alexandraerin

Just the other day I was telling Jack how it would be kind of nice to go spend a week and a half with my parents with only my little netbook... living at the dollhouse makes it hard for me to get up and walk away from the computer, because there are a limited number of directions in which I can walk that will not just take me to another computer. After weeks of a furious work pace in multiple directions, I was looking forward to the chance to relax a little.

So, of course, on day one of my semication, my one computer becomes inoperable.

On the plus side, my famously poor pattern recognition skills have finally pieced together the common factor in every time my netbook gets virus'd: airport wi-fi. To be specific, every time the poor thing gets hammered, it's after (or in this case, while) I use the free wi-fi at Omaha's Eppley Airfield. I never caught on to this before because in all the cases before there was the more obvious common factor that the problem always showed up when I was visiting my parents. This was obviously more correlation than causation, as sometimes I'd be staying at their place in Nebraska and sometimes here in Florida, and there was no sign that anything was wrong on their network. So it just seemed like a run of bad luck.

When my computer restarted in the middle of the airport and I got a phoney warning from "Microsoft Security Essentials" trying to get me to buy Palladium Protection Pro (Microsoft Security Essentials is a real thing, but they don't shill for antivirus programs you've never heard of), it hit me that no matter where I'd visited them, each time my lappy had succumbed had been soon after a trip through the airport, or multiple airports. I'm not saying I got infected in Omaha each time, but it seems likely that an airport was the vector in each case.

I could kick myself for having taken out my lappy in the first place after having told myself (and the internet) that I was going to be relying on my Kindle for time-passing and nerve-calming during the trip part of this trip... but if I had stuck to that, then I probably would have pulled out the lappy next time, and who knows whether or not I would have made the connection between that and any infections that manifested later?

Lesson learned. From now on I'll stick to my Kindle when I'm traveling, and use my phone for those things which must absolutely be checked on/kept up with.

Anyway, I'd planned on rather leisurely beginning (or even finishing) the Little Aidan story tonight and doing some bookkeeping, get confirmations out to the people who paid for AAEs this weekend, but I've spent the past few hours de-verminating my laptop and now I just want to get to bed. The Aidan story will be going up later in the week; I'm going to press on with the next chapter tomorrow. Now that the immediate tension/suspense has been resolved, the construction posts will be returning... a development no one can welcome more than me, as it makes it the writing come both easier and faster.

I did finish reading Habitation of the Blessed during my flight, and under different circumstances I would have already posted a review of it. I would like to share my thoughts about it by and by, but for now I'll just say that it is a wickedly funny book. Humor is not its only or even chief virtue, but it's one that I suspect goes remarked on less often than its other ones, in the same way and for the same reason that the wisdom and beauty which twine themselves through Douglas Adams's novels aren't often remarked on. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would not be as enduringly popular if there weren't a good deal of sense running beneath the surface of its more obvious sense of humor, and the first book of the Dirge For Prester John trilogy wouldn't work as well as it did if there weren't an incisive sense of humor running beneath its insightful sense of everything else.