Michael Karikas
 
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MY BALROG
09/14/2004 + 22:29

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Blinding rage, shoelaces
Tunes The Shins - Young Pilgrims

This is a catchy song.

Yesterday was the debut of some skull-shoelaces I bought over the weekend. I'm not particularly fond of my work clothes, so I thought adding these skull laces was a nice way to say 'Yeah, I'm themotherfuckingleaddeveloper, what up?'

These look like newspaper from far away


So, the past month or so I've noticed that my net connection was a little flakey. "Whatever," I tells myself, "it's probably my roommate using her share of my 1.5MB downstream." I've also had to powercycle my router/modem about once a week, which is a little suspicious.

The past few days have been totally ridiculous. I had a 1 in 5 chance of actually connecting to any given website, and an even smaller chance of that page loading with all its images, css, and javascript intact and functional. Cross-browser. I finally decided that maybe I should try a couple other computers of mine out, see if they're having any problems - nope, just my main one was affected! So, I did a virus scan and a spyware scan, and was shocked and pissed to see that I did indeed have legit spyware on my precious 'puter. The most noticable were MSView and IGetNet.

Not happy. I take care in keeping my main computer (Phoenix Dark) free from sin. But, it's been running the same copy of Windows XP (yes, it's true) for about a year, and the boot drive hasn't been formatted in over two. I used to make it a habit to do both every 9 months or so, but apparently have gotten lax. I don't run and P2P stuff on here or go to any troublesome websites (that's reserved for my Celery computer), and all my software is legit with two minor exceptions. So, what's the problem?

Allll Microsoft. Most of my clients and their audiences use IE exclusively, so I generally browse with IE (although I've been using Firefox more). Also, I use Outlook for my email, though I think I really need to begin using Thunderbird (heck, I hooked my Dad up with Thunderbird and I don't even use it). C'mon though, it wasn't very stable this time last year. Also, I am using Windows XP, which apparently is so flawed at security that apparently viewing a jpeg is now, for the first time I'm aware of, a potential security risk.

In addition to those wrongs I was also running for a few months without a firewall, really because I thought one was included on my router until I realized that I never had to configure anything =P.

So the point with all this stuff is that I'm-a-hoppin' mad at Microsoft and this situation I've been put into. Being moderately active in making sure nothing bad goes on my computer has, for the first time, failed! The internet seems to be a wild battleground now, and it's far too easy to be in the crossfire. So, this weekend I plan to wipe the mother out and start anew. Still with Windows, yes, but with no Outlook, no IE unless necessary for work/particular sites, and every bloody service pack they've got. Even ZoneAlarm or a close cousin, maybe. Maybe ethereal if I've got some time to kill at random points in time...

Lastly on this note -- I'm not quite ready to jump ship and go to Linux for sweet salvation. I have a computer down here that I was installing Gentoo on about a month ago, but then the bloody cpu fan died. After last night's discovery I had to take a proactive approach; newEgg's going to hook me up, probably by Friday knowing them.

Yay, got that out. Aside from that, things are good, though I need to clean my apartment.
****************************************
And then you said:
Jason, 9-15-2004 with $6.56
You know, I meant to say how sweet your shoelaces were yesterday.



because 'blog' is so cliché and balrog has better special moves