Well I do not know where to start, a lot has happened since the last post.
I will start at the beginning, I was hacked last week. I attempted to login to a lot of stuff and it didn’t work. Realised I had been hacked and started to take action. Since I had no email accounts anymore it was hard to reset passwords but luckily I had set some pretty tough security questions so I was still able to change passwords and email addresses using this method. Once I had most of the accounts back under my control I started to look at what actually had been damaged. The worst affected was my server, they had logged into CPanel and deleted every single last file leaving all of my many domains displaying 404 pages.
I started looking the financial side of things and unfortunately it has also been compromised. There was hundreds of pounds attempting to be transferred out of credit cards. Luckily the companies noticed something was not right and blocked the transactions and phoned myself to check that it was genuine. When I told them they were not they cancelled the requests, locked the accounts and cancelled the cards. I also reported them to the fraud department so they are currently being investigated by the police and they should get back to me one of these days. Will keep you up to date with that.
To make all of this worse my internet was due to be disconnected the next day as I had cancelled my Virgin Media account due to their utter crap speeds. Due to their word the next day the internet was cut off. This meant I was forced to use the phone for the rest of the problem fixing, which wasn’t too bad as there was only a few companies left.
Most companies were helpful even if it did take them days to reply to tickets that were labelled critical. One company thought that was totally unhelpful was Google. I wanted access to my Google Mail account again but that wasn’t for happening. I do understand that they cannot give out the password etc to anyone but the personal details were so extreme that even I did not know the answers to some. So needless to say I gave up on the account and have just had to move everything to a new one.
Due to the lack of the internet I have returned to the mobile for communications and I used all 400 minutes and 1000 texts for this month. The O2 website is very unfriendly and I find it difficult to see the actual status of my account. I think that is a bit shocking considering I give them about 40 quid a month. They don’t even have a number that you can phone from your mobile and listen to your balance and allowance details.
BT Total Broadband was supposed to take over yesterday but nothing happened, I phoned BT and was told that engineers were very busy and that I would have to wait until midnight for it to be connected. I didn’t hold up much hope but agreed and went to bed. This morning when I woke up I wasn’t wrong, the internet still hadn’t been connected. I phoned BT again and after waiting for 52 minutes to get through to an agent I was told the same as last night except it was going to be tomorrow or Monday now. I simply said “It’s either on today or I leave, Sky has some pretty good deals.” instantly the agent said “I will send an engineer to the exchange as soon as possible. 20 minutes later my internet was connected and the speed was a very high 7MB a good deal faster than Virgins 3MB. I do not understand why as the line has not changed much since the Virgin period but I was surprised so that was a good thing. Been using today and it’s been very very fast. Done speed-tests and I am getting the full speed so no complaints yet.
Here is an picture of the nice router interface displaying the speed. Still not been assigned an IP as I have not yet entered my username and password.
Also went to the Leopard launch event in the Apple Store, Glasgow. Got a free t-shirt which is quite good quality for a freebie, but I suppose it’s Apple. I have since installed Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” on my Mac and have to say it’s fantastic! Such an improvement over Tiger, if you have Tiger I don’t care how much you like it get out there and buy Leopard, you won’t regret it. Below is a screenshot of my current OS X desktop.
To make things better I also was moving to a new school which is a very hi-tech building and best of all we have the new iMac’s to compute on. Yay!
Lastly I have been BETA testing the new Office for Mac. The 2008 version is much more refined than the 2004 version and again is worth the upgrade. It still runs like a BETA though and consumes LOTS of RAM, over 600MB and about 2GB of virtual RAM. This brings the computer to a standstill as it’s constantly accessing the disk. Hopefully this will be ironed out before release, right enough knowing Microsoft it will be released like this and then fixed with a nice service pack. We will see. Here is screenshots of each application starting up (I have left Entourage out as I do not install it because I don’t use it) and a screenshot of Word in action (I didn’t do the rest as the performance was that bad).
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