So this error pops up for people every once in a while, and I always forget to make a post about it. I often forget it's even a thing and spend hours trying to diagnose posting issues when it happens, only to remember, "Oh yeah, that's a thing."

The version of Drupal and the Database system we are currently using can't understand EMOJI! The charset doesn't allow for it.

Hey everyone,
Sorry, I've been so quiet lately. Things have been happening.

Today, we started an aggressive process to fix what I've been calling the "phantom logout issues." No one is logged out; just some part of the system serves you a "stale" logged-out page from the cache in a few small places.

We have disabled much of the caching setup to try to figure out what's going wrong, and things seem to be better, but I need more data before I can start rebuilding.

We found a house! Well, specifically, we found an apartment!

We were initially denied due to credit, but we were given insight on how to appeal and told it would likely go through.

We are still at the same hotel, and we are working hard to get on payment plans for a few things and pay off our utility bills, some of which we recently found had never been disconnected as we had requested.

So fair warning, this may be hard to read. You've been warned.

So, Hey everyone. Last time I posted a blog I told you that Aimee and I and our lil ninja were homeless and working with an agency.

for the record, that agency is DYFS/DCP&P/CPS or whatever they are called these days.

They are still paying for our hotel and helping us try to find more permanent lodging, but that has been hindered by a few facts that I alluded to but didn't directly mention.

I was alerted to a satirical article from the Onion by Wendy (Thank you Wendy) on the BigCloset Discord and it probably upset me more than it should have. Their article was a response to the NY Times's article supporting the TERF J.K. Rowling and her views on transgender individuals (titled "In Defense of J.K. Rowling") and the onion titled their article "It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of As Many Trans People as Possible." My full post/article on it is linked below, but I'm going to share with you my note/forward attached to it.

This blog is intended to be a heads up.

TLDR:

• Hardware Upgrades "soon" but actual date unknown
• Database Upgrades even sooner, within the next 2 days

After the recent downtime where I had to do way too much data recovery, we put in plans for new infrastructure upgrades and improvements with help from a QnEZ Customer.

So as the title of this blog alludes to, I'm finally close to filing my legal name change.

I managed to change my gender marker in New Jersey and I've been waiting to get my birth certificate changed till I also had my name change so that I only have to pay one fee to the state of California (where I was born).

So when I first started thinking about this blog this morning, there were many many many places I thought of going with it.

I wanted to touch on how the fact that I know I'm a girl, doesn't change me. How I will still curse, and use rude and innapropriate jokes at times (Sorry to everyone that hoped I would class up just because I started estrogen). I wanted to point out that I still plan to do paintball, play computer games, and sometimes just lie around and be a slob.

So BigCloset and surrounding is basically my full time job. I spend time buidling websites, tuning our site and others hosted by us, ressurecting sometimes forgoten projects that have been neglected over time, and try to think of ways to reduce costs, and/or increase revenue.

But like everyone else, I sometimes need to do "something else".

So as many of you know, I got really intersted in Photography (read as, fell down the photography rabbit hole).

Most recently, Cat, Myself, Amy and the NinjaBaby attendted the Atlantic City Airshow and so I figured I would share a few pictures with you.

Sorry about the outage earlier folks. The virtual boot image for one of our front-end servers recently corrupted so I pulled it out of the hunt group while I work on it. Around the same time I decided to process upgrades on the remaining 2 front ends, using the standard rolling reboot pattern that I usually do but with one server down I forgot that we were short coverage while the front ends finish their boot process and really get rolling.

So most everyone has gone home and the dust is starting to settle. We've not gone on the Honey Moon yet (that's in just under 2 weeks) but we are starting to find our slightly new routine.

For those that don't know, last Saturday (October 28th, 2017) CapturedByThePast and I officially (in both the eyes of the Church, and the state of NJ) tied the knot. It wasn't a big wedding or reception but for the most part, the people who mattered most to us were there.

The bills are paid, and for Amy (capturedbythepast) has started signing things with her new name.

Hi Everyone! I posted about helping us, and helping NinjaBaby via the POAC - Autism: Walk For A Difference already once, but with the walk only a few days away I thought I would post again.

And for those of you that are reading this after saturday (should you show up late to the party) It's NEVER too late to donate, even if the walk is over contact me and I will give you information for how to donate to POAC directly (not via our walk page). Every little bit helps (just like at BigCloset).

Just an FYI... I will be in the endzone at the #SheBelievesCup matches today in Harrison, NJ.

As a pastime and to help de-stress I have been doing sports photography for a sports blog.

If you are at all interested in Soccer/Futbol England vs USA will be televised on FOX at 5pm eastern.

When the game is over I will try doing a blog of photo highlights.

-HuGs-
-Piper

This is just an FYI. We have detected, and are currently mitigating, a small scale DDoS attack against one of our VPS host nodes. Because this VPS host currently hosts assets for YourBigCloset it could possibly affect the performance of BigCloset as we host some of our VideoAds from YourBigCloset. This is just an FYI and we don't know if it has any relation to Bigcloset.

Hey Everyone!

This is just a note to let you know that we are getting ready to release some new features and upgrades to BigCloset. Some of these upgrades have been attempted in the past and broke a lot of our custom changes to the front page.

So it is entirely possible they will break again, but I promise you I will be working just as fast as possible to get everything working again.

Unfortunately while I've tried to put off these upgrades because of the havoc they may cause, they have recently become urgent.

I have seen this before and didn't write about it, but when I ran across it today I felt it was time.

Stack Exchange is a place I go a lot for programming and systems management help. One of the sites that Stack Exchange operates is one called "Worldbuilding".

From the site:

Just an FYI to anybody out there. There is a large remote code execution exploit that affects all versions of Joomla since 1.5 that has been in the wild for about 3 days now. There are hotfixes/patches for old/outdated/non-supported versions of joomla, and a proper update for the latest version.

More detail here: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/12/remote-command-execution-vul...

-Piper

So I recently got the chance to meet Maria Bellow during the book tour for her new book "WHATEVER... Love is Love" and thought I'd share my experience. I just recently posted it to my rarely-updated WordPress blog.

-Piper

Article can be found here: http://outsidethecloset.com/index.php/news/765/arkansas-pois...