I beg to differ.

Since Corey was born, I’ve struggled to find the time and inclination to read a book. Indeed, I’ve started reading a book by Janny Wurts lent to me by SBW, but I’ve yet to finish it, despite having started reading it well before Corey was born, and he was 11 months old this week.

Up to now. I have just finished Sue Townsend’s latest Adrian Mole instalment: “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years”, on my iPhone.

Yes, you read that right. ON my iPhone!

I’ve lusted after an iPad for a while since JBW told me he’d loved reading a book on his. I’m not prepared to fork out for one though as I have a relatively new personal laptop, which does pretty much the same things as an iPad (although perhaps quite as fancily).

I then contemplated buying an Amazon Kindle; considerably cheaper than an iPad.

Imagine my delight then when I discovered that there’s an Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone, and free to boot!

I downloaded it and downloaded a few free classic books, but it wasn’t really doing anything for me.

I was out and about one day and a little bored, so I looked through the Amazon Kindle book catalogue on my iPhone and came across “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years” for just over £3. I’ve read all the Adrian Mole books released so far and I knew a new one had not long been released and I wanted to read it.

So. I purchased it and downloaded it onto the iPhone. And started reading it. And finished it in less than two weeks! Not bad going for someone who has taken over a year to read an actual book!

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years” on my iPhone. It didn’t take long to get used to it, and the font and size is very similar to a printed book, albeit each “page” is much shorter.

The best thing of all is that it’s so easy to “get out your book” and read as I almost always have my iPhone with me. So if I’m twiddling my thumbs or standing on a tube train, out comes the iPhone and off I go into another world.

Still think that technology is the harbinger of doom for the trusty old book? I certainly don’t.

Time to start reading Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, on my iPhone!

You will have undoubtedly noticed that I am actually blogging! Cripes!

The simple reason for this revelation is the iPhone. I was particularly delighted to see that WordPress had developed an app, and that the app allowed access and postings to a multitude of blogs.

That means moblogging has taken on a whole new meaning, and as I’m more likely to post while commuting or bored, it has become so easy to do.

So here I am. Let’s see if I can keep this up …

Some of you will be aware that I have deliberated long and hard over the last month or so as to whether I should get a Blackberry or iPhone.

What finally “clinched the deal” as they say, was the following three facts:

- I already have a Blackberry at work;
- the majority were urging me to get the iPhone So there was considerable peer pressure *cough*; and
- why not?! I have always made decisions about new mobile phones based on the £, so this time, I decided to push the boat out, yay me!

So there you have it, a proud new owner of the Apple iPhone. Three cheers: hip hip … oh alright then, it really isn’t that much of a big deal!

If you don’t like it, don’t worry; I’ll probably change it again soon anyway.

If you’re interested, it’s the corporateid theme from TopWPThemes.

I’ve also upgraded the WordPress installation to version 2.5, which is a marked improvement on previous versions. It’s also more secure. So hopefully, hackers will be kept at bay from now on.

I’ll try and post a bit more regularly from now on. Bear with me while I re-insert all the features that were available previously.

Here’s a pic:

It’s SO nice to be back to normal!

It was a work laptop, and I should hopefully have a new replacement this week. Until then, I’m relying on other people’s laptops and those laptops that wait around for some lovely new owner to pick them up, brush the dust off and give them a reason to live again!

I probably won’t post to North of the Stupid Line too much over the next week or so. If you’re going to miss my witticisms, comment and tell me/us!

This code was the culprit:

[html][/html]

Somehow, a hacker managed to access 3,500 FTP accounts on Dreamhost servers (including mine), and editing index.* pages to include the above code. When this started happening with the websites on my server, I googled “m-gallery.org”, which only found 3 results, none of which made sense. Now, there are 76 results, which illustrates how the problem spread quickly.

There’s a good summary of the whole shebang here that explains how the hack worked.

If you’ve been infected as a result of accessing one of my blogs or websites, then I do apologise. You will be pleased to know that I *think* I have now managed to obliterate this nasty little bastard from my server. If you spot it anywhere, give us a shout.

Oh, I suppose I should tell you how to get rid of it if you’ve been infected. Basically, if you’re running a WordPress installation you just need to replace the index.php in the root of the installation, wp-admin and in the theme folder that you’re using with either a fresh copy or a copy that you may have backed up on your system. If it’s a simple website with HTML pages, just replace index.html with a copy you may have backed up on your system.

Those of you who are that bothered about NotSL and my other websites to check it out every few hours, you may have noticed that my server suffered a few teething problems over the last one or two days, the reason being an outage as a result of Dreamhost replacing some cables at their office. For more details (if you’re really *that* interested!) go here.

As a result of this, some of the features on my server and Dreamhost generally aren’t quite working at 100% capacity, so if you experience problems with any of my websites, you know why!

To be honest, this was rather frustrating, as I was looking forward to working on deaflawyers.org yesterday! I also need to work on a few other websites, but the problem is time, or lack of it!