Administrative note: The blog is recovering from malware.

On February 25, 2012May 24, 2018 By StevenIn Life At Home9 Comments

This blog is clean of malware. However, that wasn’t the case last night, so if you saw weird behavior when visiting before today, that may be why. And if you see weird behavior moving forward, please leave a comment and let me know! Here’s what happened:

Last night, while I was preparing the bus post, I noticed that sometimes when I went to the main site, I would get redirected to some spammy rr.nu domain. I thought it was a fluke the first time it happened, but then it happened two more times. Around this time, one of my friends was encountering Google warning them away from the blog, like so:

It turns out that at some point in the last few days, stevenglassman.de was hit by malware. I believe most of the changes were from February 21st, but it might have been earlier. I’m not certain of the point of entry, but a lot of things needed to be updated, so it might have been as simple as php injection. When I noticed this, I did a reinstall of all the core WordPress files, and I also reinstalled the theme that I’m using. This killed off most of the badness, but I was still seeing spammy rr.nu links at the bottom of every page. In addition, something was generating a .logs directory which contained a list of the spammy links. When I deleted that directory, it came right back.

Ultimately, I did all of the following-

Deleted all of the themes except the one I’m using.
Removed ALL of the plugins except for Akismet (anti-spam) and Jetpack (statistics).
Removed Jetpack and installed it fresh.
Changed my MySQL password.
Changed my web user password.
Changed the blog password.
Disabled FTP for my web user entirely. (I never use it anyway; I rsync or scp files.)
Went through individual files all over the server and pulled out obfuscated base64 code that was designed to cause more mayhem.
Didn’t get a lot of sleep.

By the time all of this was done, the spam link finally stopped appearing at the bottom of every page on the site. The .logs directory stopped being regenerated. I haven’t lost any of my posts, and everything else seems to be intact. However, I’ll be re-setting lots of tiny things over the next week or so, reinstalling Wordbooker and lj-xp (my crossposting plugins), and so forth.

On the plus side, this clean start gives me the opportunity (I choose to call it an opportunity) to work on some design elements of the blog that I’ve been procrastinating.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging about life in Regensburg, Germany.

Another One Rides The Bus

On February 25, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany6 Comments

When I first found out that I would be moving to Germany, I was convinced I would need a car here. One of my co-workers spent a few months here doing pretty much the same job that I’m doing now, and he rented a car for the duration.

The more I researched the area and the more I learned about life in Regensburg, the more I realized that I didn’t want a car here if I could avoid it. While I do have an International Driving Permit, I didn’t want the expense. To own a car here means insurance, a probable car payment, winter tires, fuel with a hefty per-liter price- no gallons here. On top of that, I would need a new set of skills- there are road signs here that I’m not familiar with. The traffic patterns are different. The stop lights are set before the intersection instead of across it, so that’s another thing to get used to.

I could have had my car shipped over here, but that would have cost thousands of dollars for a vehicle that’s already six years old. Her mileage is low, but I don’t know if the cold would have agreed with a car that spent its entire life in Florida.

For those rare occasions that I might need a car for other reasons, there are always options. When I got my bed from Ikea back in November, I rented a van at an hourly rate with which to transport the bed and a co-worker did the driving. If I find a need for a car for a longer journey, there are many car rental places around such as Europcar.

glassman_honda_civic — Goodbye, little blue friend.

When I left the country, I handed off my car keys to my brother and gave him instructions to offload the car. I’m going to be here for a few years and it made more sense to sell the car than to try to store it. This week, my car was successfully sold back in Florida. I’m sad to see the Civic go, but it’s better this way. I last drove her on November 11th, the morning that I left the United States.

That’s also the last time that I’ve driven anything though, and for the most part I don’t miss it. For the last three months, I’ve been a regular rider of public transportation. I’ll talk more about the awesomeness that is the German train system in a future post; for now I just want to talk bus riding.

Before I took the bus for the first time, I nearly had an aneurysm trying to read the bus schedule. The way the schedules are formatted is extremely easy to read, but only after someone explains it to you. Without that explanation, it’s easily the most confusing document I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t had a headache already today, go look at http://www.rvv.de/Linie-9-Haltestellenfahrplan-ab-11.12.2011.d1757.pdf. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

In my time here, I feel like I’ve already become a veteran bus rider. I’ve run full-tilt for a bus, only to see it pull away from the curb at the last minute. I’ve been on a bus where someone very close smells like they just ran a marathon through a sewer. Oh, the joys of public transportation.

Those frustrations are small, though, compared to the benefits. The bus system here is excellent and I take that to and from work every weekday. I’ve also learned to find my way around to a number of great specialty stores for home goods and the like. The first time I was on the bus ride home from work and I saw the blue flashing lights of a traffic snarl, I just leaned back, sighed happily, and turned to the next page on my Kindle book.

Each month, I go to an automated machine to get my monthly ticket. I pay a fee of roughly fifty Euros a month for unlimited rides within zones one and two. Zone one is the city center of Regensburg, and zone two contains several of the surrounding towns, including Neutraubling, where the office is located. That’s a small amount of money compared to what I paid back in Florida for gasoline, insurance, and so forth.

There’s several different types of vehicles in use here- some of the more frequented lines like the 1 and the 11 to the University have double-length buses with an accordion thing between the sections. It’s really pretty astonishing. There are certain buses that are red and seem to be affixed to specific lines, and others that are yellow- I’m not sure if there’s a specific reason for that, or if the colors represent anything other than the region the bus travels through.

I’ve also found that the bus lines have their own personalities. It’s hard to describe, but they really do. I even have a favorite bus line, although that might change over time; I’ve only actually been on five or six of the different lines. There are three that will take me to work. There’s one line that runs hourly to Ikea- pretty handy if you want to go eat meatballs on a Saturday afternoon.

I just realized that I wrote an entire post about buses without including a picture of a bus. Here’s one of those nifty double-length accordion buses I was talking about to make up for that.

Thud!

On February 18, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

This picture makes me laugh so much, for one reason:

The presence of the warning sign on the glass partition- “Caution- Glass!” – means that somebody, probably several somebodies, have already walked into it. Heck, I almost walked into it myself, and I saw the sign.

It’s a bad, bad day to be a necktie.

On February 16, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany4 Comments

Just before the end of January, I was in the grocery store with a friend when we passed an aisle filled with costumes- the exact same sorts of costume gear that you would normally see in a Target or a Walgreens just before Halloween. Naturally, I asked what the deal was.

It turns out that there’s another holiday here that involves dressing up. It’s called Fasching, and it’s this month. Fasching is Carnival, a.k.a. the local version of Mardi Gras, and it happens roughly seven weeks before Easter. It spans several different days, with a variety of different events.

The Thursday before Ash Wednesday is known as “Weiberfastnacht”, or “Women’s carnival night”. On this day tradition dictates that women are allowed to cut off the tie of any man within reach. The women are also allowed to kiss any man they like, according to some versions of tradition. (Not one to waste an opportunity, I bought four cheap neckties. And some ChapStick.)

The following Monday is known as Rosenmontag (Rose Monday). On Rosenmontag there are various street processions involving lots of costumes and carnival floats. Faschingsdienstag (Carnival Tuesday) is the last day of Fasching and when most of the festivities happen. Faschingsdienstag is not an official public holiday in Bavaria, but it’s still celebrated.

The traditional food of Carnival season is Krapfen, or donuts. They’re available in every bakery, in all sorts of different flavors. I’ve heard of varieties containing sweets such as vanilla, marmelade, or chocolate.

According to legend, it used to be customary to choose a man to be the “sacred king” of the tribe for a year. The method of choosing the sacred king was the King’s Cake. A coin or bean would be placed in the cake before baking and whoever got the slice with the coin was the chosen one. Another version of the King’s Cake story says that it’s just a king for a day scenario. I haven’t found any reference works that I trust to be completely authoritative so far, but I’ve seen numerous references indicating that the King’s Cake idea has evolved into the donuts that we’re familiar with today.

My favorite part of this, so far,is the costumes though. So far today, I’ve only seen three people dressed in costume so far, and two of them worked in the bakery where I get my morning pretzel. I’ve also seen posters for Kinder-Fasching, which is basically for the kids. (Kinder = children.) I suspect I’ll see a bunch more costumes after work, but I expect to see more when I go out this evening for my usual bi-weekly Stammtisch. The word doesn’t translate easily to English, but a stammtisch is just a meeting group. This particular stammtisch is the Regensburg English Stammtisch, which is a group that meets every other Thursday to drink and chat in English. I try not to miss it because it’s a heap of fun.

Naturally, I’ll have another tie on for that part of my evening.

Grocery Shopping Revisited: Two more things.

On February 12, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn Life In Germany3 Comments

I mentioned in my first grocery store post back in December that I would probably never use the shopping carts here because I can only buy what I can carry home. That’s not always true, though- I have friends and co-workers with cars, and I’ve had the opportunity to push one of these four wheeled chaos engines through the grocery store. The verdict: I have no idea how anyone can keep these things going straight. I usually wind up pushing it vaguely sideways.

There’s much more to them than I realized at first, though. Since I wasn’t planning on using them, I didn’t look very closely. I did notice that there was never a stray cart in a random place in the parking lot though, and now I know why: They’re chained together. In order to release a cart, you have to either use a one Euro coin or a plastic disk that you’ve paid for. This is a pretty ingenious way to make sure that carts find their way back to the right place.

There will probably be a post some time in the near future about how Germans deal with waste, trash, and recycling. The garbage sorting is pretty impressive, and I don’t think I can remember a time in my life that I have been more aware of how much (or how little) trash I produce. One of the coolest examples of this is the bottle return system.

I also have a tremendous fascination for the bottle return. I was not aware of this process when I did the first grocery post back in December, but many plastic drink bottles (and some glass bottles) have a pfandflasche, or bottle deposit. When they do, you’ll see a little decal on them with a curved arrow to suggest returning the bottles. At the Kaufland, my usual grocery stop, there’s a guy who takes the bottles. In the Globus and Aldi locations, however, there’s a machine that will take the bottle in, spin it to see the label, scan it, and crunch it up. (This has led to an astounding number of “crunch crunch crunch” jokes.) I love feeding these machines. When you’re finished, they’ll give you a receipt for the amount of credit you get back, which you then have to take to a cash register to get back.