*hugs* Thanks everyone for your support.

Well, my fight with Netbunch is getting me nowhere. They finally canceled my account after I wrote them and informed them that I would be reporting them to the BBB.

I am apparently reached the end of what I can do with them. In my first letter, I informed them that I had written and specifically requested that my account be canceled. Three e-mails later, I’m told that they’re “sorry” (bullshit) that my account was auto-billed. Did I tell them to cancel my account? *head-desk* YES, you idiot! I told you three months ago to cancel my account! I wrote them back and informed them that yes, it had, gave the support ticket number, and the person’s name who responded.

And that is it. They stopped responding. I swear, this is shades of AOL.

I suppose it’s officially time to begin my dialogue with the BBB and my credit card. yay. really. i’m really, super excited. …*sigh* I hate phone menus…

I probably should just buckle down and get an account with Paypal so I can begin accepting donations.

I suppose I should expect this, if you do a web search on Netbunch or Webhostplus and you get tons of results from people like me who have been burned by them. That’s probably one of the reasons they keep changing names every year or so. (My first suspicion being that they’re doing it to try and hide from the BBB/Attourney General due to the number of complaints they keep getting.)

Either way, avoid Netbunch / Webhostplus / Mesopia like the plague. If they buy out your hosting company, find a new one QUICK. They aren’t a good (or particularly safe) company to go with.

*growls* Remember three months ago when I moved my server? Remember how I said I canceled my services with that old host?

Guess what? I just checked my old Jinxandjedi yahoo account where I used for my old domain’s contact e-mail. I was thinking I could safely let it die. When they answered my cancelation e-mail, I removed all my credit card and contact information. They didn’t need it anymore.

Instead, I checked it this afternoon and guess what I discovered?

Note the date that I indicate with the blue arrow; they’ve been charging our credit card for three months. What’s more, they charged me $12 for renewing my domain which they don’t even have anymore! All my credit card information was back on the account, even though I deleted it. But for some strange reason they had my address mostly correct too and I didn’t even give it to them!!! (They had me listed as #17; I’m at #47)

As soon as I calm down I’m writing a complaint to the BBB and seeing if the bank can refuse any and all future charges from those assholes. Originally, I wasn’t even going to bother, but now I’m absolutely livid!

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I’ll be glad when this semester is over, but I’m not looking forward to next semester either. I’m going to have about $400 – $500 worth of books I’ll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I’d really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I’m probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.