If I Didn't Know Better, I'd Think this Post Was About Computers

'...What's the difference between Protestants and Christians?'

-sebastian

Everything is breaking all the time.

My winter coat's zipper is completely jammed, so I've had to improvise every morning for two weeks. My clarinet has a bad cold, possibly pneumonia, and barely wheezes through the clarion register. My guitar -- my beautiful Ambrosine -- is in the hospital being repaired. And, of course, my own mental health is at stake, for my computer has taken ill as well.

Worms. Nasty ones, too; desert makers forty feet long. When I first noticed something was going wrong, it was just a matter of sluggishness, pop-ups, no pictures loading in explorer, and impromptu shutdowns. Also, none of my antivirus software worked, and system restore was blocked. Unsurprisingly. Later on, it was more a question of the cpu slowing to a complete halt as soon as the desktop loaded. I must have restarted fifty times in the last three days.

Our techie friend is out of town, and I know very little about anything computer-related, but I've been doing my best to get everything back in shape. Sort of. The fact that I am typing this on my own computer is a testimony to my many hours of lost sleep. The fact that I am typing this in Chrome is a testimony to the fact that the worm is smarter than I am.

In the process of the fighting of the good fight against computer viruses, I backed up all my files and some of my music, erased all the minor programs I could think of, and combed the internet hunting for new bug-killing freeware. Thanks to above techie friend, I was able to find a trial version of Kaspersky, a Russian scanner. It saved my worthless ass, but it's hard to take its language seriously:

Most antivirus programs: usually do stuff to viruses like 'quarantine', 'clear', 'delete'
Kaspersky: NEUTRALIZE.

I suppose it's a genius. It restarts the computer so it can eliminate viruses before they kick in. Still, the war has not yet been won. It could be awhile longer before I'm back with a real post, although I may have something small up here soon.

Lucky for you I don't act on all my impulses.