My first day alone in weeks:) Although I have really enjoyed spending time with family, friends, and getting to know new people, today was a well deserved respite from the over-stimulation I have been receiving as of late. I was really looking forward to today, a day I planned to spend relaxing with the dogs, doing a couple secret shops, cleaning up the house I have been neglecting, and perhaps starting a new book, the Alchemist, which Gummy Bear left me before we said our goodbyes at the airport this morning. I did manage to get most of those things done - the dogs are clean, house is decent, secret shop went well, and the dogs and I went for a glorious walk before the sun had a chance to burn through the marine layer, but, as it often does, a rusty wrench got thrown into my path and I spent the last 2 hours trying to recover from its damaging blow.

Computer viruses?? Pff… They are SO 1999, or so I thought… It all started the other day with my Gmail messages looking strange. All of them appeared to be from the same sender named “undefined”. Hmm… Strange, I do not remember conversing with someone of that particular surname. In response to this somewhat troublesome development, I did what any computer genius does, ignored the problem and used a different application to read my emails, which worked like a charm.

Then, at approximately 5:30 pm, everything started to go downhill. I could go to certain web pages and ping certain web pages, but not others. It was as though all of a sudden Worthington (the laptop) decided that he did not want to visit sites like Startup Fiance and Yahoo, he only wanted to use Google, and display everything as Google search results, no matter what I typed in the address bar; this happened in both browsers. Worthington’s newfound selectivity baffled me, and again, I did what any computer genius would do, I called Butterfinger. A network engineer in his former life, I figured he would be able to get to the bottom of the problem in no time, explain to me why I could visit some sites and not others, and I was confident that this little blip in the health of my dearest laptop would be just that, a momentary inconvenience.

After me spending a good 30 minutes fumbling through the command screen and logging into the router, he determined that my only real option, and best bet, was to restart the router, which would have been a simple proposition if it were sitting right next to me. Unfortunately this is not the case in our new arrangement, and our router spends its days locked behind closed doors, tucked away in the closet of our roommate. I had to get the router (lovingly named Infectious Viruses) him, but what did I do? Of course Butterfinger knew what to do, trip all of the circuits and reset the router, which was what I did.

About an hour has elapsed now since my first recognition of the problem, and despite my most fervent desire for the issue to dissipate, restarting the router did not do anything. This was now much more than a simple router issue, and it became apparent that we were dealing with an ITD (Internet Transmitted Disease). I am still not sure how I contracted the nasty illness, and without getting into too much detail about my internet habits, I will suffice it to say that I am not THAT lonely. Perhaps I got it from one of my favorite free TV sites (I have been addicted to Kitchen Nightmares in Butterfinger’s absence), or perhaps I was just the unwitting prey for a bored 13 year old down the street; I will never know.

Now, 2 and 1/2 hours later, the ITD seems to be contained after a thorough cleaning. I used my secret weapon, SpyBot Search & Destroy to wipe out any of the pesky vermin residing inside the wondrous Worthington, and we are back up and running. So, I guess this is the part where the public service announcement comes in, “Internet Transmitted Diseases are out there, and they are very real. Protect yourself out there on the internets by using the proper protection.”

July 10th, 2008 | The Office, Natural Disasters