Fagstein » Fagstein

You failed my subscription challenge

Fagstein — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:40:46 +0000

I'm very disappointed in all of you

So a week ago, I asked you to participate in a fundraising event in which I spared you from the guilt trip of asking you for money. Instead, I promised to give away my own money in proportion to how much you helped to inflate my ego by subscribing to my RSS feed or following my Twitter account.

Kind of like those emails that say Bill Gates will donate money if you forward them. Only this one was real.

I gave you a week, so that news of my good deed would spread far and wide and everyone would have a chance to let themselves be counted.

One week later, here are the results: The number of Twitter followers has gone from 3,816 to 3,854, an increase of 38. Subscribers to my RSS feed haven't changed, and could possibly have even declined.

So my grand total to be given to charity, under the generous formula I set, would have been $38. Enough for a family of four to ... have dinner at a McDonald's.

Seriously? I can't get you lazy bums to do something as effortless as hit "follow" or "subscribe" even if I'm paying for you to do it? At that rate, I'd wonder if you'd even remember to breathe if there wasn't an unconscious brain function that forces your lungs to expand and contract. What do I have to do, deliver a pizza? Show you porn?

Look, I know, lots of people already follow me, and not everyone has more than 3,000 Twitter followers. Well, I'm not everyone. My extended family (which includes a lot of those aunts whose sole purpose in life is to initiate awkward converstaion) thinks I'm some sort of Internet superstar, and my attempts to dissuade them of that notion are interpreted as false modesty, which only makes it worse. Put simply: I have a reputation to build, and such a piss-poor participation rate in a yearly charity exercise is embarrassing. Like a reader poll that only gets two responses.

And if those great aunts stop believing in the legend of Fagstein, they'll move on to even more uncomfortable questions, like wondering why I'm not married and don't have kids yet.

So you know what? Screw it. Screw the whole formula. Screw the "subscription challenge" and counting Twitter followers like some narcissistic douche.

The Gazette Christmas Fund is getting a cool $1,000 from me this holiday season, which will be used to write eight cheques for $125 each to families in need. And I'm not going to put something like "on behalf of Fagstein readers" as the name that goes on that list of donors, because you had nothing to do with it. If you couldn't care enough about these families to even get off your ass and setup a few hundred fake Twitter accounts to follow me with, then you don't deserve to be associated with this donation in any way.

You want to make Christmas brighter for someone, you're going to have to do it with your own money this time.

That is, except for the 38 new Twitter subscribers. To you, I thank you from the bottom of my ever-expanding credit card balance.

To the rest of you, you can all go to hell.

Merry Christmas.

Fagstein’s Fourth Annual Subscription Challenge

Fagstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:32:22 +0000

I'm giving away some of these (the money, not the condoms)

To celebrate yet another year of employment, I'm giving away some of my money again.

And as in previous years, your participation does not involve you spending any money, just helping to inflate my ego a little bit.

In the past I've given to Dans la Rue, the Welcome Hall Mission and the Old Brewery Mission. Now all of them are annoying me regularly with letters in the mail, which I find annoying not because they're charities asking for money but because they're wasting so much on printing and postage. It just seems weird that there's someone who has gone through the calculation and determined that this money needs to be spent to get people to donate.

This year, I was told by my boss that I've reached the five-year rate of pay at work. Under the current collective agreement, that's the maximum rate, even though I'm still a part-time temporary employee whose future there isn't at all set in stone.

While I could use some more job security ... and my own weekly column too, while you're at it, imagination ... my bank account can attest to how much I've benefitted from these people paying me to do something I enjoy so much, so I'm giving back by sending my big donation to the Gazette Christmas Fund. Or The Gazette Christmas Fund. I'm still debating whether the "T" should be capitalized.

Anyway, here's how it works: I'm going to give $1 of my own money for every new (legitimate) follower to my Twitter feed between now and one week from today (Dec. 21), and $2 for every new subscriber to my RSS feed. The former is currently 3,816 and the latter is 1,196 (though I don't know how reliable that Feedburner count is). And to save myself going bankrupt in case this goes super-viral, there's a combined limit of $2,000, which I can totally waive if I feel like it, because I set the rules, man.

So go forth and sing my praises, and together we can give away a bunch of my money and make me cool at the same time.

And if you insist on donating your own money, go ahead. I'm not going to stop you.

Want to watch me talk in front of a brick wall for half an hour?

Fagstein — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:54:54 +0000

Last month, I gave a talk to some student journalists from Ontario and Quebec who gathered in St. Henri as part of a regional conference of Canadian University Press.

I occasionally get asked to talk to students, and like most professional journalists I'm happy to do so, because it gives me a chance to help others and because it totally inflates my ego to see so many people look up to me.

As it happens someone was there with a camera and recorded the whole thing.

About half of the talk (which is in English but has questions answered in English and French) has been posted to YouTube in three parts (keep in mind I was low on sleep and didn't have enough time to prepare a script or even a list of talking points, so you'll hear a lot of "uhh"s and awkward pauses - the question period is better):

I was asked to talk about "online freelancing", but as I explain right off the bat there isn't really much of a difference between online and regular freelancing, except (usually) for the pay.

I turned on YouTube's transcription service on that first video, and the first words out of my mouth get recognized as this:

"Service to the following online freelancing outsourcing harvest session ... really ridiculous"

Sounds about right.

I reference a few things in the talk that I should link to here:

Last call for interns

It's not part of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but I also talked a bit about my internship application to The Gazette.

The deadline for applications for next summer's interns is coming up Dec. 16. Applications (cover letter, CV and up to five clippings) for jobs as reporters and copy editors (print and online) can be sent to city editor Michelle Richardson (The Gazette, 1010 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 200, Montreal Quebec H3B 5L1). The jobs are full-time for 10-12 weeks somewhere between early June and mid-September, paid at 80% of the starting salary of the position, which works out to a decent pay for a student. It's open to people who are university students in the current academic year.

Applicants need a driver's license and need to be bilingual (i.e. able to speak, listen and read in French).

The full posting (PDF) is posted on Concordia's journalism department website along with postings for other internships.

This internship is how I got started, and look at me now!

Oh, wait...

Welcome to my new home

Fagstein — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:38:40 +0000

If you're reading this post, it means you have successfully reached this blog on its new server.

After three years with U.S.-based SiteGround, and not particularly impressed with their customer service after an unfortunate emergency a little while back, I decided to wait until my two-year agreement had expired and move the site to Montreal-based iWeb. It's not an endorsement (ask me in a couple of years and we'll see), but the fact that they're closer to home and don't charge extra for things that should be free make me more comfortable.

Anyway, the transition should be entirely transparent (in fact, considering my experience with software projects in general and dealing with servers in particular, I'm a bit surprised how easily and seamlessly it all worked). The entire database has been moved over, so all 3,157 posts, 17,678 comments and about 240MB of photos and audio clips are still here at their same URLs. Hopefully, nothing except this post should give any indication that anything has changed.

If there is something obscure that I missed, please let me know by commenting below.

And now that this project is over, I can get back to working on content again.

Fagstein: “En français SVP”

Fagstein — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:57:32 +0000

The comments attached to this amuse me. Perhaps it's time I create some automated Google Translate version of this blog.

Or I could send my blog posts to QMI Agency's translation department.

(For the record, this is what the Google Translate version of the post referenced above looks like)

Wait a second, I’m giving money to a brewery?

Fagstein — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:38:58 +0000

Now I feel slightly less guilty about not giving my spare change to panhandlers

I asked you to show your support, and once again the response was "whatever", but I have enough of an existing audience that the Old Brewery Mission will still be slightly richer for the Christmas season.

For the record, my Feedburner subscription count went up a whoppingly massive nine, while my Twitter follower count went up by a slightly more respectable 46. So $650 for existing feed subscribers + $9 for new feed subscribers + $23 for new Twitter followers + a bonus $214.7 for existing Twitter followers ($0.10 each) = $896.70 to help society's forgotten.

So as the charity thanks me for my donation, I thank you for your continued support, and particularly thank the Gazette, my employer for 11 of the past 12 months, whose union wage scale (combined with my lack of dependents and serious medical issues) means I have the kind of money to stupidly give away like this.

Merry Christmas, folks.

p.s. If you totally want to show me up, or even just feel a bit less bad for the fact that I'm donating my money in your name, you can make your own donation. The Old Brewery Mission accepts money online through CanadaHelps.org.

The Third Annual Fagstein Subscription Challenge

Fagstein — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:00:38 +0000

I made so much money this year, it made me go CRAZY!

I don't know why, but I still have a job. And because I don't have ~~a life~~ a dozen kids, pets and other regular expenses, I've decided once again to give away some of the cash I've been hoarding to a different financial black hole: a local charity. And the amount will depend on you.

If you're new to this, you can see the posts from 2008 and 2009, but the idea is the more people who subscribe to this blog via feed readers (like Google Reader), the more money I give away. According to my spies at Feedburner, the current subscriber count is 1,250, which is pathetically similar to what it was a year ago. Like last year, I'll start with $0.50 for each of those people as a base ($650), and add $1 for every new subscriber after one week, to a maximum of $1,000 (just in case this goes viral and I end up having to pay a quadrillion dollars or something).

As a bonus, I'm also donating $0.50 for each new Twitter follower (spammers and other non-human accounts not included, along with those who have astronomical following counts). At the moment of writing this, that number is 2,147. Again, this will be up to a maximum of $1,000 (so don't bother following me if the count hits 3,147, I guess) - yeah, I know everyone's doing it, and for more money, but I don't have Véro cash.

The recipient of my stupid crazy giveaway this year will be the Old Brewery Mission, who will no doubt then add me to a mailing list like Dans la Rue and the Welcome Hall Mission, where I will be reminded regularly through the mail of how my contributions are helping people.

As if I care about helping people. I'm in this to get famous, and giving money to readers directly doesn't give me a tax receipt.

This not-contest ends exactly one week from now, at noon (ish) on Wednesday, Dec. 22.

P.S. Speaking of giveaways, I have a small collection of swag - some media-related, others of local interest - that people have handed me over the past little while that I can't really use because it offends my ethical sensibilities. I haven't figured out the most fun way of distributing this stuff to those who might enjoy it, so I welcome your suggestions below. A charity auction? A party? A contest? Use it to bribe people into becoming friends with me? Just throw it in the garbage? Hand it to Jean Naimard where his burning rage will cause it to immediately combust?

The lure of the Digital Life

Fagstein — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 06:20:20 +0000

I was recently invited to appear as the guest on an episode of The Digital Life, a half-hour show on Radio Centre-Ville (CINQ 102.3 FM). Pre-recorded last Wednesday, it aired on Saturday afternoon and is available as a podcast on their website. I was asked about the origin of the name "Fagstein", what I think of journalists who look down on bloggers, and a few other things.

Digital Life host Reisa Levine and producer Mark Korman

The half-hour went by pretty fast, even though there were no commercials or breaks for news, traffic and weather.

It was my first time at Centre-Ville's studio (which, despite its name, is actually at St. Laurent and Fairmount - closer to a geographic centre of the city than downtown). I'd say it's tiny compared to other radio studios, but I can't really think of any big radio studios these days.

Small studio at Radio Centre-Ville

The show was recorded in the smaller of two studios - another down the hall used for live broadcasts has a much larger table and more microphones. But the quality was fine.

Reisa Levine and Mark Korman have been doing the show for about a year now, since the former hosts stepped aside (as tends to be the case for volunteer work). Levine works at CitizenShift (formerly of the NFB) and is a veteran media producer. Korman is the author of the Montreal Radio Blog, which is worth reading for locals interested in radio.

Recent topics covered include PodCamp and the Citizen Media Rendez-Vous. If you know what those are, this show is probably worth listening to.

I asked them why they do it. Why, when just about everyone is a social media expert and has their own podcast, they would have their own show on the subject and devote so much time at a community radio station that barely anyone can hear.

Levine's answer was simple: It's a labour of love. It's the same reason I write this blog. You do it for yourself.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The Digital Life show airs on Radio Centre-Ville (102.3 FM) every Saturday from 2:30 pm to 3 pm. It also streams live from Radio Centre-Ville's website and is available as a download from the Digital Life blog.

Front-seat driver

Fagstein — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 08:20:14 +0000

A woman sits on the bus driver's armrest greeting passengers

Maybe I'm being a bit of a prude, and insufficiently open-minded. And I know it can get boring when you're driving a bus late at night.

But it just seems somewhat ... inappropriate to have someone sitting with you in the driver's seat as you're driving the bus. Not only does it look rather unprofessional when people start to board the bus, but I'm pretty sure the people who tested the bus for safety don't recommend people sit there.

There's a seat right by the front door, and at this particular moment it's unoccupied. Maybe you can sit there instead. Don't worry, your conversation shouldn't suffer.

UPDATE (Oct. 2): After having a similar experience - this time with children - Gazette reporter Anne Sutherland has written a story about bus driver behaviour, which appeared on Page A3 of Saturday's paper:

Bus driver story by Anne Sutherland on Page A3 of Saturday's paper

The photo becomes officially my first freelance photo for The Gazette. Of course, had I known that would happen when I took it, I would have tried to make it a lot better (and taken it at a higher resolution).

Me!

The story also quotes me briefly about my experience:

Here’s another, I hope, rare example of bad behaviour by bus drivers:

Montreal blog Fagstein posted a photo taken Sept. 17 of a female passenger riding on the armrest of a male driver’s seat.

“This was on the 361 bus at 2:30 in the morning,” said blog author Steve Faguy, who works as a copy editor at The Gazette. “The woman was sitting there the whole time, about 30 minutes. If the guy had to do some kind of emergency manoeuvre, he can’t do it with her on his lap.”

New media is awesome and all, and I work at the Gazette and put together a bunch of pages every day, but there's still something about seeing a piece of paper with my name on it delivered to over a hundred thousand households that makes me a bit giddy. Running my first photo about a third of a page (I've cropped out the ads) on A3 of the Saturday paper ads icing to the cake.

The new boss, same as the old boss

Fagstein — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:31:50 +0000

So, funny story:

A little under two weeks ago, my record of employment came in the mail, along with the pay stubs for my last two paycheques at the Gazette. It was about then that it hit me that I didn't work there anymore. Now I was unemployed, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

As I figured out what that would mean, a week ago Sunday I went on the government of Canada's website and filed for unemployment insurance benefits. At least it would seem like I was still getting a salary while I looked for a new job.

That's when Murphy's Law (or a corollary thereof) took effect. Shortly after I woke up on Monday afternoon, I got emails, Facebook messages and telephone calls from my former colleagues, telling me about a job opening at The Gazette for a part-time copy editor on contract.

The paper is in the process of switching to a new content management system for both print an online, which will notably include a change of page layout software from QuarkXPress (version 3.32, released in 1996) to Adobe InDesign. This will mean a lot of training for existing copy editors, so they decided to hire a few more to help put out the paper. My name, apparently, was one of the first to come up.

Yeah, she's dumped me a few times, but I keep going back. Funny what love does to you.

The interview was pretty short. It's not like I needed to provide references. "Can you start Monday?" I was asked over the phone. And just like that, I had my old job back.

There was a bit of paperwork to deal with (actually none of it on paper, it was all getting electronic accounts setup and a security pass reactivated), but at 4pm Monday, exactly one month after leaving for what I thought could easily have been forever, I entered the office and went to work as if I'd never left, stopping occasionally to hear a "welcome back" and a joke from a colleague.

I felt a bit weird. I mean, there was some drama exactly four weeks ago. I sent a going-away email, had a going-away party. Everyone knew I'd be back, even though they didn't know how or when. It seems they were right.

Instead of venturing into the unknown and beginning on a new path, my unemployment turned into little more than an unpaid month-long vacation, ending the day after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.

This will be my fifth contract at The Gazette, my fourth as a copy editor. And the length is unknown, even to my bosses. It could be measured in weeks or months. It could last forever, or I could be back on EI benefits before you know it. I've gotten accustomed over the past five years to not knowing what's in store for the future beyond the two or three-week notice that's given on the posted schedule. Living a contract life is a sacrifice I've made in exchange for being able to work at my favourite job in my favourite city, and without a wife and kids to support it's hardly a burden to be occasionally unemployed or underemployed for short periods.

So like I have for the past few years, I'll enjoy it while I can. Particularly the awful, awful puns.

I'm a hypocrite again. All hail The Gazette.

Another unemployed journalist

Fagstein — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:48:46 +0000

Farewell, dual-display Mac G5

As of 1:30am today, I am no longer an employee of The Gazette (a division of Canwest Publishing Inc.)

It happened so long ago that most of this blog's readers probably don't remember, but I was hired as a temporary, part-time worker at The Gazette in January 2008. Back in 2005 I was picked as an intern, and stayed on for an extra year on contract before I was let go the first time. When a vacancy came up a year later because of two parental leaves, I got an email from my old boss asking me if I wanted to come back. I didn't hesitate.

The contract was supposed to last nine weeks. But it got extended, and extended again, and again. Finally, with the person I was replacing returning to the payroll, my contract wasn't renewed past Jan. 31. The nine-week contract ended Sunday night at 105 weeks plus a day.

All this to say that the split is amicable (sad for both sides, but amicable). It's not in any way related to Canwest's creditor protection filing, nor anything I did. That said, it isn't completely disconnected from the crisis facing media, and copy editing in particular (the Miami Herald yesterday looked at how many grammatical mistakes make it into a newspaper on a daily basis because of the reduced number of copy editors).

Though I'm obviously not happy about getting dropped out of my dream job, I'm grateful for the opportunity I got to live it for those two years. I want to publicly thank my colleagues, whose help, guidance and awful puns are what I will truly miss most about working there, and what I will most look forward to if I'm ever given the opportunity to work there again. I especially want to thank Assistant Managing Editor Katherine Sedgwick, who was my boss for most of my time there, and who emailed me out of the blue two years ago asking me if I wanted to come back. Her ability to judge character is obviously well above par.

As for my future, it's up to me to write it now. I have no plans to leave the city unless some irresistible opportunity shows up. And my goal is to stay in the field of journalism. But that's a tall order with everything that's happening to the news media.

But I'm not thinking too much about that yet. I didn't take a single day off while I worked at the Gazette, and so my immediate plans are to make up for that by taking it easy for a bit. My last paycheque doesn't come for a week and a half, and it'll include all the banked overtime I never ended up using. That, plus all the money I've saved up means I'm not desperate for a job right now, and I can take my time figuring out my next move. And spend more time with my family, I guess. That's what the politicians do, right?

In the meantime, my loss will probably be your gain. I'll have more time to blog about stuff. My browser is just about ready to burst with all the tabs it's got open. I hope to clear some of that out and post some of the ideas that have been circulating in my head this week.

My relationship with The Gazette also hasn't been completely severed. I plan to continue freelancing for them (notably compiling the Monday Calendar), and am exploring other opportunities, as they say.

Some people have asked if I would consider blogging full-time, monetizing this little experiment I'm running. I'd do it in a second if I thought it could be profitable, but I don't think that's feasible yet. I may change my mind on that depending on how desperate I get for cash, or how desperate people are to advertise here.

I certainly won't be holding my breath for that.

Unless I can turn holding my breath into a job.

UPDATE: I'm really feeling the love, in the comments below and on Twitter. Unfortunately, I can't trade that in for a career just yet.

Thank you for my donation

Fagstein — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:04:02 +0000

Hello Steven Faguy,

Welcome Hall Mission thanks you for you generosity. Your gift of 650.00 CAD will be processed by our accounting department and an income tax receipt will be issued shortly for any gift of $10 or more. We invite you to consult our website www.welcomehallmission.com to learn more about all the services provided by the Mission.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Cyril Morgan
Executive Director
Welcome Hall Mission

The Second Annual Fagstein Subscription Challenge is over. Thanks to everyone who participated.

From my calculations (which are not really exact science because FeedBurner's stats go up and down pretty wildly), this blog picked up 37 subscribers over those two weeks (22 of whom used Google Reader, the most popular feed reader) to bring the total to 1,163. So that means the subscriber donation total is $563 + $37 = $600, which is a suspiciously round number.

I've also decided to tack on the $14 I saved by scamming the AMT earlier this year. I figure charity is a more fitting use for the money than either the transit agency of myself.

Throw on another dollar for all you wonderful new subscribers as a bonus (except you, you know who you are), and you get $563 + $37 + $14 + $36 = $650. And that's the donation that has been made in your my name to the Welcome Hall Mission, where I understand they're totally going to just blow it on hos and bling.

The Second Annual Fagstein Subscription Challenge

Fagstein — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:30:47 +0000

I got so much money, I'm giving it awaaaaaaaay!*

Last year, I found myself in the enjoyable position of having some extra money laying around, so I decided I'd give some of it to a local charity. Being a self-centred narcissist obsessed with attracting attention, I decided to tie it to the number of people subscribing to my blog.

My eight-week contract as a part-time copy editor at the Gazette was extended a few more times, and though it could see its end after the upcoming two-year mark, I'm grateful for the chance to make all this money doing something I enjoy, so I'm doing this again.

I set up a Feedburner feed for this blog (it should be transparent to existing subscribers, so no need to change feed addresses), and it reports an astonishing 1,126 subscribers, almost three times as much as 12 months ago. Since I have about seven friends, I have no idea who most of those suckers people are, but I feel humbled by the fact they - you - like to read all the junk I post on here.

Last year, I donated $1 for each of my 402 subscribers to Dans La Rue (and, because I like round numbers, I rounded it up to $450). That was enough to get me on their mailing list and on a special pamphlet listing their few hundred largest donors. This year, because I'm cheap [come up with better excuse here], I'll donate 50 cents for each of those subscribers ($563), and add $1 for each new subscriber between now and a week before Christmas (Dec. 18, for those of you who can't count).

My chosen charity this year will be the Welcome Hall Mission, which helps the people most in need in this city.

I won't be giving you sob stories about the poor families in desperate need of assistance. I won't be showing you pictures of starving African children. I won't be interrupting your regular programming to ask you to pledge in exchange for a tote bag. Hell, I'm not even asking you to give any money yourself, I'm giving away my money for you (but if you wanted to feel less guilty about that, you could match the measly 50 cents I'm donating for you, and maybe throw on a dollar above that for the two freeloaders on either side of you).

So give it a try. Set yourself up with Google Reader (like 710, or 63% of my feed readers) or another RSS aggregator of your choice, and subscribe to this blog. If you want to unsubscribe after I've given my money away for you, that's cool.

Tell your friends if you want, but I'm not doing any marketing for this (why would I want to aid in the bleeding of my money?). I'm just doing this as a thank-you to my readers, and a way to silence my liberal guilt.

And if other fellow bloggers want to match my challenge (50 cents per existing subscriber, 1 dollar for every new one), I welcome the competition. But if you're too cheap to put your money where your blog is, I understand. Cowards.

* Eagle-eyed Fagstein readers will recognize part of this picture as the one used in this blog's header. The picture was taken for use in my freelance invoices. No, really.

pwnd.

Fagstein — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:34:05 +0000

He didn't use that term, though his message had enough unnecessary capitalization and punctuation marks that he might as well have.

I was just finishing off my shift at work on Sunday evening when I checked my email. You might think this funny, but the first indication that something was wrong was that I'd just gotten a bunch of new Twitter followers.

Figuring some witty comment of mine had been retweeted by admiring followers, I checked, and found this, followed by a few others like it. A frantic typing of my blog's address later, and I got the message that my blog had been compromised.

Supposedly I deserved this because of thing I'd said about Islam. I find that highly unlikely. In any case, rather than try contacting this young chap through the cool hacker email address he so helpfully provided, I'd just restore the website from a backup.

Except I had to get home first. A much more anxiety-filled metro ride at 11pm on a Sunday than I had anticipated. Part of me is glad I hadn't found out about this at the beginning of my shift, or I might have been completely useless and/or had a heart attack.

Warning: This story has a lot of technical jargon in it.

Once I got home, I did some investigating. I could still access my account on the hosting server. Files, including all images, were still there, as was another site on the same server. Eventually I narrowed it down to two things that I had lost: the custom WordPress theme (which controls how the blog looks and how it functions on a user-interface level) and all 2,663 posts as well as a few drafts. Other information like tags and settings were still in place. But, of course, the posts make the blog.

Restoring it should have been simple: restore the database from the latest backup and reinstall the theme.

You know those sentences that begin "what kind of moron..."? Well, I was the answer to a few of those, particularly "what kind of moron doesn't back their database up on a daily basis". I had a copy of a relatively recent stylesheet, but thanks to WordPress's innovative in-browser theme editor, the customizations I'd made bit by bit over the years were only on the server and were now gone.

As for the posts, my most recent database backup was two months old, and that would have meant a lot of lost data, especially comments.

I spent about an hour scouring the website of my web host. But SiteGround (yeah, I know there are better providers now, but they were cheap and easy at the time) doesn't have contact information unless you want to buy something, and their tech support system is designed to make it as hard as possible to waste their time with your silly emergencies. It was only when I found a section that offered backup restoration - for a price - that I could get any help.

The most important help came relatively quickly once I punched in my credit card number. The database was restored to a version from about 24 hours earlier, and the posts, comments and all the other database data came back.

As for finding out the vulnerability that caused this in the first place, they weren't too helpful, offering a form-letter sales pitch about all the things they do to secure their servers, and changing a database password in case the intruder managed to get it somehow.

Rebuilding the theme took a while, and I had to repeat some steps I'd taken before, using an old page in the Internet Archive as a guide (yes, it's been that longer than a year since I've had a significant redesign).

With a full backup sitting on my computer, I was still tweaking past 4am when he struck again. Same guy, different message. I don't even remember if it was interesting.

What followed was a bizarre, surreal cat-and-mouse game where I'd reset the blog's administrator password, only to have him reset it back again. Eventually I decided the easiest way to deal with this for the night was to lock out my WordPress installation from its own database. That put an abrupt end to it, but also made the blog inaccessible to everyone.

(To my horror, I thought that hadn't been enough. I replaced an authentication key - a string of random characters in a text file that's stored used for browser cookies - only to find it being rewritten back within seconds every time. It was only the next day that I realized that in my zeal for protectionism I had set permissions on this file to disallow writing from its owner, and I was ignoring the error messages that the file editor was giving me when I'd save.)

I eventually called it quits at about 6am, lying in bed with my laptop running out of battery power. I'd planned to sleep for a full eight hours, go to work and then deal with the issue on my day off. But I woke up four hours later and couldn't get back to sleep again, despite valiant efforts. Throwing in the towel, I opened the laptop and got back to work. Rather than try working with a potentially compromised system, I started from scratch, reinstalling a fresh version of WordPress and then working on populating it with data (50MB of text, mostly in the forms of posts and comments).

Though the posts had been restored, I kept the website inaccessible and locked down as I went to work on Monday. Better to have my blog be blank for a day than have someone potentially have free reign through my database while I'm away from my computer for 8 hours.

Word seemed to spread quickly there, and I got a lot of concerned questions from coworkers and blog fans. (Thanks everyone, by the way, nice to know people care so much about this little thing.)

After I got home, I implemented a few simple security measures (nothing my readers will notice) and changed a bunch of passwords, so hopefully this won't happen again. After reinstalling some plugins, moving the image and other data files back into their proper directories, and a few minor tweaks, it's back to its old self again.

Since I hadn't written any posts over that 24-hour data gap (it's been a busy few weeks at work, sorry), all I lost was a bit of a draft post and about a dozen comments, and even those were salvaged from elsewhere (an open browser window and email notifications, respectively). If you added a comment during the day on Sunday and it hasn't appeared, it might have been lost. So feel free to comment again.

Now, hopefully, I can get back to my life.

Well, in theory, were I to have a life to get back to, I would be doing so now. Instead, I'll do laundry and groceries.

What do I have to do to get you to stop honouring me?

Fagstein — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:47:28 +0000

The Mirror, May 14, 2009, Page 14

I give up.

Last year, I asked you specifically not to vote for me in the Mirror's Best of Montreal poll. You (or at least some of you) wilfully disobeyed me and I placed eighth on the list of best blogs.

This year, I decided to avoid the reverse psychology and say absolutely nothing about the annual readers' survey when it came out. That failed miserably, because this year I placed No. 2 (behind Midnight Poutine, who are again humble about taking the top spot) and the paper has an interview and picture for all my friends to see (it's at the bottom, below the giant head of Ted Bird).

The article by Lorraine Carpenter is complimentary (though "Fagstein" wasn't a schoolyard taunt - they really didn't need to invent a new name to make fun of me), and Rachel Granofsky's photo - well let's just say she took about a hundred shots of me and that was probably the best one (the best photos of me are the ones where part of my face is hidden).

The full list of most popular local blogs, for those interested:

Honourable mentions:

It's sad that in order to place on this list you essentially have to whore yourself out to your readers (half of the top 10 asked their readers to vote for them in this poll, though some tried to remove the evidence after the fact - I'm looking at you Mike Ward). Two others - Spacing Montreal and Pregnant Goldfish - pimped themselves last year but not this year and subsequently fell in the standings.

But hey, it's a popularity contest, and that means Céline Dion is on the list for "Most desirable woman", Jean Charest is on "best politician", Global on "best TV station", Metro on "best newspaper", 3 Amigos tops "best Mexican" and McDonald's places in multiple food categories.

Unfortunately, that means many high-quality candidates are left off the list. Among them Montreal City Weblog, Coolpolis, Patrick Lagacé, Dominic Arpin, Indyish and Urbania (feel free to nominate your favourite unhonoured blog below).

All that said, I'd still like to thank those who think so highly of this blog and voted for me (which, in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit includes myself - but only once!)

If you'll excuse me, I have to go pick up a few extra copies for my mom.

The April fish

Fagstein — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:34:27 +0000

April Fool's Day is truly a holiday for me.

Tuesday night, after getting home from a long day exploring suburbia on an expiring multi-zone transit pass, I hunkered down until 6am writing stories to be published later that morning. The idea was to fool without causing any panic or long-lasting effects.

It seemed to work. I got a few emails, particularly about my secret metro tunnel story, which seemed to be the big hit of the morning. Though I really spent most of my time on "Fagstein ME!" and its associated comment form (thank your lucky stars I confined that design to a separate page and didn't put animated GIFs all over the blog). Interesting tidbit: the posts from that page were all taken from tweets of people who follow me on the Twitter.

The posts served their purposes: they fooled a few gullible people (whose names I will keep to myself for now), and they brought a smile or two to the faces of those who got them. And nobody died or anything.

And, of course, I scored the jackpot of having a Patrick Lagacé post all about me and how awesome I am, as well as some mentions in lesser media.

The first year of this blog, the April 1st post was a very believable one about having gotten arrested during a rather extreme scavenger hunt (so much so that the organizer emailed me to apologize). Last year I sold out by joining PayPerPost and hawking products for pennies.

Now I'm being asked how I'll top this next year.

Good question.

New Fagstein personal blog

Fagstein — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:00:08 +0000

Some people have been telling me I haven't done enough personal blogging here and they don't know anything about me. It's true, I tend to keep personal matters to myself. But that changes today with the launch of my new personal blog: "Fagstein ME!"

You'll find all my personal thoughts and anecdotes there from now on.

UPDATE: I see I was outdone.

Quchjaj qoSlIj!

Fagstein — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:00:53 +0000

Yesterday was February 12, the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the -1th birthday of the 2010 Olympics, and the second birthday of this blog (the day I turned in my soul and embraced arrogance and sarcasm).

Today is February 13, Friday the 13th, 1234567890 Day, and my birthday.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, the 150th birthday of the state of Oregon, and the 20th anniversary of the Salman Rushdie fatwa.

So much to celebrate. Go ahead, have some cake.

Blog software upgrade

Fagstein — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:48:59 +0000

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which has a whole new backend and some new features for comments. One is a reply feature, which allows you to respond to specific comments (I haven't tested comment threading yet but hopefully it won't explode). The other is comment paging, which will split comments to multiple pages when the discussion gets too much (ahem).

Let me know if you see any bugs as I've had to update the template myself.

Fagstein’s 2009 suggestions

Fagstein — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 03:46:40 +0000

The fine folks at Hour asked me to provide some "suggestions" for The Man various powers-that-be for 2009, which would then be used as free holiday filler quoted in an article to come out on Christmas Day.

The piece, which puts me the bottom with the rif-raff and interest group leaders, includes pretty well verbatim what I sent them.

Specifically, that:

Gérald Tremblay and Benoît Labonté think for a few more seconds before their next project to blatantly pander to voters before next December's election
STM provide real-time updates online about metro service disruptions
Montreal police and other emergency services post their breaking news about car accidents, fires and murders online so that curious Montrealers can check for themselves what's going on instead of having to wait for one of the media outlets to take dictation from the PR guy
more Montrealers start up niche blogs about their communities and their areas of expertise
TQS and Global TV, who are third in the franco and anglo TV ratings for their local newscasts, realize that slashing budgets isn't the only answer and start experimenting by covering the news in some unique way
940 Hits die a slow, painful death for having replaced 940 News with crap
Montreal music radio stations stop desperately clinging to the lowest common denominator and take a chance by allowing their DJs some freedom in choosing what goes on the air
Montreal newspapers, radio and TV stations stop giving lip service to the Internet and put some real focus online - the Journal [de Montréal] could start by dealing with its union issues that are preventing it from launching a real website
local TV stations start creating local programming that goes beyond the evening newscast that gives us the weather, fatal car accidents and fluff every day
Montrealers stop complaining about the snow and take public transit if they're so annoyed at having to shovel out and move their cars all the time
Amir Khadir brings hard work and new ideas to the National Assembly instead of spending his time as an MNA whining about how the government isn't helping poor people enough
the next major public transit expansion project take fewer than 20 years to plan and execute.

Any you'd like to add?

Fagstein » Fagstein

You failed my subscription challenge

Related Posts

Fagstein’s Fourth Annual Subscription Challenge

Related Posts

Want to watch me talk in front of a brick wall for half an hour?

Last call for interns

Related Posts

Welcome to my new home

Related Posts

Fagstein: “En français SVP”

Related Posts

Wait a second, I’m giving money to a brewery?

Related Posts

The Third Annual Fagstein Subscription Challenge

Related Posts

The lure of the Digital Life

Related Posts

Front-seat driver

Related Posts

The new boss, same as the old boss

Related Posts

Another unemployed journalist

Related Posts

Thank you for my donation

Related Posts

The Second Annual Fagstein Subscription Challenge

Related Posts

pwnd.

Related Posts

What do I have to do to get you to stop honouring me?

Related Posts

The April fish

Related Posts

New Fagstein personal blog

Related Posts

Quchjaj qoSlIj!

Related Posts

Blog software upgrade

Related Posts

Fagstein’s 2009 suggestions

Related Posts