Happy birthday to my best friend!

Today's my best friend's birthday. We have been friends since we met in summer school when I had just turned sixteen years old. He is 1.5 months older than I am.

He came out to me as being gay when we were in university. I still remember that conversation over the phone. He didn't know how I'd feel I was good with it.

We caught up today when I texted him to say hi and wish him a great day. I didn't realize that his Facebook account was hacked and he had created a new account. He didn't know that my Instagram account had got hacked, either. We both weren't following each other, which is funny when I look at things now.

We sent a bunch of texts today. It was nice catching up. We hope to meet over a meal or something soon. It has been way too long!

My hacked account ordeal and its recovery

A few Saturdays ago, one of my social media accounts got hacked. The following Sunday, I recovered it for five minutes. I saw this account get hacked again.

Recovering an account should not be difficult. It is.

My hacker changed my e-mail address and password. I had no choice but to do a video selfie, which compares video me against photos and videos of me on my feed.

It took me nine times to get my first confirmation. Ridiculous. I'm me. I have not had reconstructive surgery!

When you change your password to recover your account, you should get logged out of all app instances. Nope, this hacker was still logged in, and changed my e-mail, password, and handle.

Two-way authentication was on. It complicated things.

David versus Goliath.

I got help from my savvy contact. We planned for a few days. Our plan went down last night - successfully!

My video selfie was approved on the first try. You need great lighting. It helped!

Hacker had an IP address from Italy. My best shot was to recover in the wee hours Italy time. It worked.

When you do recover your account, do these steps:
1. Change your password again. You do it once before you access your recovered account. Do it again.
2. Change your e-mail account.
3. Turn on two-way authentication and make sure that you have it go to at least a text message.

I'm thankful to be back. This particular social medium had e-mails saying that you can click a link to secure your account when an unauthorized change occurs goes to FAQs. Not impressed. Do better.

I'm back!

Hello! It has been a while.

I spent the last ten days in the Twin Cities. I ended up not posting a thing.

I should get back to writing about having one of my social media accounts hacked. A local business with cool owners reached out to me yesterday when I returned. Their business account got hacked and wanted to know how I got mine back.

Getting you account hacked is scary and frustrating. More later.

Have a great day!

Hacked social account

One of my social media accounts got hacked on Saturday afternoon. It has been a pain trying to recover it. The hacker decided to change my e-mail address.

I was briefly able to log on Sunday morning after going through a verification process. You would think that when you change your password that this application on all devices would log you off everything. Nope, it didn't.

This hacker's location is in Italy. He (for the sake of using a pronoun) was still logged in after my password change. He changed my account handle and e-mail address. I got hacked again.

I got notification of these changes. There was a link in the message to click if this change wasn't done by me, but it goes to an FAQ page. It doesn't revert the changes at all.

Useless.

I'm still working on getting my account back. It has been a royal pain, to say the least.

I have more to say, but I'll save it for later. Let's just say that it's frustrating.

Facebook and my ex breaking his hiatus on it

I don't do a whole lot on my Facebook account. I have moved around over the years, so it's easy to keep in touch with people. I wish friends happy birthday, check in here and there, and that's it.

The ex has a Facebook account. He stopped using it back in 2017. Unfortunately, I got a notification that he has posted two new photos.

The photos aren't exciting. However, they either have some sort of hidden meaning or he's simply ready to be social again.

His profile pic is a car from the 70's. What's interesting is that the licence plate is from Texas. It's where we last were together before he broke up with me.

His cover photo is a lighthouse. It's a beacon of light when it's foggy. Maybe he is seeing the light. I also love lighthouses, but I don't know if he knows that I do.

Perhaps I'm reading into this photos more than I should. It's just weird that he has resurrected his Facebook account after a four-year hiatus.

I have removed him as a contact on Skype. Perhaps it's time to do the same on Facebook.

Starting a conversation with a condescending tone doesn't get far with me

It's interesting dealing with various departments and people to get things done. Well, sort of done.

Let's start with getting my retirement savings accounts (RRSPs) transferred from one bank to another. I need to open two new accounts with my primary bank. One is a regular RRSP account. The other one is a locked-in RRSP account where the money can't be touched until I retire.

I had to deal with another financial representative who called me after I was done work. The conversation did not start off well.

"Do you know that you have a locked-in retirement (LIRA) account?" he asked.

"Yes. I don't appreciate your condescending tone," I replied.

The day before, I had sent two completed forms back to my bank. One was for my regular RRSP account. The other for the LIRA. I knew exactly what I was doing. He had all forms in his position. He was just too lazy to look at them. 

I did a questionnaire a couple of days ago to determine what type of LIRA account would suit my needs. He did the same thing again, but did a cross reference between my answers over the phone and a previous one from a week ago for my regular RRSP account. I didn't get it. Wouldn't you want the get the results for the LIRA questionnaire that I did recently, as they are for this new LIRA account? It didn't make a whole lot of sense.

I was civil. I did say that we should get things over with by doing this questionnaire and thanked him at the end. He did apologize for being condescending. I think he let up when he asked me how much was in my LIRA and I told him right down to the cents.

I have more to unleash about my manager and our human resources department. I'll save that for tomorrow.

Comments on my blog - part 3

Here's hoping that I don't create an ongoing series of updates pertaining to my blog and its comments settings. I never thought that I needed to clamp down on spam. It was my first time doing so. I've had this blog for fifteen years, which is crazy!

To make a long story shorter, I changed my blog's comment permission setting from everyone to those who are followers of my blog. My understanding was that if you are deemed a Blogger follower of my blog, you could continue to comment on posts.

Well, so much for how things should be. I was touched when I saw Can't Comment on Cutiebootie's Blog and Message to Toronto as blog post titles. It was touching that they reached out to let me know that they couldn't add comments. I appreciate you!

When tons of spam messages flooded my blog, I initially changed the setting to allow only readers with a Google account to leave comments. I suppose that Blogger wasn't fast enough to clamp down. Two days after I had made the change, I was still getting spam messages. I decided to change it to only followers who could comment. The spam finally ceased.

On Sunday, I decided to change my blog setting back to comments accepted when you log in with your Google account. I left it that way for seven hours. No spam. Yay!

I then let Fondles and Michael know about my change. I'm happy that comments work for one of them. Here's hoping that it works for the other and everyone who has a Google account.

I will keep it on this setting for a bit. If it's still quiet on the spam front, I will consider giving everyone access to commenting.

It has been such a relaxing long weekend that I have decided to defer my self-spanking to this upcoming weekend.

An update on getting spam as comments

Currently, if you are a follower of my blog, you can leave comments. Even if you have a Blogger account, you must be following my blog to post comments on here. I just did a test and can confirm.

I am sorry about this change. My intent since I started my blog was to have anyone who doesn't have anything offensive to say comment on my posts. Since these spam messages are numerous, I had no choice but to change my settings. Otherwise, I would have removed the comments section altogether, which would have made me miserable.

So, if you have a Blogger account and want to post messages here, please follow my blog. The Follow button is at the bottom right of my page.

Ever since I made this change, the spamming is gone. It's nice that things are quiet again.

Down the road, I'll give changing my settings back and see how things go.

Bonus pay coming soon to my chequing account

On Monday, it was confirmed that my bonus pay will be deposited at the end of the month. I am excited!

I have a loan that will be completely paid off at either the end of May or early June. I am putting this bonus pay towards paying off a credit card. I will be in decent financial shape come the summer.

It's nice to look ahead and see how bright my financial situation will be. Yay!