Infection

The cat juggler in me won't let this moment pass without mentioning that our little blind girl, Yin, now comes running when she hears the back door opening. She still hasn't relaxed out there on the back patio, but she hurries out the door and wanders for a long time where a couple of weeks ago she feared to tread.She has the heart of a lion.

The infection mentioned in the title is, of course, in the computer I depend on for email, job hunting, Facebooking and blogging. It reared its ugly head early Friday morning when I first fired 'er up. The worst one called itself Windows Police Pro Anti Virus. It attached itself to Internet Explorer, stopped me from going online "until I paid for the service" which involved my credit card info. If I weren't so hinky about credit card transactions on the internet- indeed if I weren't suspicious of everything on the Internet- if I were naive, in other words, I might have been bullied into complying. So I tried to delete it with the Control Panel, but guess what- the Control Panel was completely disabled as well.

Luckily, Carmen had just purchased a copy of Norton 360, which I loaded on Saturday evening after the Balloons Flailing In The Wind show. First it uninstalled AVAST!, which had done nothing about the infection after repeated attempts to root it out. Then it scanned out and fixed FOUR viral problems. Saturday night I was back online and able to load my balloon pix onto Facebook, play a word in my Scrabble game with Cyndie, check my email, post the previous Cat Juggler story, and finish the London story on thegospelofrandmcnally blog. I shut down, then on Sunday morning fired up again, only to find EVERYTHING disabled including Norton. I read my Norton booklet this morning, looking for a phone number for support. I was told that I could get my phone number from their website. Aaaaaaaaaaaugh!!!

What fixed it (for now, anyway) was to start the computer with the Norton disc in the drive and reboot starting with the Norton disc. After I did, it reported another virus caught- another virus in Anti Virus clothing. So for now I'm back in business.

No wonder my dad hates his computer. One of my pet peeves (there are so many!) is a tool that makes your work fast and easy, malfunctioning so that all of your time and energy is taken up trying to make the tool do anything useful. Technology. Whatever happened to stone knives and bear skins?