So here is what Google has to say about me now:

What is the current listing status for journal.amanita.net?

This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 220 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-07-07, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS26347 (DREAMHOST).

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, journal.amanita.net did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

And yet it still gives the warning when I try to visit with Firefox. I can't even post to my site with Firefox. I'm using IE to post this. Dammit! How do I kill that Firefox warning thing? Blah!

First of all, I wish MJ had hung on for one more news cycle, so Farrah could have had her day in the sun. I was watching MSNBC earlier, and one of the talking heads said they had been working on a Farrah tribute, but they pushed it aside when MJ died. It was all MJ all night on my TV. Yes, we knew her death was coming, but I wish she could have had more "Remembering Farrah Fawcett" moments. They died just hours apart.

As for MJ...wow. What to say. I'm not sad, I didn't know the guy. But I'm disappointed. Whatever you think of him, MJ was the greatest showman of the 20th century. His music, his dance, his performances...unparalleled. Yeah, the hyperbaric chamber and the pet chimp and all that, sure, crazy stuff. The nose disappearing, the skin bleaching (instead of saying "this is the face of vitiligo" and being 'spotted" he went for a uniform look), the plastic surgery, the dangling kids over balconies and making them wear masks...yes, the man was certainly bizarre. But goddamn he had some fucking talent. For years I was ashamed to admit I was a fan of Michael Jackson. When I was in high school he was at his weirdest and being accused of stuff, and I kept my mouth shut. In more recent years I have decided, you know what? Liking the music is different from liking the weirdness. Plain and simple, I like Michael Jackson's entire body of work. His short films are fantastic. His collaborations - with Paul McCartney, everybody on We Are the World, etc - are amazing. Michael Jackson fucking rocks.

As for the child abuse stuff...I think he's too complicated to fit the traditional pedophile mold. I don't think that whatever he did with little boys was from the predator standpoint that most pedos come from. He wasn't raised right. His (non) relationship with his father, his earliest years having been onstage, seeing sexuality at a young age, all of it turned into a very complex individual who couldn't understand what was wrong. Now, that doesn't excuse him; he was an adult and should have been responsible enough to not do whatever he did. But I think it explains it better than "ewwww pedo" does. For decades he tried to reclaim some form of childhood. The very existence of carnival rides at Neverland Ranch speak to this. Setting up big party days where he invited dozens of kids to go on the rides WITH HIM reinforces it. Something was disconnected between the "boy" Michael and the "adult" Michael. Yes, he knew better - nobody with an average IQ thinks it's okay to molest kids - but he was coming from a different standpoint.

And even as I say all this, I wish I had more to say about Farrah. I really hope she and Ryan O'Neal got married in time. A friend says he read she didn't regain consciousness and it never happened, but by golly, if those two decided to get married, I hope they got to. I suppose it is a blessing for him that MJ died because now he can grieve in (more) peace than he would have otherwise, since everybody's focused on MJ. But still...wow...what a day. What a day.

I've been a Twitter user since November 2006. I am a good Twitter citizen, I have lots of people I chat with on a daily basis. Last night I woke up around 1am and went to check Twitter from my iPod, but I couldn't log in. I opened up my netbook and discovered I'd been suspended.

I filed a ticket immediately which was automatically assigned to @delbius, who deals with spam and suspension issues. She's based in San Francisco, though, so I knew my ticket wouldn't be looked at till the morning. A normal person would have gone back to sleep, but having insomniac tendencies myself, I set up contingency plans instead. I used @mthinks, a little-touched account, to announce my downtime, knowing that I had a few peopwho followed both accounts and could relay information. I also mentioned it on Facebook, where I received an outpouring of confusion and sympathetic indignance.

Morning finally rolled around, and I went to work. I anxiously awaited a response from @delbius; when I saw her post for the first time I made another peep and was told to sit tight and wait. By this time I had come up with a possible explanation for the suspension: linking to sites that distribute malware can get you cut off. Sure enough, when she responded, that's what it was - my profile URL was my site, which got hacked about a week ago but was immediately cleaned up. Google didn't pick up on it right away though; I requested a re-review and it was completed about 12 hours before I was suspended from Twitter.

So with my account reinstated and my profile URL set to my @chimp address, I was good to go on the Twitter front. It was SUCH a relief to be unsuspended! It was less than 24 hours from start to finish, but for a heavy Twitter user like myself, that felt like forever. Even now I am so relieved to have my account back, it was a scary experience! (No need to point and jeer about addiction and taking a break, I'm already aware.)

So with Twitter squared away, the next move was cleaning up my website. It turned out almost all of the domains I host were hacked with the same iframe-inf injection, so there's quite a bit of cleanup to be done, not to mention figuring out prevention tactics for the future. That's going to be the challenging part - whether Dreamhost will work with me on it, and whether I'll be able to keep it from having such repercussions again, remain to be seen.  I'd like to take the opportunity to clean up my web presence overall, since there's really no reason to leave messy tracks all over my host.

I'm still just glad to have my Twitter account back. The rest is yet to do.

For the past two days I've tried out LifeStream, an aggregator for your various feeds like Netflix, Twitter, etc. I like it. I'm going to keep it. It'll be more "this is my life" than my blog has been in well over a year; I started making fewer posts, and the ones I made were mostly philosophical, rather than what I'm actually doing. So by reading what I'm queuing on Netflix, what I'm saying on Twitter, what I'm posting to Flickr, what I'm bookmarking on Delicious, etc., you'll be able to see what's actually going on in my life. Honestly, a lot of what I do is recorded online in these ways, so I think it'll be cool.


My other cool thing is that I got an Xbox 360. It was on eBay for $75 but I didn't realize that it didn't come with...well, anything. After buying the A/V cable, power cable, hard drive, etc. it turned out to be a lot more expensive, not to mention the $70 for a used wireless adapter (we don't have wired networking in the house). Fortunately a friend loaned me a couple of controllers and some games; I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV mostly. It's so many light-years ahead of my old PS2! I love the Xbox. I ordered Civilization Revolution from eBay because I love playing Civ IV on the PC so I figure I'll try the Xbox version. I have also played Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise a little, but I have a really hard time because the instructions are SO tiny and hard to see! It's all lots of fun though. And I watched streaming Netflix on it last night, too!