…and see my new design!

Hello friends,

If you are reading in Google Reader right now or any form of RSS feed I highly recommend you click on over and check out my new blog design. I haven’t changed my design in almost three years since I first switched from blogger to wordpress and I figured it was time for an update! My wonderful and extremely talented friend Kyla from Freckled Nest Design has worked tirelessly on my design over the past couple of months and I am so, so happy with the finished product! She’s also done some much-needed behind the scenes work so my blog should run more smoothly and be a more user-friendly experience for everyone. If you are having any problems with viewing the new design properly please let me know!

I can’t recommend Kyla enough for blog design. I almost died of happiness over her extremely long and well-detailed emails. She was SO easy, quick and efficient to work with and she nailed what I wanted right on the head. Thank you Kyla!!!

…on the life front!

I’m in Ottawa all week doing training for work so my posts will be few and far between along with my comments once again. I hope you’ll all bear with me over the next month as I adjust to my new job and schedule! I really miss blogging regularly but, as I’m sure many of you know, the first few weeks at a new job can be very mentally demanding. I promise I’m not going anywhere and I’ll be back on a more regular schedule soon!

I will have a training update and a wedding update coming your way this week and hopefully a post on what I’m getting up to in Ottawa as I’ll be spending some time with my good friend Anais while here running and going to hot yoga!

See you soon! As always, thank you for reading. I hope you like the new look as much as I do! XO

I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years weekend! Mine was pretty good and laidback. New Years Eve is not a big thing for us at all so we just stayed in and relaxed. We made homemade sushi, had a couple apple martini’s and watched movies. Lovely!

Today is my last day of vacation and I’m determined to be productive and get organized and ready to go back to work tomorrow! The good news is I’m really looking forward to going back to work and getting back to a schedule. 10 days off is a long time for someone like me who craves structure and routine.

***

Anyways, this blog post is not about that, it’s about the lovely news that I woke up to on Friday morning; my email and Facebook had been hacked.

I think we’ve all got those hacked emails before, I know have. But mine seemed to have been hacked on a colossal scale. Not only did they email over 600 email contacts that I’ve collected over the past several years they also emailed all my Facebook friends with an email address.

Then to top it all off they deleted every single email in my gmail folders from the last 3+ years. Every single wedding email. Every single email related to my freelance work. Everything.

After lots of investigation and reading through google forums and filling out complaints with Facebook I think I’ve *kind of* figured out ways I could have done things differently. Considering what a huge loss this was for me I thought I’d share those things with my readers so no-one goes through the same thing!

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1. Have a different password for your facebook and your email

OK, this might be obvious, but I did not know this so I was using the same email address AND password to both. I have reason to believe the hacker originally gained access to my facebook account, likely through one of the many third party apps I’ve allowed to access my facebook information, and then tried using the information on my email and lucked out. This was definitely an actual person and not a virus and the IP address google tracked led to somewhere in Nigeria.

2. Use the two-step verification process gmail offers

When using this verification process in order to log into your gmail from any computer other than your regular one you need to enter your password AND a verification code that google texts to your phone. You can then choose to save that verification code on the computer for 30 days or not. If I had had this set-up before the hacker never would have got onto my email in the first place. Instructions for setting this up can be found here. It’s super simple!

3. Back-up your emails

I lost thousands of emails on Friday. Most of them didn’t matter but some of them did. At the time it felt devastating to lose so much information. This wouldn’t have been a problem if my emails were backed up. There are ways to back it up to your harddrive, others also suggested making a separate, ‘secret’ email address that you forward important emails to and there are several third party web services like Backupify you can use.

***

Last Friday was a really bad day for me. I was getting phone calls and my parents were getting phone calls wondering if I really was stuck in Spain. My @replies on Twitter and texts were blowing up letting me know I’d been hacked and I spent several hours in front of my computer trying to recover the lost emails. I’m STILL locked out of my Facebook account three days later, which is starting to get quite annoying. I wish they’d get back to me already!

However, in hindsight, the lost emails really AREN’T that big of a deal. And now I get to start 2012 with a nice, cleaned out inbox Trying to find the silver lining here!

If anyone else has any advice to avoid being hacked please leave it in the comments section!

Good morning! Happy Sunday! I wanted to blog last night but I was dead on my feet after spending over 12 hours at Universal Studios!

But let’s rewind! Where I last left off Eric and I were looking for a place to go for appies and drinks since we were still very much on West Coast time and hungry at 9 PM. We ended up at Bahama Breeze, which despite being a very expensive cab ride, was really awesome!

We had a plethora of drinks and appies and just relaxed, chatted and enjoyed one anothers company. It was such a fun night and made Eric and I realize we need to make an effort to go on more date nights like this – with no phones! – when we’re at home.

We crashed into bed around midnight on Friday hoping that a full nights sleep would get us fully on east coast time finally!

Saturday morning we were tired and dragging our feet. We actually just missed the 8:45 shuttle to Universal but it came back so we were able to catch the second one. Before doing anything else we beelined it back to Harry Potter World for one last magical visit and to go on the Forbidden Journey ride one more time. This time we only waited about 40 minutes

We sadly said our goodbyes to HP and headed over to spend the day at Universal!

Universal was really fun, and a lot less crowded than HP! We went on a bunch of rides while we there: Terminator, The Simpsons, Men in Black, Jaws, Disaster, Revenge of the Mummy and The Simpsons again.

It was a really fun day!

Finally around 3:00 PM we broke for lunch and had some very questionable, and very expensive, fried fish. At least our restaurant had a nice view of the park!

Universal was really cool and had a bunch of little “neighbourhoods” that were fun to wander through!

I loved the Christmas decorations

After going on The Simpsons ride for the second time (that ride was SO fun, up there with the Forbidden Journey as a must-do ride!) we actually got caricatures drawn of us. After sitting there for 35 minutes and paying $40 I was slightly disappointed because he’d drawn me with blonde hair.

However, I don’t have a photo to show you because I forgot it at the restaurant last night!! I was SO mad at myself but it turns out they called in the middle of the night to let me know they found it, so Eric and I are going back there today to pick it up and I’ll share a photo in the next post!

Anyways, after the Simpson ride and getting our photo drawn it was time to meet Stephany for dinner!

We met at the Hard Rock Cafe, which was really good. It’s also the biggest Hard Rock Cafe in the world – little tidbit for you  Stephany was awesome and we had so much fun chatting about blogging, books and other things!

After we said goodbye to Stephany Eric and I wandered along CityWalk one more time and considered going for a drink, but then we decided we were just too tired and headed back to the hotel for sleep!

***

Today is our last day in Orlando and we’re planning on going back to CityWalk to get our caricature, and then taking a cab to this giant flea market and tonight we have tickets for Medieval Times.

Our trip has been amazing and so, so fun but also has ended up costing a lot more than we budgeted for. I never realized that we would have to take a cab EVERYWHERE we went since nothing is walkable nor is there good public transportation in this city. We paid $33 to go 8 miles in a cab on Friday night! By the end of the trip we’ll have easily spent over $200 on cab fares which seems nuts to me since we’ve taken advantage of the free shuttle every chance we could and also took a shared shuttle ride to and from the airport to save a bit of money.

Eating has also been really, really expensive and it’s almost impossible to eat cheaply. I’m not complaining, just things we didn’t think about when planning the trip! I also thought three days here would feel really short but it’s actually been perfect and is kind of similar to Vegas in that respect. Everything is just so go-go-go and expensive we are ready to go home after three days!

Anyways, those are just some of my observations from the trip so far. See you tonight or tomorrow with one last recap