Homer and the Any Key. I borrowed this from the Sony website–I think they’re too busy with other matters to pay attention to me.

Hi! did ya miss me?

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I did a crazy nutty thing. I used my Windows 8 laptop to download a piece of freeware that would allow me to convert sound files from .wav to .mp3. This was a task that I was undertaking for my radio gig, if you must know. The site was supposedly/ostensibly a ‘safe’ download site belonging to a relatively reputable company. My Sophos and McAfee anti-virus programs raised no initial objections.

Then downloading began.

One of my pathetic anti-virus programs blinked several times to say it had blocked a potentially harmful website. I knew I was in trouble not long afterwards  when I restarted and got literally dozens of pop-up ads on my browser pages. Both my installed anti-virus programs were powerless against whatever viruses had been dumped onto my box. Google ‘rootkit’. Multiple installation of other anti-malware programs did nothing. There were also some absolutely hilarious conversations with the folks at Geek Squad, many of whom should give up computing and go back to working with live chickens at the circus.

I’m going to update all this with a complete story of the Windows 8 Computer Massacre, complete with full orchestration and five part harmony and other stuff. One of the memes of the apocalypse going around is that we’re suffering a huge and ever-diminishing returns on technology. This will all be in a couple days. In the meantime, a lot has happened in three weeks that I couldn’t post because my machine with all its links and passwords was dead. Let’s all try and catch up, shall we?

Missed you!