I'm Back...

...mostly. I tore down the hard drive, reformatted it, reinstalled Windows XP Pro and most of my gotta-have-it-gonna-die-without-it software.

Yep, it was some bad bug malware in there somewhere that Norton didn't get and Spy Sweeper didn't get -- Spy Sweeper itself was infected with it and it hadn't updated its definitions since early April.

But now I can use Firefox to post and I'm not being hijacked by Google Anal any more. I can get to websites that were being lost to me (such as Snopes!) and all it cost me was 36 straight hours of stürm und drang -- yeah, I stayed up all night to do it. Kinda reminded me of back in college cramming for finals. Except we didn't have computers back then -- and we all had to bring whale oil for the lamps and a lump of coal for the stoves on cold winter mornings...

But you know, no matter how careful you try to be with backing stuff up, something's going to screw up, and sure enough, I lost all of my personal settings in Firefox, including all of my bookmarks, plus a whole raft of personal macros that I created in MS Word.

My own fault, looking back on it, but still, I guess should be happy that I'm up and running again.

Which I am.