Amazon discontinued the ability to create images using their SiteStripe feature and in their infinite wisdom broke all previously created images on 12/31/23. Many blogs used this feature, including this one. Expect my archives to be a hot mess of broken book cover images until I can slowly comb through 20 years of archives to make corrections.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

What I Did On My Day Off

I had yesterday off work, and since My Man's car was in the shop, he borrowed the Batmobile to get to work. Which left me home alone, with no transportation all day. Normally an excellent time to scour the Bat Cave, do some laundry and watch Law & Order reruns. Except other than doing some cleaning, that's not what I did at all.

No I spent, literally, all day wrestling with our desktop computer and pulled off 2 Trojan horses and about 8 viruses. And the damn thing still isn't working correctly. Sigh. So it's looking like I have more wrestling ahead of me today. Crap. So annoying. I'm about ready to chuck the damn thing about the window.

If you're an pimply asshole who lives in your Mom's basement, eats your weight in microwave burritos and cooks up new computer viruses because you can't get laid? Yeah, I hope they shrivel up and fall off.

And yes. I mean that.

Of course all the wrestling with the computer did afford me the opportunity to finish up U Is For Undertow by Sue Grafton on audio book. I actually haven't "read" Grafton since high school, and she's one of those authors (like Janet Evanovich) that I pretty much listen to on audio exclusively these days. I really liked this one, a lot. There were moments in the story where I felt the author went off the beaten path, that probably would have annoyed me had I been reading ("Yeah, yeah - it's all a rich tableau. Get on with it!") but it worked for me on audio - and once again Grafton shifts points of view in this book between Kinsey and the various players that are tied in to the mystery (a 20+ year old cold case involving a kidnapping of a little girl, who was never found). A solid B+.

And now, back to wrestling with this damn computer. Oh well, at least I'm not totally screwed. We still have the Bat Cave laptop that's operational. Sigh.

11 comments:

Portia Da Costa said...

Oh no! Not you too!

Yesterday I had the day from hell with my laptop, all because of a trojan horse virus I must have picked up somewhere during my morning surf. Must have spent at least nine hours trying to sort it out.

I think all is well now, but it still worries me, as I have a full security suite and I'm pretty careful.

Apparently, according the the AVG site, the risk factor is higher than normal at the moment. :(

I found Malwarebytes Anti-Malware effective in finding and removing quite a lot of nasties.

Wendy said...

Portia: I've pretty much discovered that my anti-virus software was useless. Since this whole thing has started I've run 2 anti-virus programs and three anti-malware programs. The desktop is better, but still not operating at 100% - and I've pulled a load of junk of it.

Sooooooo annoying....

A Library Girl said...

I once watched in horror as, within seconds, a bunch of things (I found out, later, that it was at least 15 different programs) were installed on my computer without my permission. I feel your pain. I never quite got all that stuff off, so I ended up deciding that it was finally time to get a new computer anyway. My laptop had survived 5 years before those seconds of horror, so I guess it did pretty well. Good luck with your computer!

nath said...

My advice is back up everything you want and restore your computer to its initial setting - if you still can...

JamiSings said...

Viruses and spyware suck. I've lost everything more then once because of malware introduced while looking up song lyrics.

Someone at work likes to cruise numerology websites. Every time they do, our computers end up with thousands of viruses. I'm usually the one finding them too. Then the tech people have to come in.... It's a library, can't they just check out books on numerology so we'd stop getting computer viruses?

I know it's the numerology sites because this one numerology calculator always shows up on the computer along with the viruses and there's usually a numerology website URL in the address bar.

Wendy said...

Library Girl: It's been a while since we'd been hit - so we were most likely overdue. The desktop is actually a lot better, just not totally back to normal. Sigh.

Nath: It may come to that. In preparation, everything has been backed-up.

Jami: There are so many nasty, malicious web sites out there that can really fudge up a computer.

Kati said...

I swear to God, the first two times I read the Grafton title I read "U is for Underwear." And I kept thinking it was a spoof.

In fact, now that I'm thinking about it. Someone should do a spoof of Grafton titled U is for Underwear.

I'm just sayin'.

Wendy said...

Kati: After reading your comment I had to go back and reread my post. It would be just my luck to mistype the title as U Is For Underwear - LOL.

CindyS said...

Phew! It's not my own laziness then that has had my computer acting like a possessed kid spitting pea soup everywhere. Last night I did some stuff that makes the computer at least operable (programs stopped running here and there). I'm considering Nath's option but I don't have anything I need to back up the computer. I think I can buy a USB stick (?) to load everything onto and then restore to new settings.

My other problem are all the programs that load when the computer is turning on. I may as well go and wallpaper a room while waiting for the darn thing to boot up. I tried to delete programs from the start up menu but the computer won't let me.

Must have forgot to say 'Simon Says'

CindyS

Tara Marie said...

It must have been a bad week for computers, I spent two days working on mine at home and one of the priests at work accidently downloaded a worm on my work laptop--he's not allowed to touch it again.

Wendy said...

Cindy: That's largely been our problem - slow loading. At this point I think I've cleaned it up the best that I can. Maybe after the holidays I'll start wiping out programs we can live without.

Tara: If the priests aren't even safe, we're all DOOMED! LOL