Tuesday Trauma
First the good news – Today (Wed, 31-Oct) is Thasya’s birthday. She’s now 14 YO. Seems like it was only yesterday when I first met her in 2001. She was very small, shy, afraid of many things, unable to speak English. She is quite the opposite now in many ways. Tonight we will have a more or less normal dinner – but this weekend Thasya will have a party at the house with her friends. Interesting event last week – a young boy came by the house thinking it was Thasya’s birthday. He even brought her a present. Didn’t realize her birthday party was “next week”.
As for Tuesday Trauma – our new PC has been acting very poorly since late last week. We have been getting weird pop up menus, strange shutdowns, strange search responses, and very sluggish behavior. I have been trying to figure out what the issue was … and used some of the error messages to find clues. Then I got on the internet and starting “googling”, yahoo searching, and yahoo-questions. I kept getting the same answers …. there was likely a trojan on our PC that was loaded as a Internet Explorer Add-on. There were several examples of how one might get rid of it. Last night, I followed the instructions – found what was alledged to be the erroneous file …. and deleted it.
So far, all is fine. System seems normal.
One of the symptons of the trojan was a message that LOOKED LIKE it came from Windows advising that the computer “was infected” – but the wording didn’t feel right. Plus, I coudn’t find anything at the Microsoft website that would support the error message’s validity. The message kept trying to get me to go to another site and buy some software “to remove the virus”. As per the blogs and chat rooms – once you download the software that’s when all hell really breaks loose – hijacked screens, stolen passwords, yadi, yadi, yadi.
Anyway – alls well that ends well … and hopefully this one has ended.
On a different note, Decy’s friend Daisy from Makassar is coming to Jakarta today. She arrives at the airport at 730am and will be staying a few days with us (not sure how many). Being as my office is halfway to the airport, then Decy will ride with me to work and then continue on. And speaking of continuing on, I probably ought to go wake her up.
soooooo …. ciao ciao.
