So…I dug into the Windows Security Center to check firewall settings, and disabled the Windows firewall (kids, don’t try this at home) to see if that would help.  It still didn’t work but gave me a new clue: apparently without Windows Firewall running, Windows was able to tell me that McAfee Personal Firewall was running.  I don’t use McrApfee products. So…time for a scraping-off operation.

Problem: No McAfee stuff was apparently installed on my computer.  I went through the start menu, I checked under Add/Remove Programs, I used RegEdit to poke around in the registry (kids, don’t try this at home).  NOTHING.  At this point I was getting annoyed.

Then I found this page.  Apparently enough people want McrApfeee off their hard drive, and it’s enough of a pain in the neck to make that happen, that 1) it’s worth it to people to make whole web pages about it, and 2) McAfee makes a product just to remove it.  That should be a clue to the company that their product sucks.  I ran the free program, it apparently scraped some other associated crapware off (I still don’t know from where…), and shazam!  Icky program is gone and my WLM works again.

All I can figure is that it somehow piggybacked in on an update of something in the last few days, since there have been a ton of updates lately.  Still not sure what activated it it though.  But, it’s gone.  Ding dong the witch is dead.

Once in Monmouth, I had money problems and let my Qworst account get past due enough that they did the soft disconnect. Yeah, yeah, bad billpayer. However…once I noticed the problem, they refused to talk to me about why it wasn’t working until I talked to the department that was only open while I was doing the student teaching bit or paid it online, so I went to the WOU library and paid it online, then talked to someone else in an online chat who said that I needed to be at home to troubleshoot it, so I went home, and then they told me they’d get it back on by 4:30. 4:30 passed and I called back to be told that 1) paying online wasn’t sufficient to get it back on and 2) I must be lying about the other 3 people I’d talked to because none of that showed up in my file, so they’d push their slow magic button and I might have to wait another 24. I had stuff to research and I had to do nothing because a communications company couldn’t communicate internally, GAAAAAAAAAH!!!

Today, I found out that I’d re-created the same frackup (I’ll learn eventually, I swear, in mitigating factors I didn’t know how long I was going to have to live off the month’s worth of severance pay). I called it in as either that or wind damage, read numbers off my card, they pushed one magic button for the TV that took like 2 minutes to work, then they sent me to another person to push a magic button for the internet access that took about 1 minute.

So now, I have 7M instead of 256K and a company with better humans and faster magic buttons. Works for me.

There’s not a whole lot of skill involved in solving word search puzzles, though of course people like me manaage to come up with systems for it, and when it’s done, it just kind of sits there.  Yet people would rather do anything, even something patently pointless like a word search (or adding music to their freaking Myspace), than do nothing.  Basically, the Word Search Effect works because people like to do stuff.

In this part of the timeline, that means people spend time on sites where the interaction goes beyond “click here for next page.”  We don’t just read other people’s sites, we make our own.  Then we enter “the blogosphere” and set up our sites so that other people can comment on them, and we run around commenting on other people’s sites.  And don’t get me started on wikis.

So, here’s something you can do.  Yes, you right there.  In addition to commenting on my blog (you know you want to) I’m going to let you start labeling the posts with tags.   You can put the same tag on posts you think are related.  Standard fair warning, I may mess with it because this is in the final analysis my site…don’t be gross, don’t be mean, and if there are two very similar tags (like cat and cats, for example) I’ll probably combine them.

Just click on a post title and scroll to the bottom of the post to get started.  Have fun!

However, a friend of mine posted “Ten signs you spend too much time in internet forums” a few weeks ago, and seven of the ten signs apply to me. No, I’m not going to say which seven. The list does seem to be based somewhat on our group’s quirks and traditions, so I’m not sure how much that affects how many of them apply to me.

According to Wikipedia, on the other hand, internet addiction doesn’t actually exist–people spend too much time on the internet but it’s not a separate mental disorder or addiction. We do, of course, know that Wikipedia’s always right. But on the off chance that it’s not, here’s my Top 10 Signs You Might be an Internet Addict.

1. You’ve taken this quiz at Blogthings either out of actual curiosity or in hopes of being an addict.
2. You not only know what a lolcat is, you’ve made one or two at some point, you celebrate Caturday, and when you see something wacky in real life you think “that could be a lolcat/loldog/lolcar/lolcousin/etc.”
3. Your friends are from the internet, even if you’ve met them in real life.
4. You have a list of the people you know online, with other information such as their ages, pets, obsessions, etc.
5. Even if you know your friends’ offline names, you frequently give them new online names.
6. Even your friends who weren’t from the internet now use the internet to stay in touch with you.
7. If you made a list of people you really trust, it would contain more people from online than offline.
8. You know why “Wikipedia’s always right” is an ironic statement, but you use it anyway.
9. You not only have a blog, but you have a blog spam problem, and a strategy for fighting it.
10. You make top 10 lists about the internet in that blog.