There once was a couple named Stam & Ceph who decided to move to Southern France for a while. "Easy it will be," said Stam to Ceph,"as easy as eating an entire French Baguette cover in Nutella." And so Ceph and Stam packed up there belongings and moved...
(Present day):
After watching a parapentor flying in our neighbor's backyard we decided it was high time to really try to figure out how French people do things...and let me tell you...eating an entire baguette with Nutella is easy (we do it almost every morning), but figuring out how to live like a French person is way more difficult. Something as simple as going grocery shopping becomes difficult when the hours that the store is open are only from 9-12 and then 2-6! It's a different pace of life, that I could definitely get used to as a worker, but as a consumer...what a pain in the ass! :)
We have been doing tons of work on the house in Castex...so far: painting, working on the floors, covering the holes in the septic system (that was gross...good thing we got respirators), high quantity pruning on the trees on the property, saving the snails, worms and frogs from falling branches, hanging shower curtains, and learning how to grow vegetables! We are the proud parents of baby sprouts of all kinds: carrots, artichokes, strawberries, rasperries, blueberries, herbs, garlic, onions, etc. I made up a song for our first baby sprouts...that will be posted soon (my singing ladies, you are going to love this one, might be on par with the Gum Song).
It has been beautiful out until recently...snow and cold have come to call. I tried to hide so the snow and cold couldn't find us, but our cats were meowing so the snow and cold found us...dern cats! Anyway, we're still mooching internet from a local McDonald's (never appreciated McD's so much in my life). I called the internet provider this morning, and we should be getting internet within 4 days. In the meantime, just so you all have our number, it is: 011-33-5-61-69-85-98 (the 011 is to dial outside of the US, the 33 is the country code, and 5-61-69-85-98 is the actual phone number. You have to dial all of those numbers in order to reach our house. If it were too easy it wouldn't be French!)
We miss you all very, very, very, very, very much! Hope all is well and more stories and pictures to come once we get internet!
Love,
Steph
P.S. We've changed the comments up a bit so that you can't post anonymously to try to reduce the chances of getting hacked again...Sorry for the hassle. You will have to sign in before posting now.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Cam
I don't understand how you hack a blog. Explain to this old coot please.
ReplyDeleteMonique
Hey Monique,
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are a bunch of ways to hack blogs, but somehow someone added a script (a command) to one of the widgets (the visitor counter) for our blog. When the widget would load, the script would tell the web browser to redirect the viewer to another page...the spam page.
In order to remove the bug, we had to remove the widget before the widget redirected us to the spam page, which was about half a second. It took both of us and about 15 tries to push the right buttons quick enough...to make matters more amusing, we were in a McDonalds in St. Girons, sitting across from a bunch of giggly girls at lunch. :)
I'm not sure if the widget was bugged from the get go, or if someone hacked our blog after it was already made. I'm not computer wiz, but I know that it is common for hackers to write sections of code into comment boxes, form fields, and such. The code executes malicious operations once it is transferred to the server and voila! you have been hacked!
We had the comments set up so that anyone could post, regardless of whether or not they had a verified account of any sort. There are programs called robots that search the web looking for places to insert bugs through comment and form fields, and it may have been something like that. We frequently have robots spam the NC3 site, either trying to get info about the site, or attempting to hack it somehow. By making it necessary to login to an account prior to posting comments, I'm hoping that it will alleviate some of the risk of getting randomly hacked again.
Hopefully that helps a bit. If there is anyone out there who has more useful input, or if I'm off base, please correct me.
Cheers,
Cam