-

Downtime: That Sought After and That Forced Upon


Work pressures continue to ratchet up, as I find myself not only working against a ridiculously strong current with no assist and a wholly inadequate appreciation of the miracles I've been accomplishing, but I'm also finding myself forced to make a huge decision I can't go into here. At the moment, there's simply too little breathing room, and I need to have some time to myself.

Add to this, that sometime on Friday a particularly insidious, virtual disease worked its way onto my computer at home, and as of my first attempt to get back online on Saturday (and many subsequent attempts) I've been unable to. We've dealt with similar things before, but this is obstinate. That this is the first time I've run into this with our current system reminds me that as bad as Microsoft's Millennium was in many respects, its data nazi successor, XP, is in some ways worse. I seem to recall diagnosing these problems was much easier under earlier operating systems.

At first it just seemed that something had reached in and either plugged up a com port, or redirected my modem -- and that may still prove to be the case at least as regards net access. However, it causes my system to run at a ludicrously slow speed at times - leading me to believe that something is monopolizing the processor - and running my anti-virus scan only leads to it reaching a point where it simply... stalls out and goes no farther. I'm only reaching this by finding a different system to access from. If I have the patience for it tonight I'll make a renewed attack, and at least write down the odd "...out of query..." and other, numbered errors I've been running into.


I want a tool, not a new and frustrating hobby. In a better universe, those who create and distribute malicious viruses, not to mention data miners, spyware and hijackware, would be strung up by their genitalia using piano wire and hooks, as the situation requires. Maybe we can just turn them over to some of the special interrogators who've been having such a fun time in Iraq recently.

So, if I'm quiet for several days at a time again you'll have a few possibilities as to what's keeping me occupied and/or away.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
Insurance Company-Driven Propaganda Storm It's almost heartening to see them go to these lengths - they're getting a little scared - though I worry how many wingnut media outlets will reference the report as if it's substantive..? ( From the Washington Post ) The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report by Ezra Klein In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results.&qu
Read more

The Tease of Things I Don't Need

-
Image
     The lure of things we don't need, could easily find greater needs to apply the cash to, and which we may not even have the space for, is a very First(ish) World Problem, to be sure.        HasLabs is a special projects division of Hasbro, that occasionally pitches large and/or elaborate items - oversized figures and/or vehicles - essentially crowdfunding each project. They set the price, and a funding line - the number of people who need to pledge to buy one (or more -- up to five) at the announced price, then collect the names and information of interested parties for a period of 45 days. Once the number of pledged buys hits the target, the project is greenlit.      A couple years ago there was a HasLabs special build project aiming to fund a production run for an oversized (32" tall), elaborately-articulated action figure of Marvel comics' Devourer of Worlds: Galactus. Back on July 18, 2021 I posted a piece on the project, which at the time was just two days
Read more

Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

-
Image
      Even though I've already watched the pair of debut episodes of Frasier (see next paragraph), and this week's Star Trek: Lower Decks (which continues to do a stellar job of mining  previous Trek series for character, episode and extraterrestrial culture lore and deftly applying them at breakneck speeds), I still have multiple things I'm looking forward to catching up on, including new eps of Gen V (Amazon Prime), Loki (Disney+), and both Archer and Welcome to Wrexham (both on Hulu), along with the first two episodes of a final six for Doom Patrol over on Max... and that's just off the top of my head, so getting this week's streaming post out of the way brings those one step closer for me.       I've watched the two episodes of the new Frasier series that arrived on Paramount+ this week, and while it was a mixed bag it was good to see the character back, with him attempting to move into his third act by returning to Boston, where we first met the ch
Read more