My Computer has SARS!
Slow blogging today.. I've been attacked by the bane of computer users everywhere. I've caught a virus. An especially virulent one not unlike SARS. If I turn the stereo down and listen very carefully I can hear the insipid bit of hideousness tippy-tippy-tip-toeing through my machine's brain. I can hear some of you scoffing at this notion but lo, I can hear it. And I can see it. Which is why I knew it was there in the first place, well, other than the tip-toe thing. Now when I click on anything from my browser (kicking myself for using MS's Explorer) I see the following:
And here the application sits like a pig in the proverbial mud puddle waiting for some unknown or unseen event to occur. Now I think we're all clearly in agreement regarding the issue of pop-ups but this one is particularly annoying in that nothing else can be accomplished until this window is manually closed.
Quoteth the Raven, Paranoia may destroy you, but it's looking like a fundamental strategy in the quest for ongoing survival.
I can be plenty paranoid too. And I believe I have reason to be. You see, after every keystroke that I make, an unknown packet gets sent out from my machine to the internet - somewhere. My firewall is telling me this and I am now in the process of logging them. Someone or something in the virtual "out there" is recording my keystrokes. To technophiles, this particularly insidious "virus" is known as spyware. In this case it's only recording my blog. But it could have just as well been recording my social security number or my credit card.
I don't claim to be good at very much, but one thing that I do understand is the machine. I am the machine. The machine is me. I'm an older programmer - one of those guys your mother warned you about - an assembly level programmer. There aren't many of us around these days having been replaced by younger, smarter and cheaper "tool users". I spit out the word with pith a vile. Those neophytes who don't have an idea about the inner-workings of the black-box that they call a living. Yeah, you know who you are (including you Microsoft employee weenies. Never enough time to do it right. Always enough time to do it over and over and over and over....
There's pride at stake here. The gauntlet has been thrown down. And rich pure&simple will not sleep until he has identified the perpetrator of this villainous evilness. And find it I will. At this very moment, humming contentedly away in a background process, is rich pure&simple's "snoopy-the-snooper" software. Custom built in "C", it compares images, bytes, bits and checksums of what my machine's memory should look like to that of its virus infected reality. (These files take up a fourth of my disk...!)
I ask myself what have I downloaded lately? The usual porn is in jpeg or mpeg format. Pretty innocuous unless discovered by the wife. That leaves Radio UserLand. Are the hairs on your neck standing up yet?
Rich pure&simple will ferret you evil-doers out. And when he does, you will rue the day you picked on him. Rich has his own toolbox filled with nasty little bits of his own (increasingly illegal ones) . I have no qualms about unleashing to you evildoers my own spiteful version of "howdy-back". Wanna play a game???
5:11:44 PM 
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Welcome To The Club
