Bloggrrrr

The other night, the gentle whirr of my wife trying to suck air through her recently congested nasal passages was unable to lull me to sleep. Therefore I decided to get up and find something to do to make me comotose enough to fall asleep.

I decided to poke around on the web and check out some blogs by friends and family. After checking in on our family out west (who, by the way, we sorely miss and wish we got to see more often) and my good friends up in Chicago (who we also miss, but get to see slightly more regularly) I made a very dumb mistake.

This is one of those dumb mistakes that I, a seasoned computer engineer, should have known to avoid. I started clicking the little "Next Blog" button that appears up on the upper left side of our blog. DON'T PRESS IT... Wait for me to finish my tale of woe.

I started pressing that little button which takes you to random blogs within the "blogger.com" domain. At first, this was fascinating. I read some news about a guy wrecking his car in Chile. I saw some political dissent pages from Russia. I read multiple pages concerned about the situation in Iraq. I saw multiple pages in Japanese which were pink with lots of Hello Kitty stuff strewn about. (What IS it with Asians and Hello Kitty?) I saw a couple of pages that looked similar to ours...pictures of kids with dashingly handsome fathers. (Similar to Nate, Riley, and myself, right guys?)

And then it happened. I landed on the page full of ads for "hot women in the Indianapolis area" and, let's just say, male physiological enhancement. Before I was able to sigh and move on to the next page, my virus scanner started ringing like a doorbell. It was going crazy. Each time I clicked "delete" to remove whatever infected file had been transmitted to my computer, another warning popped up.

I was finally able to get my browser closed, and the virus scanner did stop complaining, but it was too late. I was in a sweat. It was slightly after midnight, and I have over 100 GB of ripped CDs sitting on my hard drive. I do NOT need a virus fouling up my precious iTunes cargo. I think Erin has some important school stuff on here as well, but that's not the point! It's my MP3s that we're talking about here!

I rebooted, hopeful that everything was fine. At first, everything looked good. No virus warnings, and the PC appeared to be content. But then I started noticing a few little weird things. These are those little weird things that I'll notice, but Erin won't, and they'll bug me. A new button in Internet Explorer. A couple of new files in the Windows directory. I started researching a bit on the web, and sure enough, the virus had left a few little pieces of itself lying fallow around my hard drive.

I decided that despite the fact that the virus scanner had prevented the virus from doing any harm, I still wanted to remove all traces of the stupid thing before it was able to reanimate itself, as these things frequently do.

To make the already long story short, I was up until 3:00am killing off the last traces of this evil website. I did manage to get it all (knock on wood), but my 6:30am conference call with China that morning was BRUTAL. I don't do well on three hours of sleep these days. Erin seems to do very well on no sleep. She has actually suggested that she should ALWAYS be the one to get up with Grant, since she functions like a well oiled machine on no sleep. Or at least that's what I THINK I heard her say.

Thankfully I got some sleep last night, so I'm in better shape today. And let this entry be a lesson to you. The wise web surfer will avoid that "Next Blog" button like a public toilet in Asia. It won't be a satisfying experience, and it will leave you with a long term stink that you'll have trouble removing.