Friday

I've been having some trouble with computer. It started shortly before I left for vacation, and since returning it has been almost crippling. The symptom: whenever I am accessing the operating system from within another program, that active program, or the operating system itself, freezes up. Then I have to reboot everything. Working solely within a certain program works out fine, so there's been no trouble using the internet, for instance. But if I attempt to copy, paste, or even save my work, for examples, everything freezes up, and that work is lost in the reboot. I mention all of this because I spent the greater part of today attempting to isolate the cause of those symptoms: downloading several years' worth of updates and trial-version anti-virus software for the up-to-date system threat assessment. In retrospect, this has been the one week, suffered every few years, I've sacrificed so I don't have to deal with the constant invasive vigilance this culture of cyber-fear seems to inspire. The tedium of approving every contact and daily system maintenance is not for me. It seem like this lack of vigilance really did cause the problem, though. The scan took about an hour, and identified and quarantined a number of possible threats, none of which seemed all that destructive. Updating took another hour to load and deploy. After this, I turned everything off to cool while I went out to diner and a movie. Since I've returned, the computer has been acting perky and happy. All that defragging and stem-repairing does have some effect. Now I am able to type this out and save it, too, without the thing crashing. It hasn't been long enough for me to feel truly safe again yet, but I think that normal operations can once again resume. [Cavin]