Loudon Directions

When a friend gives me directions to his house he might say something like, “Go west on route 32, then north on route 31 for around 20 miles to state road 141. We are 3 miles east of 31 on 141.” Effective, but no pizzazz.

I prefer Loudon directions, where the little league football field used to be “Up behind the old high school”, even after it had long since stopped being a high school; or directions to Steekee might include, “turn right there where Miss White’s store used to be”, or “head out like you’re going to Jackson’s Chapel but turn off to the right there not much past the cut off to the old Davis Ferry”; or directions to the high school might be, “out in West End, on the left just past the projects.” Much more character.

Granted, you would need a working knowledge of the geographical history of the area, but the Loudon directions are just as exact as the other, more antiseptic ones I get now, but with a lot more feeling and meaning, where the one giving the directions naturally assumes you know the area as much as he does. There are no preconceived notions about who you are, or why you want to go there --- at least none that are spoken. In a way it’s as if you are being accepted, and we all like that.

Like A Rock

Back in the 80s Moe Bandy had a country song titled "Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life". If I had to pick someone who wrote my life it would have to be Bob Seger. We've already talked about "Night Moves" and how it captured the heart and soul of a teen aged boy, and "Against the Wind" covers a large chunk of my life since graduation, and now in looking back "Like a Rock" echoes some of my thoughts. It came out just about 20 years after graduation, so it seemed to fit so well. And now, almost 40 years later, I've altered one word and you know what, it still fits. Here are the words, with all due respect to Mr. Seger, and I've also posted it as the YouTube video. Read along while you listen to the song and see if it doesn't fit for you too.


Stood there boldly
Sweatin' in the sun
Felt like a million
Felt like number one
The height of summer
I'd never felt that strong
Like a rock

I was eighteen
Didn't have a care
Workin' for peanuts
Not a dime to spare
But I was lean and
Solid everywhere
Like a rock

My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose
My steps were quick and light
And I held firmly
To what I felt was right
Like a rock

Like a rock, I was strong as I could be
Like a rock, nothin' ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock

And I stood arrow straight
Unencumbered by the weight
Of all these hustlers and their schemes
I stood proud, I stood tall
High above it all
I still believed in my dreams

Forty years now
Where'd they go?
Forty years
I don't know
I Sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they've gone

And sometimes late at night
When Im bathed in the firelight
The moon comes callin' a ghostly white
And I recall
Recall

Like a rock. standin' arrow straight
Like a rock, chargin' from the gate
Like a rock, carryin' the weight
Like a rock

Lihe a rock, the sun upon my skin
Like a rock, hard against the wind
Like a rock, I see myself again
Like a rock

We're Back in Business

I finally got everything back up and running. Folks, I was not kidding when I said on the last post to watch your system. It took me a hard week to finally get everything back up to where I wanted it, and it's not even near where it was. I do this for a living but I absolutely hate to work on my own system, and like I told someone earlier, every now and again the computer gods throw something at you to remind you that you don't know everything, or even as much as you thought you did.

The finally tally was not pretty. I slaved my hard drive to the kid's machine and ran a virus scan against it. I had 638,000+ infected files. I wanted to salvage at least some tax records, my pictures and my mailbox, but the virus attacked every .exe file and every htm/html file and it gutted my profile. All I finally was able to get were the pictures of our trip to Hawaii and my music files, which in retrospect was pretty good.

So remember, back up now and back up often.

Damn

There are so many titles I could put on this post, and until I actually save it, I probably won’t know which one I will use. Long story short, my PC has gone belly up, or as we used to say in the USAF, “Tango Uniform”, which is the phonetic alphabet for T U. I’ll let you figure out what the T U means.

Twenty or so years ago, I fancied myself a hacker. Nothing malicious, just some occasional fun of getting into a site I wasn’t supposed to be in. Life online was good; computer security was lax if it was used at all. However, it did not take long until things really took off and left me in the lurch. Now I’m nothing like a hacker. They are light years ahead of me. I am just a user and sometimes a very poor one at that.

The other night I was on a site I shouldn’t have been on. One of those sites that fit in the grey area between the safe, every day sites and the ones who like to stay well below the radar. I hadn’t been to one of these sites in a few years, primarily because a lot of them used to be supported by porn sites and sometimes you’d get a screen flood of pictures of bare naked ladies and it’s hard to convince the missus that you were not looking at them intentionally. I wasn’t of course, and would close the windows as quickly as I could, but she always remained a bit skeptical.

Anyway, I hadn’t been on this site more than a minute when BOOM! It was almost like a home invasion. Windows started popping up advertising a specific malware cleaner and giving me the option of evaluating it or buying it. I should have closed down immediately, but I had Symantic in place and it had always stopped such things before. This time however, whatever it was came right through Symantic and by the time it caught up with what was going on this thing had a firm hold on my PC. All of my scanners and cleaners were disabled as this thing attacked them first.

I quickly unplugged the internet cable but it was too late. It would not let me use the scanners I already had nor could I load any new ones. I tried to restore my machine from the Windows restore application, but that didn’t work either. I was finally able to get in through Safe Mode to a point I could load a cleaner and it found something like 63 pieces of spyware, viruses or Trojans. It cleaned them off but the system was still limping, so I started the scrubbing process. I thought I was making good headway until last night, when two more viruses got on, apparently through a back door the first group left open, and Symantec tried to clean them but finally just threw up its hands as if to say, “I give up!”

So now my only recourse is to wipe the drive clean, reformat it and install one of my backups, which are several months old since I’ve been lazy lately. I will lose the emails, address books, pictures, personal files, web site work, etc. that we all harbor on our PCs and while I can get a lot of it back, some will be gone forever. It’s kind of like losing your wallet. You get past the money part of what’s missing fairly quickly; it’s the other personal things that bother you the most.

What does all this have to do with you guys? Hopefully nothing, but my ISP did inform me that they had gotten complaints that I was a spam zombie. Apparently, one of the infections was using my machine to send spam to the internet. If any of you got flooded with spam because of me, I’m sorry. More than that though, if you haven’t backed up your system lately, do it soon. External hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper every day. Keep your system clean, set your machine to clean it routinely, and get a good firewall/virus protection package and use it. Set it up to scan everything as it comes into your machine.

You could save yourself a lot of headaches, not to mention money.