Rant The First: Hijackers and Diaper Days
There are some people, to whom, one can never give their email address, lest they add you to the super duper carbon copy spam my entire mail box monster forward list guaranteeing, not only a life time supply of commercial spam, but that every photo collage, cancer prayer list, political activist fund raiser awareness bullet point action list, news clipping and bad joke that has entered the realm of the internet in the last 24 hours also enters your mail box.
My younger brother is not one of those people. He's been known to curse people and disparage their parentage for even thinking of adding them to their spam list. He is however, the type of person who plays it fast and loose with internet security on his home computer.
He ignores windows update icons. The virus check can go months without being run. Spy ware protection? What spyware protection? If his computer isn't infested with something really nasty then its proof that some sort of higher power exists and is looking after his well being. I never want a computer of mine to have any contact with a computer of his. I was scared to have my computer in the same houseon the off chance that a super computer virus might mutate into being on his machine an attack everything on the router.
So anyway the printer wasn't working on my brothers machine (No surprise there) and he had to use the old man's machine (aka the same machine I used to blog on). This was all right for a couple of week. Then it was not all right.
An icon had appeared on the desktop while my brother was accessing his email. He instinctively knew this was a bad thing as it was in the shape of a heart and had some pithy pharse like "need love?" or "Love match". Rather than let me or my father know, he panicked and deleted the icon, praying that nobody would notice. When after a couple minutes nothing had happened and it looked like the coast was clear he shut off the monitor and went to bed.
By the time we realized the machine was infected it was too late. The hijackers had gotten hold and there was nothing to do but do a full system restore. The thing is, there was a time when HP didn't package system restore disk, because of the hidden partition. The old man's machine dated back to this time. The partition was of no help! We needed disks. It was a three day argument with HP to get the disks on a now out of warranty machine. It was another three days shipping and handling.
I was cool with the break as at about the same time my brothers marriage was going through difficulties so I had almost full time care of my niece. I would get up in the middle of the night to feed her, then again at six in the morning when she woke up to play and eat and all that good stuff. After a day of taking care of baby girl I found out that perhaps I've been a bit too judgmental of the mommy blogs.
Your brain turns to mush when you spend your day taking care of a child who can only communicate in emotions. Cry, laugh that is about the extent of it at that age. We weren't discussing global affairs or contemplating great literature. It was all, "Did you make a stinky for uncle?" "Who's ready for a nap?" "Just give me a burp and we can get back to the bottle."
After a week of no computer it was easy to let a day slip by, then two, then three as I would sit down in the evening and find that I just didn't have the ability to write. Nothing was churning in my mind remotely funny or eccentric all I had was resentment towards the situation I was in mixed with a growing fondness for one baby girl. Resentment because it is so very hard to get past the entire concept of not being the one responsible for creating this new life yet pretty much stuck with the day to day care. The fondness comes in that one cannot help but smile at the happy baby. One can not be angry with a baby that is looking to you for comfort. (at least I'm not able to be).
And that was pretty much the first month in a nut shell. A broken computer let me slack off and it sort of snowballed. Tomorrow I'll get into Rant The Second: Bye Bye Baby. The we can return to whatever it is people expect from Shockingly Provincial.
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My younger brother is not one of those people. He's been known to curse people and disparage their parentage for even thinking of adding them to their spam list. He is however, the type of person who plays it fast and loose with internet security on his home computer.
He ignores windows update icons. The virus check can go months without being run. Spy ware protection? What spyware protection? If his computer isn't infested with something really nasty then its proof that some sort of higher power exists and is looking after his well being. I never want a computer of mine to have any contact with a computer of his. I was scared to have my computer in the same houseon the off chance that a super computer virus might mutate into being on his machine an attack everything on the router.
So anyway the printer wasn't working on my brothers machine (No surprise there) and he had to use the old man's machine (aka the same machine I used to blog on). This was all right for a couple of week. Then it was not all right.
An icon had appeared on the desktop while my brother was accessing his email. He instinctively knew this was a bad thing as it was in the shape of a heart and had some pithy pharse like "need love?" or "Love match". Rather than let me or my father know, he panicked and deleted the icon, praying that nobody would notice. When after a couple minutes nothing had happened and it looked like the coast was clear he shut off the monitor and went to bed.
By the time we realized the machine was infected it was too late. The hijackers had gotten hold and there was nothing to do but do a full system restore. The thing is, there was a time when HP didn't package system restore disk, because of the hidden partition. The old man's machine dated back to this time. The partition was of no help! We needed disks. It was a three day argument with HP to get the disks on a now out of warranty machine. It was another three days shipping and handling.
I was cool with the break as at about the same time my brothers marriage was going through difficulties so I had almost full time care of my niece. I would get up in the middle of the night to feed her, then again at six in the morning when she woke up to play and eat and all that good stuff. After a day of taking care of baby girl I found out that perhaps I've been a bit too judgmental of the mommy blogs.
Your brain turns to mush when you spend your day taking care of a child who can only communicate in emotions. Cry, laugh that is about the extent of it at that age. We weren't discussing global affairs or contemplating great literature. It was all, "Did you make a stinky for uncle?" "Who's ready for a nap?" "Just give me a burp and we can get back to the bottle."
After a week of no computer it was easy to let a day slip by, then two, then three as I would sit down in the evening and find that I just didn't have the ability to write. Nothing was churning in my mind remotely funny or eccentric all I had was resentment towards the situation I was in mixed with a growing fondness for one baby girl. Resentment because it is so very hard to get past the entire concept of not being the one responsible for creating this new life yet pretty much stuck with the day to day care. The fondness comes in that one cannot help but smile at the happy baby. One can not be angry with a baby that is looking to you for comfort. (at least I'm not able to be).
And that was pretty much the first month in a nut shell. A broken computer let me slack off and it sort of snowballed. Tomorrow I'll get into Rant The Second: Bye Bye Baby. The we can return to whatever it is people expect from Shockingly Provincial.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 12:33 AM
1 Comments:
bye bye baby? oh no! um post soon!
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