carnivalnights

i. I realize I have been completely absent from LiveJournal for over a month now. Well, I only just realized this recently. I thought it had only been a few weeks. A few people have contacted me to ask why I have disappeared and I apologize to those who were wondering. I have been really busy lately with my job (er, temp work) and there has been an excess of drama in my life recently as well (when is there not?). I have been trying to enjoy summer but some people and companies have been trying to take that away. Regardless, I am really going to try to write more often.

ii. I have been temping at the same place since mid-March. I applied for the full time position back in April because they had two open positions, and I just heard back Friday that I did not get the job. Apparently they had known quite a few weeks too. So here I am working like a slave, hoping I get this job, meanwhile they had already chosen two people and not said anything. The worst part is, they made me feel like I had a really good chance. They said my interview was great, they were impressed with my testing results (you had to go computer-related testing with spelling, reading, typing and Word), and my supervisor has called me into her office several times to tell me what a great job I am doing and how great it is that I pick up on new things so quickly.

I was really, really, really upset. It is not like I love it there and it is not my dream job, but again, this job would have gotten me out of my house, out of debt, and it was manageable. I do like a lot of aspects of it and I do like some of the people. It had really, really good pay, really good benefits, and best of all, it would have been secure. There is no chance in hell this huge company would have gone under like the last one. The tears welled in my eyes on and off for hours, and finally, I marched into my supervisor's office and asked to speak to her. I told her that this keeps happening to me, over and over. I get nothing but positive feedback from all the employers I have worked for, and still I have no job. I know I am capable, I know I am a hard worker, and I know I could do any job I put my mind to. My self-esteem is not so great as a whole, but in the workforce, I am confident in what I can do if given the chance and I know my work ethic is great. My academic attitude transferred right into my workplace attitude. Even my supervision says "it shows" that I was academically successful and studious in school. She also says she can see I am my own person and stand out in a crowd, which was sweet of her.

In interviews, they say I was great but they chose someone else. If I am so "great," why do I not have a permanent job? Do people think I can just be a permanent temp for the rest of my life and survive off the crappy pay (since I get jobs through an agency and they take a huge cut) without benefits? I have not been to the dentist in a year because of this garbage! Anyway, my supervisor is honest and so I asked her to give me some constructive criticism. I asked her to just tell me anything, anything that could possibly be stopping me from getting jobs. Anything I did wrong in the interview, anything I do wrong at work. Because someone is not telling me something. I am not perfect, but all I ever hear is how amazing I am as an employee, how good my work ethic is, how diligent I am, etc. If all that is true, there must be something else, something else putting every single potential employer off, in interviews or in my resume. I cannot go on being told I do not have enough experience because now I do. I have been working for a year straight and have tons of experience in different industries, I have my summer work experience, and I have experience running my own small business. I cannot possibly be told now, after all this, that I still do not have enough experience--so what will their excuse be now? My supervisor said she would get back to me after doing some thinking. She said she appreciated my initiative and that I did the right thing by coming to her. Now, to prepare myself for hearing some possibly negative things...

I keep thinking back to when I was really, really desperate without any work at all. I was so determined. I wish I had videotaped my struggle. I remember going all over Toronto every week, having interview after interview with recruiting agencies. The endless resumes and cover letters I sent off, all the job sites I signed up for. I remember going back and forth on the bus to see this man who I thought had a web design job for me... and after all that I did for him, including giving him prices, getting his colour choices and outlining what I could do for him, he decided not to hire me in the end because his company was 'not ready for it yet.' Like, I have been doing everything I can. And I keep thinking back to this time a handful of months ago where I was obviously showing the world that I do not give up. And over the past few months, I have done nothing but work really, really hard, taking notes during any training I have received, making sure I do my job RIGHT and EFFICIENTLY, making sure I am covering all of my bases and helping anyone else out that I can. I have never stopped, I have never given up. And it makes me really, really sad that my determination in life--including the five years in university and the years in school before that--has never paid off. I have shown a great deal of ambition even in spite of horrible things that have happened to me, both personal and professional. I was back temping again within a few days after getting laid off in the winter, even though I was so devastated that all I wanted to do was stay in bed. WHEN will all of this hard work pay off? WHEN? And when will all this determination pay off? I have never given up! I have gotten discouraged but still never given up, so where is my reward?

iii. I was kicked out the other day by my domain host, Netrillium. Apparently my site(s) kept crashing their server. Instead of telling me the error messages on their end, providing me with any sort of details or giving me any time to look into the issue, they just told me to get out. The spouted a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo I could not comprehend because I could not see what they were talking about and told me sure, they would help me, for $80/hour. They suspended my account, without notice, and when I approached them and asked why, they were rude, inconsiderate, accusatory and totally unprofessional. Less than 24 hours later, I received a message from them accusing me of "blatantly ignoring the seriousness of the issue" even though I flat out said I was posting on some forums to see if anyone could help me figure the issue out. They even accused me of making them lose clients, which is odd because with all of the downtime, poor customer service and hacking/spam due to their insecure servers, they are quite capable of losing clients all on their own. Then they decided they were not going to put my site back online for me to download things before I moved to my new host, holding my site content hostage. They gave me a domain backup later but I have yet to find out if it contains everything and works properly. Right now my new host says they are trying to restore it but I do not see any content yet, so that scares me.

Just a tip, webmasters... do not ever do business with Netrillium. And if you are with them, get the hell out. They are the worst hosting company I have ever been with and it has been one problem after the next. The only reason I had not moved from them earlier is because I was tracking the experiences of other people and their hosts over the past while, trying to decide which one to go with. I did not want to make the same mistake twice. Anyway, I ended up going with a host called Holdfire. We will see. If I have to move again, I will likely go with Dreamhost because they were my runner-up choice. Time will tell, I guess. I am furious with Netrillium though. To just give a customer no notice, take their site down and tell them to get out is totally unprofessional. And then accusing me of losing their clients?! Wow. So yes, all of my domains will be down until further notice. The process will take a week or two, I am estimating.

iv. Recently, a few people I had no problem trusting before have betrayed me. I generally try to keep a positive attitude about people, especially new people because everyone deserves a chance to prove they are worthy and loyal friends. But honestly, I am getting to the point where the only person I trust is myself. In the end, I guess you are the only person you can truly trust... but you should be able to trust, to some degree, close friends, partners or family members. I recently got into a big tiff with my aunt and she said some things that made me realize we are no longer close and she no longer knows anything about me, who I am or what I stand for. She said things that indicate she does not like my personality (just like my father a couple of months ago) or agree with how I handle my relationship with my father (by giving him far more credit than he deserves, proving she has no idea what goes on in my house while she is not here). It gives me a real sinking feeling to know I cannot even trust my own family to take my word, understand where I am coming from, or just be supportive when I need them most. Sean is well aware that my family is toxic to be around. He says he can tell they purposely try and aggravate each other and cause drama. And they do. I am not perfect either, but I do not sit there pointing out everyone's flaws around the dinner table, storming out when someone says something I do not like, making them feel like crap when they make a big life decision. When I got my first job out of university, all my aunt could do was say how crappy the pay was, how unfair it was I did not get benefits, and how 'fishy' it all seemed. No "congratulations" ever left her mouth. Same with my father. What kind of family is that? Forget celebrating--they would rather be negative assholes.

My family likes to tear me down. My father does it, my aunt does it, my uncle did it when he was alive, and even my grandmother just does not understand me sometimes or see where I am coming from. I have nothing in common with these people. Nothing but DNA. I have just come to the conclusion that it is better I stay away from them most often than not. Every time I come home from a family dinner, I am depressed for one reason or another. My family nit-picks everything about me... my hair, my clothes, my make-up. "You shouldn't wear this, you shouldn't do that." Like I'm still ten. They just make me feel like crap about my decisions and choices in life, and I am even informing my boyfriend that he cannot make me feel that way anymore either. So I think I am better off not having a lot of contact with them, and so far it has been successful. I would rather not be involved with their drama anymore, so I do not call and I have not gone to a lot of family dinners over the past few months. I thought family was supposed to be the only thing anyone could depend on, but mine is like the opposite. Most of them have now said to me they do not want to hear anything about my father, including my aunt. She has wiped her hands clean of the situation and says my grandma is sick of it too, so from now on, I am not allowed to tell them about any issue I am having with my father at all. How nice.

v. Anyway, those are the big things going on right now. I have no idea where to go from here. I am going to leave my job as soon as possible because there is no future for me there. They are not hiring anyone else for the position any time soon; they told me that in the interview. So more job hunting. Yet again. *shakes head* You know, I honestly feel sometimes like I will NEVER get out of this rut. It feels indefinite... I know two temps are being let go at the end of summer, so I need to work fast. I have less than two months to find another job. That is really scary. God. I hate this.

http://forums.papervixen.net
http://sex.papervixen.net

One more incident like this and I am deleting my domain.

I am not paying $500 a year to have my personal things deleted, polluted with spam or hacked. This is the second time my domain has been hacked this year, and about the eighth hacking in total this year (I have other domains that were hacked and deleted completely). Including papervixen.net and all of my other domains, there have been about fifteen hackings in total over the past few years. Sometimes just a message board, sometimes everything, sometimes just an index page.

I am sick and tired of spammers and hackers. First my domain gets taken over by spammers (poker, Cialis, you know the kind). My blog, my tagboard and my guestbook got hundreds of spam posts a day. I tried to fix the blog spam but after I did, no one commented because some people did not understand how that you had to type in the first word of my blog entry (to verify you were not a bot). So I lost all of my blog readers and no one came to my site much after then. Then it started in my guestbook. I switched scripts twice and that solved nothing. Even the supposed spam-prevention guestbook script I am using now does not work. Now I get about 100 guestbook entries a day, all spam. I just keep re-uploading a clean .SQL file every few weeks. Obviously, no one uses my guestbook anyway due to all the spam they see. They see the spam and think it is inactive, so they don't bother posting anything. Then the spam attacked my tagboard. I kept deleting spam comments manually on a weekly basis until finally, just a few weeks ago, the spam stopped. But basically, all of the spam scared people away from my site because it turned my domain into useless trash. No one wants to see spam everywhere when visiting a site but I just had no way to stop it.

Then... earlier this year... my domain was hacked. Or rather, my domains. Thankfully, they did not delete everything off of papervixen.net, but they did delete all content from my other domains (five of them). I had to reupload everything. This obviously took a fair amount of hours. I have no idea why they did not delete everything off my main domain, but I am certainly glad they didn't because I would not have reuploaded everything (all 2 GIGS of data and databases). I would have left it and let my domain expire because I do not have that kind of time on my hands. To reupload everything into all million subdirectories... forget it.

Web design honestly used to be the love of my life. It is the only hobby I have now thanks to my writer's block. It is also the only creative outlet I have left and am actually motivated to use. And now, that is being diminished now too thanks to fucktards who have less of a life than I do. Fucktards who have nothing better to do with their time than to delete random web sites and content from personal domains that we pay for out of our own pockets. No one has any right to delete anything of anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned, hacking is stealing or vandalizing private property. People think because it is online the laws should change? No. Hackers should be charged the exact same way. Thrown in jail too? Absolutely.

I am just fuming mad right now. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that these hackers, who hacked the two above message boards today, messaged me on MSN and told me they were going to do it. So now not only are my sites continuously being hacked, but now I am being harassed online by the hackers who are doing it. Obviously I can block these people, but they were basically holding me hostage and telling me not to leave the conversation (because they were going to "help" me). Every time I swore they threatened to hack something else. What the hell is this shit? That is literally like a hostage situation. I do not do as they say and they punish me. Anyway, they claimed this was all to scare me into checking my security holes. I know XMB is a horrible message board script but I did upgrade it to a more secure version, but I guess that was useless. And I know Invision Power Board is a horrible script too but it was never hacked before so I assumed it was fine. Every message board script that comes up proves to be full of security holes after a couple of years, so there is no way around it. I used the scripts that were popular at the time and I am paying for that years later. To piss me off even more, they told me they deleted /sex because it was "adult content." I told them to go fuck themselves because it was a sex education forum, not porn. They barely understand English (they're Turkish) so they had no idea what this meant.

Anyway, these idiots said they would fix the sites tomorrow. Right. Because I get the impression they want to "help." They said this was a warning and that they would put the sites back up if I upgraded and fixed the security holes. Well, whatever. I could care less. I do have back-ups, which makes this whole situation hilarious. Although, I am not positive if the sites were hacked today. If they were hacked earlier than Tuesday, I am screwed because that is the last time I made back-ups (that would mean I backed up the already-hacked sites and overwrote my old back-up with the non-hacked sites). I am currently asking my host for help with this though because I cannot seem to re-upload them properly. If I cannot restore them, whatever. No big loss. Both message boards were dead anyway. Just like the rest of my domain!

So yes, basically, I am really pissed off and my patience is wearing thin. The spam is not transferring to my fanlistings (spammers are using the update forms and join forms to advertise), so it will only be so long before I give up completely. I have hundreds of fanlistings, so I can guarantee if it starts happening to all of them I am just going to delete them all. It is sad that they may defeat me, but honestly... who has time to deal with all of this bullshit? Web sites used to be something that made me really happy, but now they cause me almost as much stress as school because I have to keep cleaning up the spam and recovering data after being hacked. Now my domain is just dead because no one can stand visiting with all the spam there... and if all of my content is going to be deleted at some point anyway... why should I even bother to keep picking up the pieces?

The orange bar is the number of unique visitors I get. As you can see, it continues to stay low. The spam started around October 2004. I wish I had more of this chart available because then you'd see the real visitor dip after the spam first started two years ago. My visitors have declined steadily since.