Sunday December 2, 2001

My week with the Mobile Insights people is almost over. We're at the Phoenix airport. I didn't take pictures of the conference schwag ooooh I love it how planes take off sharply and seemingly go right overhead. Actually it's best at the San Jose airport. So I didn't find time to photograph my stuff and I woulda done it this morning but I filled the Microdrive in my camera up with videos of me golfing and the crazy drunken antics of the MI team.

Just then, as I was writing that recap paragraph, and trying to get some 10meg USB storage key thing working that Alan gave me, I had a major emergency. I rebooted my laptop because the key wasn't showing up and it came up with just a small iconified man's head in the notification bar and the hard drive was crankin' and I had no desktop and I was pretty sure that I had a virus or I'd been hacked. Killing processes doesn't stop it and I'm thinking it's deleting all my files. I hold my finger on the power button and "ptwooooo" it's off.

Left my laptop open on the internet for a whole week last week. That was stupid now that I look back on it. I blocked ports 80, 21 135-9 for all the PC's on the net but I guess they got through some other way. Don't know what the hack was. I guess I'll never know because I rolled my system back to the 24th of November (XP is cool this way) and now it's all gone. Done. But scary.

I've always thought that virus software was the biggest virus ever, but you gotta have some kind of firewall and that virus stuff nowadays because email and DSL lines have made a rich soil for those overly smart teenage boys to play in.