Back Again

Back Again

You see... it started with me just getting lazy. I was also doing some research for a story I was writing, but that shouldn't stop me. Some of the stuff I am reading is good, but some is horrid. It gives me a whole new appreciation for the pain that editors have to deal with when sorting through the 'slush pile'.

Anyhow, after doing some research, I sorted through my email and found an interesting message from ebay. Someone is asking where the heck his merchandise is.

Now, I had gone through that before. Back when we first moved up here, and were living in the cottage, someone called and was upset about some Macintosh merchandise that he had paid for but not received. I had actually never heard of the stuff. I gave them what information I could, offered to help them if possible, and kind of just hoped that they found the perpetrator. I got weird emails somewhat (more than a year) later, and tried to get all the injured parties in touch with each other. Nothing ever came back.

As near as I can figure, someone had hijacked an old ebay account I had set up but never used. I look at ebay on occasion, but never order anything. I really don't trust the thing.

So here we go again.

But this time, the email was sent from ebay itself through some kind of a feedback mechanism. Also, it came to an email account that I never use for commercial stuff. In fact, it's my lists account -- the account I use to receive all of my yahoo groups and other email list stuff. Hmmm... I had noticed that some of my lists traffic had stopped recently (I lagged on checking that, too), and figured that my email account had simply started bouncing emails. This prompts yahoo groups to cut everything off.

There was an icon on the ebay email for sending feedback, so I clicked it. The we site asked me for a user name and password. I clicked on the find user name and find password buttons, and the site dutifully sent them to my lists email address -- supposedly. Somehow, they never made it.

Curiouser and curiouser.

So, a quick check to my yahoo groups account showed me that my lists email address is now listed "ricochet" or "forward" or something like that, and I couldn't change it.

I went to the lists home and *ever stinking one* of my lists was gone. Clicking on the [find my lists] link didn't help. Some scumbag had hijacked my yahoo groups account and was used it to set up an ebay account.

The first thing I did was to disable the account as much as possible. I want to delete it, but haven't seen any [delete] button anywhere. Next, I deleted my lists email account and made another. Unfortunately, that new account won't send any email that isn't sent to another quixnet (or maybe covad) account. I still have to talk to technical support about that.

I still haven't signed up to all the lists. I'll get around to it, but it hasn't happened yet.

As I was goofing with all of that, my computer froze up. It has been doing that more and more lately. When it happens, I let it cool down and reboot. Then, it happens again. If I pull the heat sink off the processor, use a little oil to soften the six year old white silicone thermally conductive goop, and push it back up on to the chip, the computer behaves itself for a week or two.

Except now, it only behaves itself for a few hours.

Rather than fry my handy-dandy AMD Athlon 1000 MHz (true, not 'PR'), I decided to lay off the machine for a while.

I wanted to get some of the afore-mentioned goop at ratty-ol-shack over in Cadillac, but we got there too late. If it weren't for my trusty $50.00 (vintage) IBM Thinkpad P233 laptop loaded with some research material, I would have been going into some DTs by then.

Then I got sick. I didn't have the runny nose (much), bad stomach (much), or any of the other nasties associated with getting the flu (no, not the H5N1 bird flu), but it did totally kick my tail feathers and leave me with insufficient energy to do more than drag my tired carcass out of the bed to use the (thankfully close-by) facilities. During that time, Mary kindly purchased the afore-mentioned silicone base heat sink compound.

I managed to get enough energy in the middle of the day yesterday to apply the stuff liberally (and I hardly do anything liberally) to the little silicone wafer and reattach the heat sink. I had already oiled that noisy fan, so this thing is purring like a kitten. It looks like it's falling apart because I don't have the cover on it, and most of the CD/DVD drives are out of the bay, but it works.

After that, I goofed with my email and yahoo groups stuff more, checked out a backlog of web comics, and downloaded way too much email.

Of course, in the mean time, that horse of ours, I mean Mary's, managed to wrap her lead rope around her hoof. The girl really wanted to panic, but I firmly grabbed her halter and lead her toward the tree so that the rope could be loosened. Calm and firm does the trick in those situations -- hopefully. If it doesn't do the trick, nothing will. If you, as the human in charge, panic, the horse is sure to panic.

So back to the computer...

I pulled a bunch of fall pictures out of my archives and started resizing them for wallpaper and for the blog. I'll be teasing you all with them over the next few days. I wouldn't dream of just dumping them on you all at once.

OK, I might load the actual wallpaper over to photobucket, but I'm only going to post two or three a day on to the blog.