The one sentence rant
On Friday my son went out onto the internet and somewhere along the way in his travels encountered a official-looking pop-up box asking him if he wanted to download and install _____ and since this box stood between him and some Nick.com game that he wanted to play he hit the yes button and moved on, not realizing that he had just changed the composition of my life because what he said yes to was an application called N-CASE by a company called 180solutions whose business motto should be “our goal is to whack your computer with as many pop-up ads as is physically possible, limited only by the speed of light” since that is exactly what this application does, making minced meat out of pop-up ad blockers which are mere mortal dilettantes playing against the evil lord of pop-up ads, N-CASE, who is in fact Satan hosting his wickedness on a server in Hell for nothing else could be so purely evil by design, so pure that once the thing is on a computer it cannot be effectively removed by deleting its files, so pure that the pop-up ads themselves contain fresh copies of the root files such that even before you can render one copy of N-CASE to the recycle bin it has already replicated itself, and, of course, with purity of purpose comes brazenness as evidenced by the fact that one of the many pop-up adds that has been slamming my computer is for a commercial pop-up ad blocker that would presumably block this very pop-up ad, but even that level of shamelessness is nothing compared to the FAQ page for N-CASE where hapless end users of this (Virus? Worm? Norton Utilities calls it Ad-ware) are actually admonished for not reading the fine print of the solicitations they encounter during their surfing sessions (I’ll be sure to pass that on to my nine-year-old son), all of which I would normally find humorous in its irony except that I am totally pissed off and spitting venom, especially since I spent the better part of my weekend (a weekend!!!) trying to defeat this scourge from my computer, unsuccessfully, I might add, and only now am I realizing that the solution lies in wiping the hard drive clean (which of course includes backing everything up, reloading software, reconfiguring the network) meaning that my work is just beginning and with this thought my anger turns to nasty fantasies of my own – I wonder how the maker of N-CASE would like it if I dropped by his house and asked his young son if his daddy might like to have the house painted for free and then have his kid mark an X by the “yes” box indicating that he has read all the fine print, which spells out my right to spray paint a large angry penis on his garage door so his neighbors will know what a prick he is; I wonder, indeed, if the head of the N-CASE design team at 180solutions might even read this blog, maybe through a Google search during a desperate but futile attempt by his PR department to find a good word being spoken about this putrid pile of zeros and ones, and what a golden opportunity that would be for me, representing all the decent and gentle and trusting folks in the world who have lost nights or weekends of their own busy lives dealing with this curse, how I would love to speak for all of us to you, Mr. N-CASE, and convey this heartfelt thought: Fuck you!
6:38:48 PM 
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