I’m sure the stories from this past weekend will begin to roll slowly out of me during the coming week – one which concerns this blog and its recent silence would be the tale of virus hell that began Friday morning. Mary Beth must have hit a contaminated page in her Thursday night surfing or opened a contaminated email– as Friday morning the system was fucked with pop ups. Even my google tool bar was no match for the onslaught. She told me later that AG Edwards had blocked all downloads, as something particularly nasty was out there. Well we got it, and when my usual lunch hour fixes did not do the trick I settled in for a weekend long war which really only concluded this am. I worked on it consistently for several hours on Friday night (while drinking Gin & Tonics out of an Atlas Mason Jar). Saturday am from my 4:30 am wake up to my 10:30 departure for the wineries was also dominated with attempted system restores, upgrading the Norton, and other widgets. Repeated cleansings with adaware and spybot revealed over 150 spy ware programs – and it took many cleanses to vent the virtual colon of this machine – the ultimate culprit seems to be Trojan horse named Sokets De Trios V1 which my kill bot program took out behind the shed and shot execution style about a half hour ago. So let’s hope that’s it. I am taking the added step of bringing in some hardware this week, I bought a D-link home network for Mary Beth and I – a hardware firewall beats a software one everyday. I’m translating my newly developed work skills into a home network for us. There is still some funk on the hard drive, as two pop ups have attempted to get out of their box in the last five minutes – so additional advice on computer colon cleansing would be welcome. Thanks –k-