A Week In Computer Hell

My Face Has Been Removed From Facebook...


(Blogging live from my underground dungeon computer complex somewhere on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River)

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I started out the week with some kind of stupid little piss-ant computer hemorrhoid on the server PC which spent all day and night popping up telling me it was on my computer's butt and wanting to sell me some kind of salve to smear on the hurting area of my technical life.

Norton/Symantic couldn't find it and therefor couldn't fix it within the first 36 hours of infestation, but somehow either by being on the ball for once or accidentally Microsoft offered a "system update" that my Vista operating system downloaded and installed all by it's stupid self and as a result the festering computer canker sore/rectal intrusion seems to have gone away, although the machine is still belching and farting a little when I try to run important things like AutoCAD.

Then this morning an old friend from High School reported that someone was impersonating me on Facebook saying that I was stranded in London and asking for money to get home.

WTF?

Anyone that knows me knows that the last place on the entire planet I would go is London, England, with Paris, France following along a close second...even behind Opp, Alabama or Morocco or Turkey or Greece or anywhere else on the European or Asian Continents.

Then another friend down on our little island called me and said some woman had contacted him, referencing me, and wanting to offer her services.

Dangit, where were these women when I could have used them, and why didn't they call me first?

Then I got this e-mail from "the Facebook Team":

Hi ,

Your account has been temporarily suspended for security purposes. Our systems indicate that your Facebook account has been compromised by cybercriminals attempting to impersonate you. These criminals often will try to trick your friends into sending them money by claiming that you are stuck in a far away location and need assistance. It is possible that your email account was compromised as well. As such, we have sent this email to all email accounts recently associated with your account. Obtaining access to a victim's email is one of the primary ways these cybercriminals have been operating. Please take the following steps to regain control of your account:

1. Select new, unique passwords for any email addresses associated with your Facebook account.

2. Respond to this email to get the account verification process started.

3. Closely follow the instructions provided in our follow up email. We also encourage you to visit the following page for more information about Facebook security and how to report suspicious material: http://www.facebook.com/security

Thanks,
Facebook Security


By the time I re-read their correspondence...realizing that FACEBOOK was having a problem and requiring ME to take action to correct it...I was tired and cranky and as a result I wrote this back to them...

**** you ***holes...I hardly used your stupid "social networking" service and if it takes more than 5 minutes for me to jump through the hoops to correct something which happened on your system and servers then I won't be back.

I write my own blogs and own and pay my own domain names and I didn't do anything which caused YOUR SYSTEM to be compromised, so get it fixed and get it right and make it easy or let's just say goodbye...

DAMMIT



at this point I assume that I'm probably banned from Facebook for life, even though whatever happened happened on their end of the Internet universe, not on my machine I don't believe.

Regardless, I did follow up and changed all of my passwords on important stuff like bank accounts and stuff but here's my point with Facebook.

I DON'T REALLY CARE.

I write this blog and my cooking blog The Redneck Gourmet, and I'm on the verge with a little more financial success in 2010 of buying my own domain names for my company and my personal use and leaving Blogger and Intuit behind. While many of my friends and family are just now discovering the Internet and beginning to do simple blogging by using Twitter and Facebook, I'm an old man in the Internet world.

My ex-wife had an Internet account while working with the Georgia Tech Research Institute way back in 1984, and I had a MCI mail account I set up with my company in 1985.

I remember when there was nothing on the Internet but a bunch of nerds sending Wordstar files and Lotus 123 spreadsheets back and forth in between comma delimited Dbase III database files.

There was no "social networking" and no "retail transactions" and no pictures of naked women to be found unless you liked printing out something on a dot matrix printer produced with periods, commas, and other ASCII characters.

Something like this made a young computer nerd's day back then...



So any way, right now now I'm afraid to use the server for any financial transactions for fear that there might still be some keystroke logger or something lurking around under the surface.

I'm tempted to buy a new small external hard drive, do a full back up of all of my photos and word processor/spreadsheet files, and then wipe the hard drive clean and re-install a copy of Windows XP professional which I bought last year and be done with Vista in this building...because Vista SUCKS.

Did I mention that MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA SUCKS?

It not only SUCKs, it TOTALLY SUCKS.

Only problem is I'll have to spend half a Saturday re-installing things like Photoshop CS3 and AutoCAD and then downloading Google Earth and the latest editions of Adobe and all of the zillions of other programs I use on a daily basis.

I swear people, it's times like this when I'm tempted to rip off my clothes, put on a loin cloth and moccasins boat shoes, smear my face and chest with colored mud and clay, and go live in the woods for a month just to prove that I can do it again (picture the scenes out of the movie "Predator" with me being the Arnold with a ever greying, ever balding head and a pot belly.)

...shudder....

I don't LIKE it, but I realize that we're all in a world of hurt when the sniveling, bed wetting, tye dyed, booger eating, tree hugging socialists finally overload our infrastructure and it all comes crashing down around our heads one day.

I admit it...I'm ADDICTED to my COMPUTER(S).

OH...oh...ah....eee...oh...OH..OHHHHHHH...AaaaaaaahhhhHHHHHHHH

THUNK (the sound of me falling over backwards out of my chair)