Hand of Providence is Upon Me !

Yes, I said it. It's true, I believe. I have been struggling with my office computer as of late. You see, my blogging friends. it was week before last when I made a "somewhat difficult" decision at 4:55p.m.

I wanted to show Mark, who shares the office with me, one of the "Real Men of Genius" ads by Budweiser. I had been looking at them for far too long the previous evening, without incident, other that a lotta hooting, laughing and guffawing on my part.

So the story continues ... I tried to search for one ... but for some reason my computer went to MS search, not Google which I usually use and prefer by far (where is my commission, Google? ha ha).

And what came up was not much in the way of good search results. But I clicked on the first one, thinking it was hopefully a youtube.com video of Real Men, that I was looking for. And, now, my story turns dark and dangerous. (you may need to put the children to bed at this point !)

I got a "message" saying I needed to load "Active X." Well, people, in case you don't know about Active X, you need to hear a couple of things about it. It is a program that MS developed to help with "interoperability." It's like Java, but just for MS, and not as good (my opinion). Plus, it is dangerous sometimes. We are to the action part of the story now, so I hope you have the popcorn ready ! ! Here it comes! !

I have heard for years (being a web designer, and computer semi-geek) that Active X can spell trouble, and it should be used with utmost caution! ! ! Since it is a program that enables "interoperability" between the MS operating system, Windows, and other programs.... well, think about that for a minute. It can be used to enable "operability" between Windows and "evil" programs, such as viruses, Trojan Horses, etc etc.

And so, it's five minutes until my office mate is leaving and I'm hurrying... I have a weird looking program on the MS search result page. Nothing is looking quite like I am familiar with, and a window comes up and tells me that I need to load Active X. AND I DO!

Well...as soon as Active X starts loading, I can see in the address bar that no "Real Man of Genius" is behind the wheel of my computer at the moment!!! Some sort of "adult" website is beginning to load. Alarms are going off in my head, and practically instantly, also, the antivirus program is trying to fix what I did!!!

It's busy trying to get rid of the TROJAN HORSE VIRUS I JUST LET ON MY COMPUTER through the Active X program I installed.

And I'm busy trying to click off the window that's trying to open... but alas...too late. The damage is done. The antivirus program, Semantic, is busy as can be, taking about 3 Trojan Horse viruses off. I'm really worried now, of course. Not too sure that everything is fixed, so I'm trying to run a scan.

Then I noticed that I have a NEW desktop, that says my computer may be infected with spyware and if I "click here" it can be fixed. Of course I'm not going to do that. I already did the damage and it's obvious that a virus (Trojan Horse) is on my system.

To make this story shorter...our computer supervisor was unable to help me. IT help desk at the University was unable to help me. I tried loading a Spyware destroyer software, but that didn't get it because it was not spyware.

If you are still reading this you may be wondering, "Where is the Hand of Providence in all of this?"

It's here... I had to have Windows reloaded. When I got it all back, with a brand new (well new - old operating system) I started things up and of course the first thing I did was to take a look at two of my websites: my two main art websites. And, they looked seriously messed up!

This is the Hand of Providence because...the reason they looked wacked out is that the computer is now running Internet Explorer version 6. I don't have that on my web design computer. I run version 7, the latest. The websites look fine in it, and Firefox, too.

But there are who knows how many millions of computers that still run IE version 6? And since I am still determined to work on websites, I need to know these things. It's important to me! so, through a very convoluted and "mysterious" labyrinthine process, I found out how they look, and now I have a computer that I can check websites out for compatibility. I don't "have" to make them compatible. I can just let it go if I choose. But I needed to know, and I needed this capability.

Funny how things go. A Trojan Horse Virus helped me out? Weird