"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

...not dead and karma
2001-02-10 - 01:53:40

For the last two weeks or so I've noticed that my internet explore would crash every hour or so. I figured I had a virus, but viruscan didn't find any. It a brief moment, fluttering moment of inspiration, I decided to update my virus dat files. Sure enough the buggers were nine, yes NINE, months old. I got the new files, ran the scanner and found several virii on my computer. Now at this point, I need to back up a bit and add the spice that makes this story very ironic and funny, atleast to me.

About a day before I got the new dat files, I ran into Amy online. If you recall, Amy was the poor soul I had friends with benifits type situtaion and decided to opt out of the relationship. We left on decent terms, more ending the fooling around than saying no more friends. But, without the fooling around we had nothing in common. Anyway, she asked me where I had been and sorts of things. Thinking quickly and not wanting to say the honest truth, I fabricated a long sad story about my computer getting a virus and totally crashing. I had to have my brother send me up a cd to reinstall windows and I had to redownload alot of programs, all of this taking up the nearly 2 and half weeks since we had last spoken. We spoke for a bit and then I said I was off to finish downloading the rest of the programs and wished her well with the new man she had found.

Back to the main story... One virus choose to infect some winsock.dll file. I couldn't clean this file, but I was able to clean several other files and decided, with this winsock.dll virus thing put into viruscan 'quarentine' to reboot. On the reboot, it caught the winsock virus again and again I could not clean it, but it recommended I delete the file, so I did. Apparently .dll files are very imporant files. Once deleted I could not get back on the internet and my computer began to freeze. It would run for about five minutes and then freeze. On reboots it would tell me three or four progarms had errors starting and I realized things were generally bad. I'm going to skip alot of what happened next, because it just makes this story longer and generally makes me look dumber.

The ending of this little sorrid tale comes at about 1am on Thursday morning. I was very frustrated with the state of affairs and help I had recieved. In a flash of sheer stupidity I decided I would have to just reformat and start all over. So, I booted my hunk of junk into ms dos mode and formated C:. As my drive was formatting, I realized I didn't have any windows cds to reinstall windows with. I blinked several times as I heard the drive clearing everything and sigh. I went to bed and decided to sleep of my moment of stunning stupidity.

I woke up and sure enough I know had a box that was very, very good at saying: THIS IS NOT A SYSTEM DISK.

It was very good at little else, but I think it has great potential as a paper weight. I decided after work to go do my taxes and see what my refund will be. I figured I was willing to spend 600 bucks on a decent computer and would chip in whatever my refund was and get something nice for once. My last two computers, just for a point of reference, were a p1 133mhz running windows 98 with 8 (though Im told it HAD to be 16) RAM and a 233mhz celeron with 32 RAM running windows 98, neither very impressive. So, I did my taxes and went off to the computer store where I met a very nice man who was very glad to see me. I fear I tend to fall into the 'impluse buyer' category when I decide I want something. I decided I was going to buy a new computer and BY GOD that means tonight I am buying one. Like I said he was a very nice man and had little trouble talking me into my new hot rod of a computer, atleast compared to my past hunks. Perhaps it's as good as he says. I liked it for two reasons, one it came with a 10/100 nic card so I dont have to install one and two it came with a cdr and a regular cd drive. I have TWO coffee cup trays, this makes me feel manly. The rest of the specs are (I will probably kick myself for buying as expensive/fast a computer as this since I know I don't need it): 933mhz pIII, 128 RAM, windows ME, 40 gig harddrive (thats ALOT of porn and MP3's, well just kiddin on the porn), 40x cd and a cdr.

Anyway, I am still alive and now off to download programs I like to use...funny, isnt this EXACTLY what I told Amy happened to me? Karma sure kicked my ass this time around.