Earlier this week I was downloading a couple of Nine Inch Nails albums, and an album by Godhead when my computer pretty much stopped working.

I’m blaming the Godhead because, other than a decent cover of “Eleanor Rigby”, it mostly sucked.

Of course I do have anti-virus software installed on my computer, it’s the free stuff from AVG, and it’s updated daily. But no anti-virus software will catch everything… a perfect mousetrap, after all, would put all of the cats out of work. Anyway.

I’ve had at least one malware or spyware incident before, so I recognized the symptoms. Hyper-long loading time even for simple pages is the main one. Constant Internet activity even when you’re not doing anything would be another. Hearing the faint laughter from the distant basement of a suburban home-schooled fourteen-year old boy is the dead giveaway there’s something wrong.

The one I caught this time had to be the same one I had last time, because the same bizarre symptom popped up again… I lost the “i” and “,” buttons. Which is just weird. I mean, seriously… come on. I put up a photo post on my Other blog and I had to copy and paste both the letter “i” and comma’s into all the proper places for it to make sense.

Come on. Really… if you’re going to infect my computer so you can track all of my surfing activity, or collect all my passwords, at least leave me my dignity. Or at least leave me the ability to spell ‘dignity’ without having to resort to copying and pasting.

I figured out how to kill it using a Microsoft security download from their website, which was surprisingly easy to find. The last time I had this infection Microsoft actually included the solution in an update the day after I caught it, so maybe I wasn’t the only one. From what I remember I think I caught the bug from the same download site.

I also fixed a few other things while I was there and now my computer is running better than ever.

Godhead, “Eleanor Rigby”;
‘2000 Years of Human Error’ (2001)

I also made a change to Salted’s RSS Feed. From now on, if you subscribe to my feed, you’ll get the whole post in your reader.

I changed it because a lot of people are having their Internet access at work monitored, and this will make it easier for them to read this stuff. I’m all about convenience.

The easiest way to subscribe to Salted though, is through the Email Subscription service in my sidebar. You’ll get the full post, including photos, sent to your email account. It’s easy, and all of your friends are already doing it.

Nine Inch Nails, “Head Like A Hole”;
‘Pretty Hate Machine’ (1989)

WordPress, the free blogging platform I use, has been making a lot of changes lately. Some are a little goofy, some are interesting.

Let me just get this out of the way, WordPress is the best free blogging platform available. Blogger is horrible, and all of the others — Typepad, LliveJournal — just suck. I mean, seriously. Look at my blog, now look at a Blogger blog, now look at my blog… see?

WordPress has a tool that easily migrates blogs from most other platforms to your WP account. It’s a one button process which, if you’re not using WordPress, you should try immediately. I can help.

That said, WP can be aggravating. It’s a lot like Facebook, in that it’s run by a bunch of kids with some impressive coding skills but about 10% of the understanding necessary to deal with the public.

WordPress has recently acknowledged this by creating “Happiness Engineers” who are taking over the Support Forums, or at least keeping the snark from Forum “volunteers” to a minimum.

But then WP went out and deleted one of their most popular Themes, Cutline, without any warning. So one night you go to bed with one blog, and wake up the next afternoon with a totally different one. Actually “Coraline”, the replacement theme, is probably a lot better, but still, a blog is a very personal thing, and to wake up to that is just wrong.

Something else WP did recently was add “Like”, “Reblog” and “Tweet” features, because WP is getting into the Social Media business. Which makes sense as content is still King on the Internet, and WP has 300,000 (+/-) bloggers posting millions of words, and thousands of photos, every day.

So finding ways to connect WordPress bloggers to other WordPress bloggers, and making it easy for people to share the content outside the WP ‘community’, is a good idea.

Anyway. I do like the newest addition to the “Like” feature, which is just above the Comments section — the Gold Star button. It’s a great use of their Gravatar system, and gives people who don’t have the time to leave a comment to sort of say “hello”.

I don’t think this post is worth an entire “Like”, so maybe, if you feel like it, just click the button halfway and see how it works.

Oasis, “Morning Glory”;
‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’ (1995)

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