Random Recommendation

So last night an adware/spyware program attached itself to my PC and started installing all sorts of obnoxious and invasive software. This sent me on a late-night quest to download a good spyware removal program. I tried a bunch of them and they promised scan-and-remove, but when the scan was done (and each program got different results, by the way) and I pressed 'clean' or 'remove,' I was taken to the program's shopping cart to order the software.

Hmm. Oliver Stone, is this a conspiracy? I wouldn't be surprised if some of these free trials put suspicious stuff on your PC just so they find something, and then you panic, and then you buy the software out of sheer frustration.

So I finally used my brains and went to the Ziff-Davis download page and found Webroot Spy Sweeper, which gives you a 30-day trial. It found stuff I had no idea was there, of course, and got rid of not only the annoying ad generator, but a trojan horse that was hiding and a bunch of other shit too. It analyzed all the cookies and gave a list of suspicious ones. And it let me clean my computer. I'll be buying this one, uh-huh.

I don't work for any of these companies. I was just surprised to find the crap on my new computer already. As much as I like Windows XP (don't shoot me for that), it does give you a false sense of security because it claims to have a built-in firewall. Uh-uh. I'm going back to ZoneAlarm.

And something wiped out Windows Media Player. I had to re-download that.

( In other news, here's a good reason not to be the massage therapist for your coworkers, especially when you're one of the people that runs the business. )

Oh, and heidi8, that will be Monday the 19th, not the 12th. If you can make it, let me or sff_corgi know. We'd both love to have lunch with you.

For My Very Dear Sunny

For those of you who don't know because she's not on your friends list (and why not, I might add), my friend sunny_daylee has had her livejournal invaded by an anonymous poster who is too chicken-shit to even leave a name, but insists on telling her everything she's doing wrong.

Well, excuse me if I, like so many other people, thought that these journals were a place to write personal feelings and personal observations. Not something akin to putting billboards up on the side of I-5 from San Diego to Seattle. So excuse me if I take umbrage (damn! I've been waiting to use that term in a real sentence ever since Order of the Phoenix came out last June! go me) with people who pick on my friends and are too wimpy and too stupid and too damn self-centered to even leave a name when they feel they have to call her names, or do their best to make her feel uncomfortable in her own space, or any of that nonsense.

So join with me here and show your support for Sunny. And for all LiveJournal users, actually, because these are our journals. It really saddens me that so many people feel they have to friends-lock all their entries. It saddens me that people are so stupid and evil out there as to feel like they can take everything on the web and twist it to serve their purposes.

But it should delight Sunny no end that someone is flummoxed enough by her and by her private statements to go to all the trouble to see if they can get a rise out of her.

We don't rise to those sorts of challenges. We don't need to. We don't need to enable that bullshit, especially not from anonymous posters. Oh, and Anonymous? If you have something to say about Sunny, feel free to say it here. Bring it on. You don't scare me.