Monthly Archives: September 2009

Humor

The 50 billion dollar burger

I’m still around, but far too exhausted to go through my pictures and do a write-up of my HK trip yet.  I also still have to update my “things to do in Japan” section!  Perhaps during the long weekend…

One thing I thought I’d quickly put up is a picture I took while in the office in HK (yes, I was also working in HK, not just on vacation!)

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Yes indeed, that is a 50 billion (50,000,000,000) dollar bill.  50 billion Zimbabwe dollars that is!  At first I thought it was a hoax, just some “funny money”, but a quick Google/Wikipedia search showed that it was in fact quite real, and bills even went as large as 100 trillion dollars.

100 trillion dollars
100 trillion dollars

Further links below for the curious!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/256844

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar

Experiences Published on the Go Travels

Out and about

Apologies for the lack of posting. The last few days have been thoroughly tiring and today is the first day in a while where I find myself being utterly lazy. It’s a strange, wonderful…and almost guilty feeling.

I’m in Hong Kong at the moment, on a “working vacation”. Despite the fact that there’s a typhoon (hence why I’m ensconced in my hotel room, typing this post out on my blackberry), it is remarkably relaxing to sit and watch the rain pelt outside the window.

Why am I sitting in a hotel watching the rain when I’m supposed to be on a “working” vacation? Well, I paid for my plane ticket (fairly inexpensive at 30,000 yen) and took a couple of personal days off. In addition, I visited the office yesterday and possibly this weekend to assist where I can. However, my room and board charges are covered, as are most of my meals – which would be the most expensive part of the trip anyway. I just feel that it’s very worth it, despite the typhoon, just to get away from things and relax.

More will be forthcoming later, though most pics won’t be uploaded until I get back on Monday and have access to a computer again!

Experiences

I bin haxxz0rd

A few days ago, njmatsuya.com was “hacked” by someone calling themselves “snipper-baggydad” (precise name changed just so that this individual doesn’t get more search engine hits).  Probably exploiting the fact that I hadn’t updated to the latest 2.8.4 WordPress build, they were able to reset the admin account and subsequently change my index page to what was essentially an advertisement for the hacker’s services (for what, I don’t know… security bug exploitation?).

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Whatever the case, I’m glad that I had already setup an auto-backup to take place on a weekly basis and was able to restore all my posts from that.  There are a few things I still need to fix up, but overall I think I’m in fairly decent shape.

The thing that most surprised me about this was… why me?  My blog has so little “presence” on the web – just a few friends and family are aware of its existence.  What on earth prompted a wannabe hacker to target my site?  Boredom?  Or just nothing better to do?  It just seems.. rather…a waste of the person’s time and supposed talents.  Ah well, hopefully it won’t happen again.  It certainly not the end of the world when it happens, but it is rather annoying.  At least it does show the importance of backups! 🙂