Tired . . . and pissed off.

Tired . . . and pissed off.

05.20.04 (8:47 am)   [edit]
I have a cold again - one of the hazards of being both a parent and of working with the public all day long. I also didn't get much sleep last night because I was up late . . . really late.

I was trying to restore my home computer to some semblance of functionality after unsuccessfully trying to remove an extremely nasty, self-downloading and self-replicating piece of malware called "vx2 abetterinternet." This browser-hijacking trojan managed to download itself onto my system and won't allow itself to be deleted or removed by my usual anti-virus or anti-spyware programs. Following conflicting advice from several web forums, I managed to screw things up so badly during my removal attempts that my computer would only start in "safe mode" and not very well in that. :evil:

I had to do a system recovery, which [b]thankfully[/b] didn't wipe out all of my personal files, including 2 years of pictures of my family and more MP3's than I should probably admit to owning. Tonight, I'll have to redo all of my custom settings and reinstall several programs and drivers. :x

And still, after all that grief, that piece of shit file is still on my computer, still hijacking my browser, causing popups and downloading more crap onto my system. :evil:

At least now, after doing more research this morning at work, I think I know how to safely remove it and prevent it from coming back. This time though, I'm going to burn copies of all my important files first, so if the worst does happen and I need to wipe my system clean to fix things, then I won't risk losing everything like I stupidly did last night. :oops:

[b]I'd like to meet the shithead who designed this malignant garbage and released it onto the web and then bash his head in with a baseball bat.[/b] :twisted:

I'm not normally a violent person, but I really equate this kind of malicious, invading software with a burglary attempt on my household. It's legal to defend your home from an intruder, why should your computer be any different.

In any case, I'd really like to see whoever is responsible for this to be prosecuted under the same laws that apply to hackers and virus creators. Just because it's legitimate to create pop-up ads, or adware in general, doesn't make it right to make something that can install itself without permission on a system.

Okay. Now that's out of the way, I can report that nothing else really important has happened since my last blog. The hamster problems have been fixed and things are going okay both at home and at work - except that I've been really too busy to blog and too busy to read blogs.

So to all my blogging friends out there, I apologize for being absent for a while. Unfortunately, I don't see myself having much free time for me to blog or read blogs in near future. For the next several weeks, it seems as though every moment of my time is spoken for and I'm not as free to blog at work as I once was. In fact, during my last hiatus, I debated again about quitting the blogosphere altogether, but I haven't come to a final decision yet. I'm not saying that because I want people to tell me not to quit, but because I just fell like it's just becoming more of a chore than the pleasure it once was. And it's not final that I'm going to stop. Who knows? Working with the public is "like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get," and the right one might set me off on a rant to end all rants. :wink: