Voof. Am I having a combination bad and good week all at once.
Good stuff first, because it's important to always think the good stuff first. Best foot forward and all that.
We had a wonderful Birthday Cake Week. Wednesday night Geoff picked "Not Your Average Joe's" for his dinner location, and we ate a wonderful meal of happiness there. Our waiter was kind of a dink though... tell a guy twice that it's someone's birthday, and you'd think he'd "suggest" or take it upon himself to bring the birthday boy's dessert with a candle in it or something. No. He didn't ... so we are glad we did cake, candles and ice cream with Auntie lee lee on Sunday.
Yesterday we had a party for him -- 15 total kids. It was scads of fun and absolute chaos. We played musical chairs, in which Geoff showed his incredible poor loserness and Jessica was the best music director using that pause button at all kinds of unexpected times. Our neighbor E won two out of the three games of musical chairs -- I was quite proud of her. We also played Hot Potato, but with a stuffed lobster, so it became Hot Lobster.
And "Pass it on" is always a great game to play with first graders. I started both the sessions and the sentences were fairly simple, but by the end had "butt" and "fart" inserted into them by naughty first grade (cough Geoff) boys in the middle of the chain.
My neighbor took it upon herself to make a cake. She called this morning and I told her I was picking one up at the market bakery... she insisted on baking for me. So she made white cake with white frosting and shaved Hershey's chocolate kisses for a covering. It was quite nice and no matter how hard I insisted that she not do that, she did it... it was beyond kind. And we had good ice cream to go with, and the kids were mentally insane by the time the party was halfway through.
Cake and ice cream mercifully took almost a half hour, and then we did presents. The kids were fighting over which present would be opened next. Geoff was sort of overwhelmed, and one of the moms played secretary so I could clean up the cake and ice cream (thank you wherever you are tonight Mrs. D).
We had a half hour to kill, the kids were mentally deranged from all that sugar, so we played Simon Says, only I used the lobster to do "Lobster Says" and the kids loved that (even though Doug thought it was stupid). Doug blew up all the balloons that I got and didn't have time to blow up, and each kid got a balloon. That ate up the rest of the time, and they all invented fun games to play like "how long can you keep the balloon up in the air without dropping it?" Everyone knows and loves that game.
The parents were pretty prompt in coming to pick up, and everyone seemed to have a super time. I was glad to have had them...
And I'm glad that I don't have to do it again any time soon.
The bad side of the week is something that maybe one of you nice people out there in the blogsphere can help me with.
We have been hijacked.
At least, our Browsers have been hijacked.
On Thursday night, Doug went to log on the PC and both Netscape and Internet explorer are not working.
The Address Bar at the top of the screen shows the URL, but the screen never changes. We can put in www.biteme.com, or www.echoesofadream.com or www.ellispaul.com and the screen stays the same.
The next morning I called our ISP. They stated that they weren't running anything that would require us to put in our phone number, and that it had nothing to do with them. They offered no solutions or suggestions. Thanks, asshats.
I run Norton antivirus, latest DAT loaded on 12/31/03. It doesn't find anything. I go to retrieve the latest DAT because I'm sure there is a new one, but Live Update won't run. I'm thinking that whatever has my Browsers by the shorthairs also has my NAV. Great.
I called Gateway.
I have always loved the tech support at Gateway. Efficient, helpful, knowledgeable, friendly. It's one of the reasons I bought the computer. When I worked at the college we had a contract with Gateway, and they always impressed me with how well they did their thing.
But now, Gateway, that fine upstanding American Midwestern Down To Earth Cows and Barns and PCs kind of company has farmed its support to India.
Now, don't get me wrong right off the bat. I totally understand the need to save money in a bad economy, and they aren't the only company to do this. And I have nothing against people from India. I love people from India.
What I have a problem with is trying to get through to someone on satellite phone to halfway across the planet where it is four AM and I can't understand what the person is saying to me.
And, getting through was a problem...
I dialed the number, and was disconnected.
I dialed again, got through the menu and punched in my serial number and was disconnected again.
This happened three more times.
I finally heard all kinds of echoey buzzy noise, and the support guy came on the phone.
He identified himself as Richard.
He had never heard of anything like this before. I should have said Namaste and hung the phone up then... but I stuck with him, I wanted to see what he'd figure out or if he'd escalate my call to another person.
He had me do a bunch of different things, like unload a bunch of stuff from my start up files, as if Windows Start Up is causing something to happen when two separate specific programs are starting up. He and I spent almost two hours on the phone trying to figure this out.
Because he had never heard of anything like this, it was a complete wash. He was friendly and helpful. We talked about Celsius and I told him that at my house it was like negative 20 right at that minute and he almost fell out of his chair (seeing as it was about 48 at his house that evening when he left for work and he thought that was chilly). We determined that he could help me no further, and he recommended I take my PC to the Gateway store to have it fixed.
I said Namaste and he was very happy to have an American be so kind, but I wasn't happy in the end. I was let down. He was as uninformed as I, and I want those two hours of my life back.
Next, a call to my sister.
She asks me if I did all the same things that Richard in India suggested, and I told her yes... she talked to her boss, who suggested a couple things, I tried them. No dice.
She then hooked me up with a friend of hers, and he and I spent like three hours on the phone trying all kinds of things... he had me all up inside my registry deleting stuff and messing with things I've never touched before. It was scary.
But it didn't work.
In the morning on Saturday I called my buddy Brian, and he set me up with a log in to his FTP server so I could pull down Ad-Aware. I ran it. It found a shitload of stuff that was no good, but it didn't find the thing to fix my Browser contamination.
I tried to download the latest definitions of Ad-Aware, but it doesn't load, it hangs at 5% and then my PC crashes.
This afternoon I went to Staples and talked to them there. They said they don't think it's a spyware problem they think it's a virus. I bought the latest NAV 2004, and loaded it. I was able to get the DAT from this week without incident.
NAV found some Adware on my PC but can't delete it or quarantine it. So I'm back at square one... having spent about 15 hours of my precious Football TV Playoffs LIFE on this problem.
Staples suggested that if NAV can't fix my problem, back everything up and go to the Gateway Store.
I'll be calling them first thing in the morning.
I bought an external CD burner (I have tried to install things inside this PC and that hasn't been successful) And a bunch o'CDs, and I plan on backing up all our documents and photos tomorrow after work.
Right now, I just don't even want to be looking at this thing.
So... has anyone out there experienced this problem? Will grabbing an AOL CD and installing it as a temporary fix get us out to the web with their security in place and help us access websites where we can find out what is going on?
Know someone who is an expert in this type of thing who wants 3 dozen home made chocolate chip cookies?I will gladly feed the face and belly of the person who can assist me in killing this browser interloper, usurper, seat filler.
Doug is whiney and needs his PC.
And on this note, I'm off. Gotta go clean up from dinner and just get the hell away from this stupid PC. Gah. I'm angry.
I can access my email from work... good thing. Don't know what I'd do other wise.
Cheers y'all.
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