Snowpocalypse II: The Second Coming!

“OH SWEET MOTHER OF JESUS, NOOOOOOO!”

Snowing again. Not sticking, but we’re preparing for immediate evacuation, not to mention the Rapture.

Snowpocalypse!

Four inches of snow in some parts of Atlanta last night.

Four inches.

Dear God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

Depending on where you live that may not sound like much, but the operative part of that first line was not “four inches” but “in Atlanta”. Not Philadelphia. Not New York. Not Fargo. Atlanta. Let me put this in perspective for you:
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His Name was Logan

My Cocker Spaniel… a permanent fixture in my home for 15 years… died last night. It wasn’t unexpected for me, but my wife (who has been recovering from an extended illness) didn’t know he was on his way out until last night. Thankfully she got a chance to say goodbye. Hopefully she’ll understand and not hate me for keeping it a secret. I don’t think dogs are capable of hate, but if they are, I hope Logan understood that there was nothing I could do for him. He was increasingly erratic and annoying in his later years, but he was our friend.

That’s about all I can say right now, other than that this has turned out to be a pretty shitty week.

What’s this popup? Oh hell… OH HELL!

Since Saturday night I’ve been involved in an epic battle against the trojan that installed itself on my machine. Well… it didn’t install ITSELF, I was a bit too quick while surfing the web; my hands were faster than my brain and I clicked on the WRONG DAMN THING…

…next thing I know, my machine is literally going insane right before my eyes. My anti-malware app gives a brief warning and then promptly shits itself. To Death. Certain security websites are unreachable. I get repeated authentic-seeming windows popups telling me that I have been infected with every species of malware known to man. Some random new “anti-malware” program attempts to install itself every five minutes. Every few seconds, the (authentic-seeming) Windows Security Center screen opens in an attempt to lure me into buying more security software. The machine locks up every time I try to boot into safe mode.

And, while I’m busy googling and virus scanning… my computer shuts down. No, it didn’t crash… it SHUT DOWN.

So.

Yeah.

The rest of the weekend and the last two days were interesting. I got my computer to at least ACT as if it were under my control, and it passes scans from the handful of malware-scanners I’ve thrown at it since. Of course, I can’t be 100% sure it’s clean until I try a few more things, and even then I can only be about 90% sure, so I may end up re-installing the OS.

Needless to say, not a lot of writing got done over the past few days. Not a lot of writing will get done in the NEXT few days, and the weekend may be devoted to port scanning and other attempts to break into my own machine just to see if there are any holes still open.

Fortunately, no data was lost YET. I’ll get back to writing when I can trust the machine that I write on.

Back from Vacation

The wife and I are back from 7 days in Hawaii. I’m not a beach person, but she had a good time so that means I had a good time, too. Right now we’re both dealing with jetlag… and I’m flying out to Maine bright and early tomorrow morning. And I DO mean early! I’ll be there for two solid weeks; won’t even be coming home on the weekend like I normally do.

Obviously there was no new content today. Barring some sort of emergency, there will be a new page of “The Forgotten” on Wednesday. There *might* be one on Friday; that depends on how work and jetlag go over the next couple of days.

Thanks for your patience.