As some of you may know by now, yesterday this website has been literally wiped out by a hacker.  The site itself wasn’t attacked, but my webmaster’s computer was hacked!  Whoever got into his computer let loose some kind of virus that was able to somehow retrieve and duplicate all his passwords and gain access to every website he’s a member of.  As far as investigators are able to determine, the perpetrator is somewhere in southeast Asia.  Good luck finding and prosecuting the suspects, whoever they may be.

But, the really bad news is that the hacker got into the server of VotersOpinion.com and wiped out all my blogs!!  I’ve spent all of last night combing through thousands of emails to try to retrieve as many as possible.  So far, I’ve uncovered 132 of them (can you believe I’ve written that many?  I can’t!), but I’ve lost about 35, most of which were published between October of 2010 and January of 2011.  That totally sucks but I learned a valuable lesson – keep copies of every important thing you write!

The good news is that the website is up and running again, even though David still has to tweak the format and do other technical stuff that’s way above my pay grade.  I’ll leave all that to him and get back to the business of writing.  This morning I went back and re-posted all the important blogs since the May 17th election in case any of you care to refer to them.  In time, I might re-publish the rest of them, but this is time consuming and painstaking work, and frankly, I’m just not in the mood.  I still have a migraine from last night.

It would have been the story of century (in my mind, anyway) if I could have blamed this mess on Myron Rosner or Phyllis Smith.  As vindictive and devious as Myron is, I’m sure if he had thought of it and could figure out a way to do it, he probably would have loved to wipe out all my columns.  In fact, if he were aware of this situation, he’d probably be salivating at the mere thought that all the “evidence” of his alleged campaign finance reporting fraud has been lost forever.  Hate to disappoint you, Myron, but I’ve recovered every last column on you!  “Rats!  Foiled again!”

As for Phyllis, well, she’s just not that smart.  Since she probably can’t even figure out how to turn on a computer, much less use one, I’m betting she’d have no clue what we’re even talking about here.  Ironically, that wouldn’t stop her from talking about it if she could.  Not having a clue about the subject at hand never stopped her from commenting about it before.  Why stop now?  Just in case Phyllis has heard about my website woes and thinks I’ve been muzzled, I’ve got two words for her:  Fat Chance.  I’m back in business, so keep up the squawking, Phyllis.  I still have my sign:

It’ll take a lot more than a stinkin’ hacker from southeast Asia to take me out of the game.  The Blog must go on!

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”