Quite a few weeks ago I noticed a few things amiss on my blog. Then one day my mom said that the site was down entirely. I contacted my host and they indicated that my .htaccess file was the problem so they renamed it. The site came back up. But some of the problems I had noticed before didn’t go away.

Before you go on you might be here because you think your site is compromised. Check here.

My web traffic had declined tremendously.
My RSS feed title had been changed to something spammy.
Search results for my site gave the site title as spam.

For instance, instead of “Ryan McFarland’s blog » Print your own (Monopoly) money” the page title would show as “Windows Email Server — Discount -137% price off” or something like that in the search results. My page was still at the top of the search results but nobody would follow that link.

Here is an example from someone else’s blog.

That is the first result for a search for “Day-Lab Ice Blue Necklace $28” (Link goes to their page.)

The first thing I did was check my blog template files. But nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. But a look at my source code on the resulting pages was messy with spam words. What the heck?

I scoured the net looking for a solution. It looks like since I still used the “admin” account for my login for the site that I was the victim of a brute force attack that got my password. Perhaps it was a compromise of my ftp password. My web host announced a security failure and reset everyone’s ftp passwords.

I tried everything listed on this source for how to fix a different hack of WordPress blogs. But none of them seemed to be the source of my problems.

Finally I found it. A file called style.php in my theme was packed with nasty spam links. The clever name was easily overlooked when I was scanning through template files looking for the culprit. There should be a style.css file. I deleted all of the text in the php file from the WordPress template editor and the problems cleared up. My results in search engines cleaned up quickly.

What I find interesting is that other blogs are still linking to me according to the incoming links list on the WordPress dashboard:

I’ll try and contact those site owners to have them try and clean up their sites too.

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We woke this morning and it was really quiet.  Really quiet.  No hum of the fridge, nothing.  Power out. 

I looked outside and the State Department Store was out too.  Surely they would have the right phone numbers and clout to make sure it wasn’t a long outage.  But for a little while I thought about emptying the freezer onto the balcony.

Hot water and heating still work here without electricity.  Good old fashioned communist infrastructure I guess.  So we took our showers by candlelight.  We ate cold cereal instead of blended smoothies.  We hoped our socks were black and not navy blue.  And then minutes before walking out the door it came back on.

The work day was alright.  One of my classes was a bit more of a handful than I like.  My coworker was sick so I had to help with equipment, locked doors, and other filling in.  Like I said – an alright day.

And now that we are home I sliced open my finger with a bread knife just ass I was starting dinner.  It is one of those cuts that probably could be stitched.  But I am stubborn.

This is supposed to be a mojito. 

You wouldn’t like mojito when he’s angry.

I don’t recall exactly where this was but it was during our winter break. It wasn’t terribly good.

I am not one to critique the use of bacon as a flavor to enhance foods.  And honestly it has been a very long time since I have eaten any canned meat products.  But Jordan’s expression mirrors my feelings on this. 

I have one elective class of 11th and 12th grade students.  Today was their last day of class with me for health and physical education.  So I arranged for the kids to get out of their classes that follow PE and the class went bowling.  We played two games and had lunch before heading back to the school.  It was a fun switch from the normal sports and fitness activities that I can offer.

As a bonus, I now know where to go bowling and perhaps more important, how much it costs, where to pay, how to get food, where the shoes are and how to set up for a game.  All those logistics are more difficult when you can not sprak the local language.

On Friday I went to the Chinese embassy here in Ulaanbaatar.  I need to get a visa because I am headed to Suzhou in a week and a half.  I will be a chaperone for our basketball team that is playing in our division tournament there. 

There are two forms I have to fill out.  The first is the standard visa application and the second is a supplemental that I have to fill out because I am applying outside of my home country.  The application is pretty quick except for the part where they require you list any previous trip to China (this is my fourth) and any countries you have been to in the last year. 

Included in my application is proof of the flights, hotel reservation, a letter from the host school inviting us to attend, the tournament schedule, and notarized  forms that show that the chaperones will be the legal guardians of the students on the trip. 

I had to miss a few classes to get to the embassy on Friday morning. The traffic was pretty bad too.  We arrived at the embassy and the driver saw the door closed with a sign on it.  That is when we remembered that it was Chinese New Year week. 

I get to go back to the embassy and try again on Monday.

Ulaanbaatar can be cold.  Sure, I have spent the last 15 years in Alaska so you might think that I am accustomed to cold weather.  But I was in coastal Alaska. Here the weather is more like Fairbanks. Summer can be quite warm.  But now?  We’re hitting into the 40s. 

Minus forties.

When we ask our regular driver what the temperature is he doesn’t even bother using the word “minus.”  It is kind of funny but it could be that this place practically spends more time in subzero temperatures than in the positive digits.  It is a matter of efficiency of speech to just skip the word.  Like you might skip saying the PM after the time in the afternoon or evening. 

In the morning our driver pulls up just fifteen feet from our apartment building entrance.  If he is not there we wait inside and marvel at the buildup of frost around the metal entry door.  The car is never warm but it is not cold like outside.  He drops us off a few hundred feet from the warmth of the school and sometimes we have to quickly shuffle to the doors.  We tend not to wear our winter hats over our perfectly groomed heads until after work.  If he can not pick us up it will be a colder commute home. 

Last week we were waiting at a corner trying to get a ride and noticed a frozen puppy in the icy snow.  Sad.  I wonder if the euphoria that some mountaineers and explorers have described happening during extreme hypothermia occurs to the little critters that can’t possibly survive the bitter winters here. 

I will have pulled on Patagonia winter long underwear under my pants before leaving the school.  I wear a hooded sweatshirt under a thick winter coat.  A knit hat, eight foot long scarf wrapped around my neck twice, and fleece lined wool mittens keep me fairly warm.  For the first few minutes.  Because I wear glasses I can not wear the scarf over my nose or the lenses fog up.  Fog quickly turns to ice.  So my face is usually cold.  My hat could probably be warmer but when it is windy I wear the hood of my jacket up. 

Fur is in here.  I regret not investing in some sea otter mittens or a hat.  They would blend in with things the locals buy.  I swear some women wear seal skin coats. 

Only a very hardy people could call this home for the last thousand years.  My hat goes off to these tough Mongolians.

I took a few pictures that show frost built up on the inside of our apartment building entrance.  The wind blows in here fairly strong.

Yeah… we were on a vacation to some nice warm places.  And now we are back to temperatures well below freezing.  So I have been seeking the silver lining.

1 – No biting insects.  No mosquitoes.  No flies landing on my ankles or to shoo off my food.  This really is a blessing.  You know those starving children they show on TV with the flies crawling over their faces?  I feel worse about the flies than the hunger.  Maybe because I have never been truly hungry.  But I have spent enough time stomping my feet while trying to eat my dinner to keep the flies off me.  And the bug bites we all had were so bad that Jordan actually carried cortizone around almost as much as his book.  Here the bugs have all been frozen solid.

2 – Speaking of frozen solid… the sidewalks here are collecting all sorts of vile substances.  People spit.  Not a light spattering of saliva though.  No they usually are a lung-butter projectile.  They spit in Thailand too.  And they get more rain and the occasional flood to rinse it away… but until then I had to slap my flip flops across their glossy sidewalks.  Here my thick boots skate across the frozen spit, phlegm, vomit, urine, animal waste, bird dropings and restaurant hose-down overflow with no risk of flip-flopping the waste onto my calves and ankles.

3 – Which reminds me of two words.  Ankle support.  We went to this really cool cascading waterfall hot spring and I bumped my ankle on a root because I had poor footwear for scrambling the 20 feet from the paved path to the warm water.  You know… maybe this one doesn’t quite stack up to the other reasons to be greatful.

4 – Pepper gave me a good one… with the colder weather I have to bundle up.  Outside you can barely see any of my skin.  Even at work I have to wear a sweatshirt and track pants.  It isn’t until I am home that I can walk around with just a T-shirt and boxer-briefs on while I do the dishes.  Which is what I was doing when I told her about my list of reasons to be glad that it is cold out.  Unlike on our trip when I wore my Speedo a few times – even getting a few laughs from the Thai people running our boat.  So now I can bundle up so that nobody has to… hey… that wasn’t a very nice suggestion Pepper!

Jordan and I got haircuts today.  Mine cost 18,000 tugrik and I tipped 5,000. We usually don’t tip but I had to.  For under $14 I had my hair washed then a head, neck and shoulder massage.  Then a hair oil treatment with heat (the picture) and they served me coffee while I waited.  Then another hair wash and the most thorough haircut I have ever had.  He then trimmed my beard and clippered my face and neck.  Wrapped it all up with another hair washing, drying, and then hair wax and styling.  Wow.  I want to get a haircut every weekend.