, as she likes to call herself, “the normal one”, is a middle school history teacher, in case you were wondering. The Spoiled One is currently doing a semester abroad in London. She will be back in the U.S. next month and needs a summer internship. Her talents include Instagram, shopping and soccer. If your company doesn’t need any of those skills, she’s also a good writer. Darling Daughter Number One, is 7 Generation Games CEO, she’s also a good writer, having co-authored a New York Times best seller, but she’s not looking for an internship.

So, anyway, I am back, well for a couple of weeks. Next, I head to SAS Global Forum in Texas for a few days to give a couple of presentations on biostatistics and career advice . You’d think my career advice might be to study biostatistics but, maybe not…

Then, I come home for a couple more weeks and am off to a Tech Inclusion conference in Melbourne, Australia. My talk there is going to be, well – different than most – and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

So, now, I’m back to blogging. I have a few things to say about the infinite number of ways people can incorrectly code a repeated measures ANOVA , subdomains and number needed to treat. Between the next game, new website, two conferences and two grant proposals all coming due before June, I’m sure I’ll fit it in there somewhere.

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