Tuesday, February 19, 2013

#ROW80 1ST QTR POST 15 – A POST IS A POST IS A POST


After a whole buncha starts, stops, false starts, halts due to lack of interests, fighting with bugs that are or aren’t the flu, but are raising pure hell with essential tremor and pain, I decided to just go for it, type any old damn thing and hope someone reads it and finds it somewhere in the neighborhood of diverting. If it comes anywhere near the zip code of amusing, that will well nigh be a mighty victory, I’ve felt nothing close to hilarious, lately. This makes me a grouchy person. Well, sort of.

I have discovered though, that I really am at the point where I shouldn’t eat around people. They keep getting food baths. JC is pretty tolerant and Mama Baby has all sorts of fun chasing down whatever I fling. Forks are out, although, stabbing myself in the eye wouldn’t really matter much. Even finger food can be a challenge. It’s kinda like that mechanical claw toy at the Fair where you put a nickel in the slot (I’m sure the price is like a dollar now, inflation and all) and drunkenly maneuver the claw around to crab the stuffed bunny and put it in the hopper. The good thing is, they treat me like I have Parkinson's Disease at the hospital. They gave me cough medicine that wouldn't make my tremors worse!

Well, I “see” 2 claws and my hopper is my mouth. I mostly make it, with the French fries, or the pizza rolls, or whatever. I’m no so good with soup. Steak I fixed real easy. Throw away knife and fork and revert to the Wallace method; eat with your hands. We’re fucking barbarians anyhow. My dad was grilling one night and I was watching him anxiously as he grilled my steak. It was still dripping when it was cooked to my satisfaction. “You little pagan; next time, I’m just going to warm it up under my armpit.” Yeah, that’ll work. Yum.

So, the ‘hood is being the ‘hood. The President of V.M. Ybor stopped by and gave us the newsletter for the neighborhood gardening times, watch list, break dance scheduled and ‘bangers ball. Knife fights to follow. Just kidding. Lots of stuff to do though and lots of renovating going on. The fact that the Black Market Grapevine is still alive and well and we still know who’s running around free as a bird and who’s behind bars where they belong is part of our provenance; Nebraska 33602, sort of an alternate Neighborhood Association, if you will. Mr C still rides the bus with his golf clubs and his cute little golfer togs, along with the ‘bangers and their hos. This still makes me laugh.

The fact is, it’s been rather quiet around here. Most of the excitement has been online. First, I tried to do something (it was more than 5 minutes ago, so I forget precisely what it was) but it had something to do with the margins. I had it so fucked up at one point that I had one column that was precisely one letter wide and went on for pages and pages and pages and was, well, truly unreadable. The most entertaining commentary in the world would not have kept the stoutest-hearted of fans interested.

I did what any good process-software engineer, or SME (Subject Matter Expert) would do back in my working days at IBM and Verizon would do; I hid it. Eventually, I fixed it, but then Blogger, in it utter awfulness of being a one-size-fits-nothing program of hashed together legacy code and shit written by 3rd year interns, decided that we no longer had to look at pictures, thus we were unable to up load them from our hard drives. I had just installed LifeCam5000, another one of Microshit’s fine programs that doesn’t work with any of it’s other products. So, I uninstalled, LifeCam and as I’d already looked at Google’s so-called “help” topics, I started a new one, which started a small fire storm.

I just started uploading my pics in HTML formatting, anyway. I won’t use WordPress because of the JAVA issue, which reminds me. Apple was hacked today through their JAVA security hole. JAVA is bad. Oracle is bad. Anyway, blog is resuscitated, until, I updated my RealPlayer. I did this on Sunday, after having spent the day in the ER. I have pneumonia, which is exacerbating my COPD, essential tremor and my pulse (which has been as high as 120 at rest) and apparently, my judgment. Shame on me; I take good care of my computers, even if my blogs are horrible.

RealPlayer is an Apple Product. I went ahead and let the system perform the update without running Spybot. I said “No” to all requests for Tool Bars and asinine add-ons. I was tired and irritable. Damn! I knew right away something was wrong the next morning. I immediately ran Spybot and found these 2 files, that are the most important ones in terms of doing the most damage. They are Trojans and they mutate by dropping a bit at the front of each string of code during each iteration and will get into the kernel of the operating system.





When all was said and done, after running Spybot and using some of my nuclear Malware rootkiller, I had to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. All is fine, but I’ve had to rebuild all my favorites, and that will take time. The Trojan had already started to dig into the system. No more RealPlayer for me, but I was never an Apple fan anyway. Still, ANY software that you have, any application that wants you to download as an update should be run through Spybot, BEFORE downloading. One guy let the SmitFraud go too long and even after a deep system re-format and reload, the damn thing was still on his computer. BE CAREFUL.

The reason I hate JAVA is that I updated it per my work, when I worked from home, from JAVA's OWN website. I got a Trojan horse that I chased for 3 days and I was not able to defeat it. I ended up having to re-load my entire system. That was an unbelievable pain in the ass. I didn't have half of the original drivers for the keyboard and mouse setup. There were several programs that were no longer published. I vowed then, NEVER again. If this had gone that far, I actually do have a system back up, but really? A Trojan from a huge software publishing house? It happens more often than you think. I will not run Java and I don't need it. I use one thing that might use it and that's Runescape, so I play from their client. The last thing I need are more bugs and security holes. Geek.com recommends killing JAVA.

My blog just looks as horrible as it has always looked, so it’s okay too. Anyway, this is just not much a post, topic-wise. I’ve been pretty sick and although I feel better, I still do not have much stamina and when I go out in public, I feel that inner core weakness and trembling that will translate to outer fury and rage if the wrong thing is said or done. Why that should be I don’t know, I just know that what is always there is like an animal, ready to spring, only the tethers feel frayed, worn. I am weary and until I regain my strength, it is best I keep the world at bay. It’s not the world’s fault.

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