"Look, there is no virus. You're all just victims of the over-active imagination of a pop-culture junkie loudmouth. - Dante, Clerks, the Series

 

A tiny frog, with AA battery for reference, or he’s sucking the electricity from the battery to turn himself into Megafrogatron®.

Pardon me for not posting last week - this post will explain it all . . .

It was a dark and stormy night . . . but recently every night had been dark and stormy. It's rained quite a bit in Houston these past few weeks, so the ground and air has been as damp as Ed Asner's forehead after a he ate sixteen pork chops covered in mango sauce.

The Mrs. had indicated that she had downloaded the latest version of Norton Antivirus® and updated the definition. Me? My theory has been that if you have a good firewall (I use Zone Alarm™) and don't visit any website that any sixteen year old would ever visit, you're mostly going to be okay.

Then that dreaded Trojan showed up. The Mrs. double clicked on it (hey, it said it was a greeting card) . . . and then realized her mistake. The Mrs. wisely decided at that point to download the latest version of Norton© so that she could make sure that all things electronic were hunky-dory. This was smart – plus she killed the Intraweb connection. Also smart. The double click on the link to the Trojan program? Could have been any of us.

Well, the smelly, mother's-basement-living, misanthropic hacker guy (yes, I'm generalizing, but I dare you to prove me wrong) had rigged the computer that if Norton™ tried to update - wham - he'd cause the computer to automatically reboot. He even set it up so if I hit Norton©'s website that the machine would transform into a robot pterodactyl and peck at my eyes.

I tried to update Norton©’s, then began the un-install of what Norton™ had gasped between reboots was "Trojan.Peacomm.b". I thought that was a hopelessly silly name, and after further investigation, it really wasn't what my computer had at all, but rather a whole slew of related malicious critters living on my hard drive – not unlike the hanger’s on at Britney’s house.

It took me about ten straight hours to find what had happened to the computer. This was as much fun as watching an all night marathon of “Golden Girls Go to Evening Shade”, plus I missed a night's sleep and the writing of last week’s post. If you received some recent spam about Viagra™, well, I'm sorry. It was our computer.

Did I mention that the smelly hacker was mean?

Note to self - you can really, really, really mess up your computer if you don't save your settings before you start messing with them.

Other note to self - you can really, really, really save a lot of hassle if you have recovery disks made and ready.

Well, I did mess the system up (with the help of the virus) and Sony™ (thankfully) had a copy of the recovery disk. We changed all our passwords, deleted an account or two, and, in general, lowered our exposure to the Intratubes a bit. I still haven’t fixed up The Mrs.’ machine – the last 10 hour session with it made me as skittish as Paris Hilton in church in thinking about messing with it.

I’ll put fixing it on the list.

Sadly, The Mrs. has taken a liking to my machine. Specifically, she’s taken a liking to the latest version of Microsoft© Word™ that I’ve recently installed. The Mrs. thinks it’s spiffy.

I suppose that’s okay, as long as The Mrs. doesn’t invite Ed Asner over. He’d drip mango pork chop juice all over the keyboard.