11:31 p.m. - 2004-01-26
Hackers
Yesterday was Robbie Burns birthday - piping in the Haggis (sheep's guts and spices) and poetry served for dinner. About a week ago, the Scots community here prepared for the celebration in the traditional way. They were down at our city's river bank tossing bags of haggis across the river to people waiting on the other side. Fortunately, for those waiting to receive their "gifts", the river is quite wide and few actually made it to the other side. The event was one that recalled the days when family delivered hot lunch (haggis) to the working members of the clan, by tossing it across the river or other intervening barriers.
Last week it was still quite warm, but yesterday and today were frigid, so celebrations were quite subdued. The largest water main in the city exploded early yesterday morning meaning nearly 100,000 people in our community went without any water for a few hours. The worst of it though is that it flooded the main road out of this area. So much so, that emergency services had to rescue some motorists trapped by the flood by breaking out their river rescue boat - that in -45 C/F weather. The repairs on the water main will require most of the rest of the week, meaning that the one main road will stay closed for the duration. Great, compromised driving conditions even moreso than usual.
I've been having really disturbing dreams the past week or so. They all have either my ex, local gang members, or both trying to defraud and assault me. I watch them planning, without their realizing. Their machinations intended to defraud me of a great deal of money are very elaborate and seem to encompass every aspect of my life and my relationships. The money they intend to steal is money I don't have to begin with, by the way. Identity theft? So far in the dreams, I have been able to thwart both their plans to steal or assault and to protect my sons as well, but I have woken up in a panic several times feeling that I can't hold them off forever. Terrible feeling. The last instance when that happened, the only thing between them succeeding in getting to me was a flimsy internal door. I woke up just as they were breaking it down. The fear I felt threw me out of the dream. Not good - the nightmares.
I got a response from the technical support team for my PC security services today. Their read of the diagnostic test results I sent them was that there was spyware installed on my computer. They provided a link to some freeware - Spybot - that will remove it for you. Spybot. I had to run the entire program three times before all of the spyware was removed. There had been 61 different entities detected originally. The second round found that several were able to reinstall themselves after the first sweep and one was even able to block Spybot from part of its operations at that time. I went into the options and adjusted it so that it could over-ride that one hacker, then I finally got the "all-clear". It took three hours of continuous work to complete. Hope that ends the problem.
The odd thing was that most of the spyware seemed to be aimed at blocking access to on-line newspapers - I'm not certain why. The most interesting stories today, when I finally was able to open them were in Arabnews with respect to a lot of social issues being dealt with in the Middle East and Globe_and_Mail with respect to the Sierra Club and human predators in Vancouver. Well maybe interesting isn't quite the correct choice - maybe instructive is better. I think overall though, my favorite newspaper in terms of use and quality of language is the one I receive from Montreal, Quebec. Yes, one located in the heart of French Canada. Now, it's time to go read with my youngest and the cats. Goodnight dear diary.
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