I am in receipt of a message from the company that makes it possible for this site to appear on the Web that my hosting account is due for renewal next month. I’ve thought about it, and have decided to let my account lapse and therefore allow randyphillips.net to disappear.

This is pretty much a hobby – I don’t make any money off the website by posting ads or selling anything; it’s been pretty much a labor of love over the past six years that I’ve lived in Los Angeles. There have been moments of great interest, most notably when Michael Jackson was planning his big London shows and people mistook me for the Randy Phillips that is the president of his promotion company AEG Live. That traffic spiked after Jackson’s death. Nowadays, though, it seems most of the traffic is a result of searches for the Awkward Family Photos or for the Goatee Saver. I have two subscribers – my mom and my girlfriend, so I can count on them to visit when I post something new.

So this is your thirty days’ notice. Enjoy while you can, note my email address for future contact (I’m looking at you, mysterious Chevron employee), and then reminisce to your heart’s content on the Internet Archive.

The boss has a blog! Lesley Leighton, the artistic director of Los Robles Master Chorale (with which I sing) has gone and published A Musician’s View in which, in her words, she will “write occasionally about music, politics, food and anything else that comes to mind.”

First post was July 8 2009 and there have been two since. As busy a career as she has, I don’t know how she finds the time to post, but I’ll be reading when she does.

It’s been interesting to sort of remake the website over the last few days. I like the new look: a little more neutral in color, the banner pictures look great in the new design, and it’s given me a chance to clean up some of the 411 posts that I’ve made in over four years.

I’ve seen some older comments from people who are no longer in my life (but, I believe, one or two visit this site from time to time), and it makes me really miss them. I’ve also been reminded of some of the things that have happened over the years – like in November 2005 when I stopped watching TV, the several times when I tried to commute by bus, the many movies I saw in glorious theaters around town. It’s been fun to look back on it all.

This website uses WordPress as its core presentation software. Over the last few months, and especially the last week or so, www.randyphillips.net has been accessed by unknown people and rendered inoperable time and time again, apparently due to a basic vulnerability in my WordPress installation. I believe these people have been able to gain such easy access to my website code as a result of past lax security on the part of my web hosting company, which enabled them to plant a ‘back door’, allowing access without having to have any authentication credentials.

Most recently, the site was rendered inaccessible on Sunday, March 22, was restored by my web hosting company (IX Web Hosting) on Monday, attacked again later that afternoon, again restored by the hosting company, attacked again overnight Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, restored again (by me this time), and then was again targeted this morning, this time with references to a server in Latvia, registered to the Church of Scientology.

This is beyond my capabilities to remedy. IX Web Hosting has been mostly responsive in restoring the site, but appear to be unwilling or unable to reliably secure the site against intruders – they seem to be able to waltz in at will and do what they want with impunity. I’m writing this out of my frustration with WordPress for allowing such exploitation, and with IX Web Hosting, which has admitted security vulnerabilities in the recent past, the result of which is their inability to figure out how to protect my site.

I have completely deleted my current WordPress installation. I’m expecting a call from IX Web Hosting, during which I will ascertain their recommendation for one more try at a secure install. If further problems occur, I will be looking for a new hosting solution and expecting a refund for the remaining time on my hosting account.

In the meantime, the site will look quite different, and some features will be disabled for a while. Please bear with me as I traverse the morass.

I know that my postings have been scattered in the past months, and I plan to remedy that in the coming days and weeks. I appreciate those of my dear readers who have continued to check in from time to time to see what’s new.

I direct your attention to a new item in the sidebar on the right. You, dear reader, now have the opportunity to ‘subscribe’ to this blog. That means that you can automatically receive an email whenever I post a new entry to randyphillips.net, which will relieve you of the burden of surfing to the site, only to find that nothing’s changed.

Please feel free to enter your email address in the space provided and click ‘Send’. You’ll soon receive an email asking you to confirm your wishes. Simply click on the link in that email and you’ll be all set.

Your email address will be secure and not shared with anyone – period.

Thanks for your continued support.

I suppose a little narcissism is healthy, but I think I take it to the extreme. I am completely self-centered, as if the world revolves around me, although I know full well that it does not. The failures of the relationships that have meant the most to me – N, C and J, you know who you are – are the result of this delusion.

This blog feeds into that – no one gives a rat’s ass about what I think about anything. If anyone wants to keep up with me, pick up the phone.

Pam Nguyen is one of my nieces, who’s still as cute as a button even though she’s in her late twenties (okay, mid twenties). She’s just started her very own blog, the subject of which is mostly Kaitlyn, Pam and Mark’s little girl who’s also as cute as a button. Pammy’s using email to fans and friends to get some traffic – and she dropped my name in her email! Funny, though – she mentioned my website, but she didn’t include the URL.

Must have been an oversight. And I’m sure she’ll post it to her own blog as soon as possible.

In any event, I don’t want to make the same mistake, so without further ado, I give you:

The Nguyen’s

Be sure to leave a comment that you came from randyphillips.net when you visit! Way to go, Pam!

Please note a new feature under the webcam picture on the right. Twitter is a service that that allows its users to provide status reports of…well, Life, I guess. Some people use it to post a blow-by-blow description of everything they do, everyone they meet, everything they eat, by uploading short little ‘tweets’ that their adoring fans can log in and follow. I’ve been a half-hearted tweeter, never really using it to its full potential. I mean, I think it’s kinda creepy to be virtually stalked, and even more so to provide the info to my stalkers! My life is not that eventful or interesting on a moment-by-moment basis. But I thought it’d be good to use it to announce my holiday gigs this year. You can easily follow it here on the website, and if you miss any, you can click the ‘follow me’ and see past tweets. I may not update it every day, just when there’s something to announce.

Normally this here website putters along with an average of 5 to 10 hits a day. Yesterday, however, I had a record 51 hits from people searching Google and such for information regarding the fire in Porter Ranch. For some reason, though, almost all those searches were looking for information on the ‘Chatsworth Fire’. Strange, because Chatsworth is across the freeway from Porter Ranch, and there are no fires in Chatsworth – at least so far. This website got hits for ‘Chatsworth Fire’ because I posted a lot about the fire in 2005, so I rearranged things so that a Chatsworth search would pull up the post from yesterday.

51 visits in one day is a lot for me, obviously, but just as obviously comes nowhere close to the millions of hits that, say, Amazon gets every day. Still, it was nice to have all the visitors, and I hope there was something else on the site that was at least as interesting as the fire.

Wanna see what my very first website looked like? Let’s go back…waaay back…to September 2001! 

Check this out!