And I don’t really have anything to say now, either.  Just wanted to let people know I’m still here.

I was unable to bring up either the blog or the admin page for more than 12 hours.  Obviously I’ve got it back now.  My admin tells me that things never crashed and that they got better after he bounced the server but that everything is still slower than it should be.  Investigations continue, hopefully this will be resolved shortly.  (Oh, the previous post, all in Chinese, cut and paste from Ming Pao, just ignore, it’s a test relevant to another project I’m working on.)

Since late last week, when you come here, it starts loading with the usual theme but then the background switches to a bright blue.   If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a couple of lines of text about “Account Suspended.”

As near as both my admin and I can figure it, the source of this is the theme.  The free theme came with a footer coded in hexadecimal and a warning not to edit it.  But said footer served up single line text ads for dubious sites, causing this site to get marked as spam by some companies that track that kind of thing.  The logical thing seemed to be to convert the hex to ASCII, remove the offending line of code, convert back to hex and run with that .  Which is what I did.  But that was more than a year ago so why something like this should kick in now is beyond me.  It could be something else but I can’t figure out who or what the culprit could be.

Which means I’m going to have to switch my theme.  That’s a damned time consuming task – finding a theme that I like and then adding back all the customization and widgets.   So I won’t get to it until this weekend at the earliest.

If anyone wants to recommend a theme or a site that offers free WordPress themes without serving up spam through the back door (in a manner of speaking), please do so.  Thanks for bearing with me.

In the meantime, here’s a photo of Michelle Bachmann enjoying a corn dog.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and take a guess that she swallowed.

Swallowed a piece of the corn dog.  What did you think I meant?

Email received today:

This is very weird.

I just upgraded to WordPress 3.1.   And then I took a look at my stats.

On a normal weekday, this site gets an average of 700 visitors.  My busiest day since switching over to this domain about 15 months ago received just under 1,000.

According to the stats yesterday there were 2,550.  1,476 of those came from Singapore.  Hi, Singapore!

And what did most of those people look at most?  This one, from August 2010.  1,300 searches for actress Vonnie Lui led to that post, which has one picture of her.

And I see that if one does a Google image search for Ms. Lui, I turn up in the first page of the result set.

Why is Vonnie Lui suddenly such a hot topic?   Did some genuinely popular blog link to that photo?

Is the message that I should stop writing and just be aggregating sexy shots of Hong Kong stars here?

If I could figure this out, I suppose my blog would be a lot more popular.   Over the course of the past 3 months, if I look at the most popular pages on the blog and exclude the home page, these are the top ten:

Machete – My review of the film includes two photos side-by-side of Jessica Alba showing how her nude scene was the product of CGI.  And also a picture of the very hot Avellan twins.  People are searching for both of those and seem to end up here.

HK Links – I’ve got a fairly large list of HK blogs here, not maintained as rigorously as I should.

Pay Duty to Bring Your Own iPad to China – Obvious why people would be interested in this.

Gay Marriages Will Save the Economy – From two years ago, this includes the video of the same name from Funny or Die, and when people search on that title I’m the number 3 result.  There’s also a very nice picture of Anne Hathaway and people searching for pictures of her seem to end up here.

Singapore Fail Whale – Showing how a tourism poster for Singapore seems to have copied Twitter’s famous fail whale.

Best Albums 2010 – This post ended up being in Largehearted Boy’s year end round-up of listings on this subject.

Chrissie Chau Grows a Cup Size – Everyone is always searching for more pictures of Chrissie. She’s a Facebook friend and she’s done at least one shoot at my photo studio but I’ve never met her IRL.

iPad and VPN – People outside the US want Hulu and others on their iPad.

iPhone 4 No Longer Available From Apple HK Web Site – Pretty much what it says.

Osteria Ristorante Italiano at the Holiday Inn Golden Mile – When the Holiday Inn offered me a free night in exchange for a possible review and then ended up comping me on meals as well, I wasn’t sure if it fell too far outside of what I normally cover here but gave it a shot.

So, there you have the top ten.  There is no common thread.  Sex figures in 3 of the 10 (with photos that I got from elsewhere.)  News about Apple products also make up 3 of the 10.  One post on music.  One restaurant review.  And the Singapore fail whale.

As near as I can figure it, if I want the blog to be more popular, I should be concentrating on posts that have news about Apple products combined with photos of relatively famous women showing a lot of cleavage.   Look for lots of future posts about iPhone 5 rumors combined with photos of Bar Rafaeli in a bikini.

(photo from here.)

It was just over a year ago that I made the decision to move from Google’s Blogger to my own domain.  And it was one year ago today, November 19, 2009 (a date that will live in infamy?) that the old Hongkie Town went dark and HongkieTown.com came online.   Hong Kong itself took note of this momentous anniversary by having a small earthquake in my honor.

My life has changed a lot in the past year.  I made this “move” less than three weeks after leaving my previous job.  It was something to keep me busy and at least vaguely productive while I was trying to figure out my next move.

People ask me how and why I’ve managed to keep blogging for six years.  The answer is that it’s something that I really enjoy, being able to sit down and write about (almost) anything that’s on my mind and to get some feedback on it.  I’ve made a few enemies here and there (if I didn’t, then I would probably have been doing something wrong) but even more friends.  Six years later, it’s still fun, and that’s what keeps me going.

One person deserves a special mention for helping me get this set up, keeping the site running and patiently answering all of my questions.  Peter Kaminski is a true internet pioneer – he’s the guy who came up with “Internet in a Box” for Netcom almost 20 years ago.  He was one of the founders of Kana and SocialText among others and he was my boss when he was co-founder and CTO of Yipes Communications 10 years ago. He’s one of those rare people who are incredibly smart and at the same time incredibly nice.  How did I get someone like this to be my webmaster?  I’d say “clean living” but I’d just be yanking you.

Big thanks also has to go to all the other bloggers and web sites out there that have linked back to here and even occasionally said a kind word or two about my little corner of the web.

And of course thanks to you, my readers, the faithful and the casual, and especially those of you who take time out to leave a comment every now and then.

And so, on to the second year ….

Over the past few days, my gmail inbox and spam box have been filling up with junk mail. These all appear to be auto-replies from hundreds of servers, telling me that an email I sent was not delivered. Of course I haven’t opened any of these. They’re coming in at a rate of 20-50 per hour.

This suggest several possibilities. Had I clicked on some spam email, that could have triggered an action like this. I’m assuming that even though I use web mail and have a virus protection program running on my computer, spam programmers have probably gotten sophisticated enough to the point that they can infiltrate web-based mail. Did I click on the wrong thing out of curiosity which then triggered some piece of code that confirmed my active email address to some bot that then sent out thousands of emails that appear to be from me? There are no suspect messages in my sent mail folder, but I assume that any program so sophisticated would also have taken this into account. Yet it seems unlikely.

This could be some other spam coming my way, some new worm or virus that’s just getting bulk mailed to people. After all, most people aren’t going to click on a message about v1agra or adder@ll but may click on one of these out of natural curiosity. What did I send? What did it say?

A third possibility. In my search for dentists in Manila, I have looked at about a dozen web sites. I contacted 5 of these dental clinics – most of them don’t provide an email address on their site, they have an online form to fill out and submit. Is it possible that one (or more) of these sites is bogus, set up to collect email addresses from people for spamming purposes? Or, less nefariously, is poorly administrated and infected with a virus or worm that they’re not even aware of?

Whether it’s one or more of the above or something I haven’t even thought of, I don’t like it.

There’s a ton of stuff that I want to write about – new HBO series Boardwalk Empire (pilot directed by Scorsese), new album from Neil Young, new album from Chrissie Hynde (now recording as JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys), new album from Robert Plant, new album from Underworld, the film Frozen, the new frozen yogurt shop in Sai Kung …. but just no time today!  However, all of the preceding are recommended, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  (Haven’t even gotten to new albums from John Legend & The Roots or Manic Street Preachers or OMD yet.)

Anyway, there’s some site maintenance coming up in the next couple of days and if all goes well, it should be invisible to you, but how often do these things go well?  I’m going to get switched to a new server (moving from Virginia to California, which might help a tad on latency for folks in Asia/Australia) – the old server should stay up while all of this is taking place and while I update DNS and all that good stuff.

If something goes wrong and you find you can’t reach the site, just be patient and it should be back very soon.  Or drop me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com if you want.

I’ve added a couple of quotes to the sidebar but for those of you reading this by RSS or those of you who never look at the sidebars, thought I’d call attention to ‘em:

” You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again.” Woody Allen

“One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.” Klaus Kinski