virus rampage

Yesterday I spent a lot of time on telephone conferences. I heard good news from a fellow who got a full scholarship to Baylor Law School. I watched a crime procedural show about domestic terrorism. I avoided watching the news report of a local woman who killed her child, but could not escape the report of the Wisconsin deer hunter who killed six people in a deer stand dispute. I want more good things and fewer grim things to happen. I want to watch more hopeful news and less despairing news. I am not that much of a pollyanna, but sometimes I want to focus on good things.

This morning I got an e mail from a work server for some company, suggesting that the e mail I sent to someone there was bounced back to me as having a virus. I had never sent an e mail to that person, although I know that the person is the spouse of an LJ friend, from reading that friend's journal. Thus, either my LJ friend has a virus, or both my LJ friend and I have a virus.

I decided to try out the new AOL offer to give me a free anti-virus program. I downloaded it, and it is scanning now. So far it's detected one trojan horse, a debeski, as well as a small host of adware. I'm glad to get this set up, as I'd been slow to get good anti-viral into place. The AOL product turns out to be good old McAfee, so that's a bit of protection, anyway. It's been running for some time, though, and I'm ready to it to end. I love the part when I get to obliterate the "found" viruses. I think that the software people should make something blow up real good when I hit the button to do that. Now it's concluded, and the one malicious virus and one dozen bits of adware have been consigned to nether regions. I will remember to e mail my LJ friend, as the virus located wasn't really a takeover-your-e-mail-and-send-proxy-spam virus, but instead a do-goofy-things-to-your-system virus, if my reading is an indicator, and so the e-mailing virus may be on my LJ friend's system.

My second freecycle giveaway went well, and I'm just waiting for a reply e mail to facilitate my third.
I'm wanting to "de-thing" my life a bit, although there are a few things I will acquire to replace the now-too-large set of things I have. I want a more limited collection of cooler things, which is not quite ascetic, but is my own view.

My spare room is still, at best, a work in slow progress. But I figure that Gun Barrel City wasn't built in a day. I'm tempted to take everything from the room, and then place back in only those essential tings. Then I can give away everything else on freecycle.

It's still quite rainy here, so I'll be inclined to take the "rural back way" to my office, in which I skirt the northern sections of the metroplex, going through small towns with horse farms to the eastern sections of the area where my office is located. Yesterday this route proved very quick, as contrasted to the bumper-to-bumper madness rain days create. I like the way it's full of horses and churches. The little St. Anthony Catholic Church in Wylie looks like a picture postcard.

I am pleased that I am getting my work on track. I want to work a little harder, still, to get ahead.

joining a meme with a nonchalant sah-voy-fayre (10 holiday wishes)

The latest meme to run all around the posts of others near my corner of the LiveJournal universe is holiday-themed. It's the holiday wish thing. I usually like to join a meme after its effective life is over, and then to transmute the meme into something different or more alive or dead than the meme itself. Once in a great while I try to start a meme, with indifferent but often amusing results. I am always amused, by the way, with LJ "early adopters" that imagine that they started memes that predate LiveJournal and often predate the internet. I believe that a cast of thousands larger than the Biblical movie epic "The Ten Commandments" has laid claim to being the Original Slayer who devised the "ask me anything" meme (a meme, by the way, that has its purposes but is not exactly one to boast about, and which dates back to roughly the Girl Scout Handbook of 1912 or so anyway, as do, supposedly, various earth religion rituals).

But I wish every LJ "early adopter" well, in the same way I wish kind people, trilobites and the city of Normal, Illinois well. Assuming that my sense of bashfulness at participating in this bit of public musical comedy continues to remain sedated by the thrill of knowing each of you, I assume I will someday have to listen to early adopters explain how LiveJournal is not what it used to be, many decades ago. But now, I'm a'hopin' and a'prayin' and a'wishin'for the things beneath the cut.

( The holiday wish meme )