Every blogger probably knows about the recent Wordpress exploit which was pretty big news.  Well, because I didn’t upgrade my Wordpress installation right away Traveling Project actually fell victim to the exploit.  How did I know?

When I went to the “Users” section of the Admin Panel I noticed that it said there were two administrators for the blog.  When I checked the list it only showed my administrator account designated as an “admin”.  This was one of the symptoms of the exploit so I knew the blog had been hit.

To fix the exploit I went into the MySQL database for Traveling Project and checked the “Users” table in the database.  I compared the list of users in the table to the list of users in the Admin Panel and deleted the only user not showing in the Admin Panel.  When I refreshed the Admin Panel it changed from showing two admin users to only one admin user, so I knew that user was the culprit and the issue was fixed.  I then updated my Wordpress installation to the latest version and changed my admin password just in case.  Luckily there wasn’t any other damage or changes done to Traveling Project.  I still have to go through the old posts and rest of the blog to double check everything though.

So for anyone running Wordpress this is just a friendly reminder to update your installations to the latest version!

It’s officially 2009!  I just wanted to wish all my readers a Happy New Year and hope everyone has a successful and prosperous year in 2009!

My New Year’s resolution was to double my online income from what I made last year, but with the United States and the global economy in what seems to be a long recession it might be difficult to achieve.  It’s going to be another year of a lot of hard-work and dedication and I’m really looking forward to the challenge.  I can only hope that 2009 brings with it a better year and better economy.

So did everyone make a New Year’s resolution?  If so I’d like to hear about it.  Feel free to share your New Year’s resolutions by commenting in this post!

I know many of you are wondering why I haven’t made a post in awhile, and the reason is I had to return back to Hawaii for some personal reasons.  I’ll be in Hawaii probably over the next few months and will be blogging about travel in general, but I doubt I will get to post anything about my personal travel experiences as I will be stuck in Hawaii (although not a very bad place to be stuck on).  I hope you continue to read and support the Traveling Project blog, and I’m still looking forward to many exciting adventures and great things to come from this project.

It’s exactly 3:58am here in Guam and I’ve been tossing and turning in bed trying to catch some zZzzZz’s with no success. It’s probably because I drank that Hazelnut Iced Coffee from McDonalds at around 11:00pm tonight, which I knew I shouldn’t have done.  Ever since I first tried it three days ago I’ve been craving for it and couldn’t resist not getting one tonight! So here I am contributing another post to the “Miscellaneous Ramblings” category of the blog, brought to you by McDonald’s Premium Iced Coffee.

There has been some things I’ve been wanting to incorporate into the blog, one of them being videos. I already have the MiniDV digital camcorder, now all I have to do is find a free and decent video editing software online; so if anyone has any suggestions feel free to email me or post a comment here otherwise I’m going to be looking for one on the net. I’m going to be taking out my camcorder tomorrow (or actually today) to a popular surf spot on Guam to test out. Hopefully I’ll have some good surf footage so I can practice my video editing skills tomorrow and post a video for you guys.

I’m still debating whether it would be better to host the videos on my own server or at Youtube, but I’m heading on over to Youtube right now to open up an account so I can test it tommorrow when I have my video ready.  After that it’s off to search for a video editing software on the web!  So until then “Esta Later” (means “See You Later” in Chammorro)!

With the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China just 3 months away I started doing some research online to see if it would be possible for me to make it to the Olympics. It would be a great opportunity for me to travel to China and cover as much of the Olympics as possible for Traveling Project.

Well, within a few hours of my research I noticed that hotel prices in Beijing around the time of the Olympic Games cost between 6x to 10x as much compared to the regular rates. Hotels in Beijing that would normally cost approximately $50 per night are around $500 during the Olympics! I’m pretty sure all other types of accommodations are inflated as well during the Olympic Games. Below is a screenshot I took of the rates for one of the hotels in Beijing:

Seeing the inflated prices pretty much killed the possibility for me of going to China during the Olympics. When I started doing my research I was already hesitant of even considering traveling to China for the Olympics because of the short time frame I had to prepare for the trip, but I thought to myself, “What the heck, if the prices are reasonable then I might as well go for it”. Well they weren’t, so no Olympic Games in China for me. You can be pretty sure wherever the Olympics are going to be 4 years from now I’ll be there to cover it for Traveling Project.  You can quote me on this!

Over the last year the U.S. dollar (USD) has continued to decline when compared to other international currencies. While this may be a good thing for travelers in other countries who come to visit the United States, it’s not as good for U.S. travelers who want to visit other countries. A weak U.S. dollar means services and goods in other countries will cost us more after we exchange our United States dollar for the local currency of the country we are visiting.

Below I took a snapshot of the 5-year exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to both the Japanese yen and the Euro. You can see that in both exchange rates we get a lot less of the countries currency for exchanging one U.S. dollar. It’s not only with these two currencies either, it’s pretty much like this across the board.

As far as when the dollar will get stronger, I don’t see this happening for awhile with the current state of the United States economy. So what’s the point of this post? I guess there really wasn’t any except bringing to attention it’s not so great a time for U.S. citizens to be traveling abroad; but on the other hand, it’s a great time for international travelers to take a trip to the United States because the exchange rates are in their favor. (While looking at exchange rates online I just thought it would make an interesting post.)

I received some new gadgets in the mail today, specifically my USRobotics Internet Phone which will come in handy when I’m traveling. The total cost of the phone was just under $40.00, and  I haven’t tried it yet so can’t tell you anything about the quality of the sound.  The USB Internet phone plugs directly into a computer and using Skype’s service I can make free phone calls through the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is great to have for people that do a lot of traveling, and I’d recommend the Skype service to anyone.  I’m glad to add it to my collection of gadgets I bring with me when I travel!