montage monday: winter riverbank

I am a certifiable DUMBASS... but we'll get to that in a bit...

But first... looky! Return on the Monday Montage... the last one was way back in March... and here we are already in July... jeeze... July... how did that happen...

I decided that since today was my first day of "freedom" (heavy on the sarcasm) and I've been kind of looking forward to going walking in the daylight again that I would just get up when I got up and not try and instigate a new routine again right off the bat. Of course that also means that I never got around to eating breakfast today... gotta fix that tomorrow...

But anyway, I got up around 7:30 and wandered off on my walk... and it just felt WEIRD! The whole daylight thing... and the fact that I went back to my full walk all the way down to the weir, rather than the truncated workwalk. And I was also taking snaps all over the place, so I wasn't always rushing along... stopping here and there, detouring now and again... that sort of thing... and in the end it took me about an hour and a half I think.

It was actually a pretty good morning for the whole photography thing to be honest... partly cloudy, some sunshine, the trees all wintery (well, some of them anyway). And because I did some random detours I got a couple of shots I wouldn't normally have seen... like the shot right in the center of the montage for example... it's a plaque commemorating the unsolved murder of Dr George Duncan in 1972 (he was thrown into the Torrens and drowned)... but it did lead to SA becoming the first state to decriminalise homosexuality. And while I knew about the whole Dr Duncan thing (you can't be a 'mo in SA for too long without hearing about it), I didn't realise there was a plaque by the University Footbridge.

Interestingly enough, I also caught the fountain further back along the river giving off a rainbow this morning... which has the whole "Pride" connotations, plus reminds me of the image I've been seeing on various other people's blogs of late.

The chalk graffiti is interesting too... somebody has been doodling around under the King William Street Bridge with chalk on and off for a few weeks now... but today it was a chalkapalooza... random scribbles and then this poem... I managed to get most of it, and it's really pretty, so I might post it in full later on in the week.

Not a whole lot of stuff happened over the weekend... well... that's not completely true... stuff happened (going to the movies for example), but it didn't feel like anything happened... you know how that goes?

Ma decided, pretty much out of thin air, that she wanted to get a digital camera... Diamonds was having a pre End of Financial Year sale, and they had quite a few cameras marked down pretty cheaply. Of course the one she originally wanted to get, which was under $200, wasn't the one she ended up getting... well, it ran off AA batteries for goodness sake... less good. But now I'm going to have to take her out somewhere so she can practice with it before she goes off to Melbourne later in the year (without me *faux sob*). I'm thinking maybe Linear Park next Sunday or something... of course I'll probably have to read the instruction book too so I have some vague idea about what her camera can do.

Damn... I'm starving... I really need some lunch... hang on while I go heat some soup...

Mmmmm pea and ham... much better...

Now we come to the reason I'm a 24 carat, 100%, certifiable, total and complete DUMBASS!

I actually know which of these one things makes me a total and complete moron, but I'm going to pretend like it was a combination of all of them, make me not feel quite so much of a dick... but I am... a big one...

While I was working I decided to take advantage of the Government's high speed connection and download the new version of MSN (the Live thing), since it would have taken forever to do it here, and there it took less than five minutes (MISTAKE NUMBER ONE).

Anyway I hadn't done anything with the program while I was working, but unfortunately for whatever reason I decided to load it up yesterday morning (MISTAKE NUMBER TWO), check out the new features, that kind of thing. The installation all went pretty much according to plan, which was good... I wasn't completely sure how much I liked the new version, but I do that a lot... complain about the new version of something until I'm used to it and it comes the old version of something... and then complain about the newer version when that comes out.

I was also just hanging around Gaydar, as one does, and this cute guy (albeit in Melbourne) left a track on my profile, so I sent him some random message (MISTAKE NUMBER THREE), he sent me a message with his MSN address in it, and I added him (MISTAKE NUMBER FOUR)...

He sent me a file, which when I pulled it out of the zip file (MISTAKE NUMBER FIVE) it was in, turned out to be a "Screen Saver" file. I really, truely should have just deleted it... gone with my gut instinct and ditched the file and blocked him... but I didn't (BIG BIG BIG MISTAKE NUMBER SIX). I really, really, really stupidly tried to see if it really was a screen saver with pics in it... and in doing so, set the fucking virus, that it very obviously was, off.

I know... I'm a dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumbass...

And he sent it to me on purpose... I know it wasn't an accident... because the virus tried to replicate itself by taking over my MSN and sending the "screen saver" to everyone online in my MSN list... but luckily for both me and everyone else, there really wasn't anybody online (well, except Bear and I sent him a text message this morning when I worked out what had happened), so I don't know that it really went anywhere... and if it did, hopefully they're weren't dumb enough to either accept the file or open it... you know... like me. But like I was saying, he sent it to me on purpose, because I spoke to him about it being a screen saver, and he didn't go "I didn't send anything to you", which he would have done if he's been infected by somebody else like I was... little rat bastard... I'm going to have to report him to Gaydar I think.

Luckily my virus checker keeps catching it before it wrecks anything... but there seem to be two seperate files, one of which causes my virus system to shut down all my browser windows (which is just plain annoying because it means that I can't just leave things running, or, in some cases, finish doing whatever it was I was doing before everything had to be shut down) and deletes my temporary internet files... and the other of which, when it did pop up, made me restart my whole computer after the virus checker caught it. And the virus or viruses seems to either keep redownloading or replicating or something, I don't know... because my system tells me it has deleted the file, but then it pops up again saying it's caught the virus. I'm guessing it kept using MSN to redownload itself, because even when I exited out of MSN this morning, it was randomly launching itself and appearing, then disappearing from it's usual spot by the clock.

So I did what I had to do... I uninstalled MSN... now I'm hoping that if I run my virus checker and delete the last little bits and pieces that might be lurking around my system, then that will be the end of it. But then I have the "do I reinstall MSN" conundrum (and then, do I reinstall the Live version... because the only other version I seem to have around the place is around Version 4 or something... and before I installed this new one, I was up to like Version 7)... because the steps that the Norton website says to go through if you do get infected with this particular file... well... I don't seem to have the loaded folders or the registry changes mentioned... so I'm not really sure what the hell to do. Not that I use MSN all that much I guess... but still... it's nice to have around, and I do use it.

And yes, all of you who either don't use Microsoft products, or don't use MSN can, to coin a phrase (stolen from Futurama), jam a squirrel in it... I don't need the whole "Microsoft/MSN bad" conversation... it's not helpful... and I'm cranky enough at present without any additional unhelpfulness.

So yeah... that's about where I'm at right at the present moment... my virus checker is still running in the background, and I'm hoping that will be the end of it (especially since my browser windows have been running for a while now without anything bad happening)... I'll keep you posted...

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