dear blog.

"it's a butterfly. or maybe a fella in glasses... hey everybody, hold on a second... i know, i know, it'll only take a second. come check this out. it's pretty cool."

dear blog.
how are you? hope things are going well.
it's interesting. sometimes i wonder who's reading you, and imagine people in far off lands wondering what an american psychology student does with his time. it's pretty exciting. maybe a bit frightening. maybe you've a reader who's a friendly herb doctor in the southwestern united states reading about my new album. perhaps another is a small pakistani boy from islamabad wondering about what i asked santa for christmas (and let the record show, you really did have a hit from islamabad reading your "dear santa" post). maybe a swedish hacker who's ip address is traced to singapore, but who is really in ireland. or perhaps another psychology student in russia, comparing his own blog to you and thinking his is much better. if he's right, i apologize.

at any rate, i'm glad we can see at least where in the world people are that are reading via the geo-traffic link on the right side of the screen, even if we can't see who it is. then again, if i knew who it was, it may weird me out... maybe that's for the best. either way, it's good fun.

well blog, need to finish a paper for psychology now. but i just wanted to write and say hi. hope all is well. i'll do what i can to get you some new readers, but i think we've already a few all stars in our fanbase. see you next later!

--the little lund that writes you.

password:**********

don't you love the unexpected? two days ago i booted my laptop and was greeted with a single error message. it locked the computer so i wound up having to manually cut the power and then reboot. this time, it didn't shut down, but boy oh boy did my anti-virus software have a few things to say to me. i was on my rather slow computer for about a minute and suddenly my desktop was a mosaic of virus alerts and messages stating that messages i had sent were not delivered because the respective recipient e-mail noted it as spam. which of course it was.

so, it seemed that somehow someone had attempted to use my computer as a spam server. i enlisted brad (my resident computer whiz roommate) and we began file hunting to try to destroy the virus. we were moderately successful. after the virus alert's ten minute cycle of alerting me that "my" e-mails were undelivered, we explored and found "s.exe", which was mysteriously installed earlier that day. i'm still not sure how exactly i downloaded this file without realizing it, but oh well. anyway, eventually we killed the file and anything touching it so we could actually operate the computer as with the file still up it insisted on keeping full demand of my processor. we cleaned the place out and were finally able to reboot in safe mode.

blessed be the computer engineer who was the cause of the "system restore" feature. he (or she, to be fair) has saved my digital heinie more times than i can count, so thanks.

anyway, it was eventually cleared off and the system was restored to 8:38 am of the same day and all was well. well, almost.

you see, because i was uncertain as to the nature of my viral friend, i was unware of it's intent. fearing it would either have ben a key stroke memory program or one that could download my firefox details, i borrowed brad's computer and flushed out all my old passwords with new ones. this all went fine except when i later tried to log back onto my gmail account.

this is my theory as to what happened: gmail was the first password i reset. i usually try to have four main passwords: an easy one for things i don't care about, a medium one for things that are important, a hard one for things that are very important or are normally especially easy to hack, and an impossible one for anything to do with money. well, gmail is the third one. very difficult. and... apparently in my haste to reset all my passwords, i forgot to write down what i changed it to, and thus i had now idea what pattern or what have you was my password, spent half an hour guessing and failing, and eventually had to wait a day and restore it with my security question. so it all turned out in the end, but what a train of events.

the final thought i had after all of this was simply that, if my computer is to be hacked, please make the hack cool enough that even though i'm mad, i'm still impressed. for example, zero cool from the film hackers. pull a stunt like his, and i'll be angry but still impressed.