Virus Developer Recruiting Emergency Averted

I just got a shock to discover that a link on my old website was sending people to a bizarre dating search engine. I felt, by turns, murderous, stupid, panic-stricken; I harboured extreme revenge fantasies and wanted to do serious harm. All in the space of just this morning. A year or two back I decided against renewing my domain name - lessbrilliant.co.uk. I was at a point where I felt like I couldn't justify the miniscule amount it cost to reregister. The website was a hobby and a learning curve and an opportunity to fawn over my favourite music; all good reasons, I know, but when the renewal came up I thought I would pack it in. Then, a couple of months later, I had a moment of regret, like you do, and I attempted to buy the domain name again in order to keep things ticking over. Blow me if someone hadn't bought it already. The name means nothing to anyone except me! What does "lessbrilliant" mean? It doesn't give anyone an idea about anything in particular, so why on earth would anyone want to purloin it? As innocent as the person was at the other end of a couple of vitriolic e-mails - with an offer of whoever-knows-how-much to release it - I know that unscrupulous people have methods of keeping an eye on domain names which have been abandoned and buying them up so that they can either: 1) Act vaguely innocent and not a little bolshy and offer to sell your domain name back to you for extortionate and unnecessary administrative fees, 2) Rely on lazy mugs like me to leave their website live and have any passersby - however few there may be - redirected to some bizarre dating search engine, 3) Some other demented reasons I can hardly be bothered to think about. It was a little window into the world of virus developers, I feel. To seek revenge on society is perhaps one of the unearthly reasons why virus developers exist - and momentarily I wanted to join their ranks and pour all my wormy, trojanic, buggy, virusy scorn on whoever had picked up my innocent domain name. You'll be disappointed to know that instead I calmly broke into a cold sweat, fumbled around for passwords and usernames, logged onto my generic webspace and re-edited all (I hope) the relevant webpages. The good things I gleaned were: Once again installing and using HTML Kit, surely the best and most exhaustive HTML editor, evah! And finally finding a use for Portable FileZilla, FTP client extraordinaire. Like any language, without continued use the different brain areas have partially atrophied, but I was able to dredge up enough know-how to put right what was wrong. You live and learn and learn and learn...

My Life In Fragments (Well, His Anyway)

I don't have much of a clue about defragging. I go to My Computer and right click, choose Manage and analyze the hard drive for its fragmentary situation and it tells me if it's fine for the moment or needs to be defragged. Instantly. Cold sweats, sleepless nights, hallucinatory anxiety - all absent and correct. There's a part of me that doesn't believe that anything actually happens when you defrag - even more so with XP, which just seems to be thin lines marching across the screen - but it just serves as a graphic presentation of a placebo in action. All is calm; your computer will be fine now; the lines have marched; the fragging has been deed. Then another part of me believes that it is imperative to the smooth operation of my precious computer, and everything will grind to a dead halt unless the lines march and the little tiny cubey things change colour and force out the red ones. And who can find the time anyway, when defragging takes all day doing nothing except telling you that it hasn't done anything all day, and do you want it to do anything... It hasn't stopped me obsessing about defragging and trying to find better and more wonderful ways of getting it done. Here's what I have presently installed: SpeeDefrag 3.0 I love the idea of this teeny weeny download: You tell it what drive you want defragged, it turns the machine off and then back on again purely to defrag the relevant drive, and then shuts everything down. It worked fine for me. The problem seems to arise when it tries to handle machines with more than one profile. For a start, it renders the "let-it-get-on-with-it" factor useless because when it arrives at the welcome screen it halts and waits for someone to log-in and help it along. And then it just stops. Or worse. A friend of mine (in one of those awful situations where you highly recommend a piece of software...) loaded it up, lit the blue touchpaper and came home to a near meltdown. Lost explorer and goodness knows what else, and every time he rebooted the whole process started again because SpeeDefrag still believed it had a job to do - which, in this instance, was computer assassination. He did eventually manage to rollback to a restore point and all was peaceful and calm again - but it was a nail-shredding time. I don't have a work-around, I don't know what the solution is. I don't have multiple accounts, and it seems to have worked fine for me. So, I guess I'm saying Approach With Caution. Disk Idle Optimizer To quote: "Defrag your hard drive with your spare CPU cycles! Using the built in disk defragger in Windows XP (SP2 Required), this program senses when your computer is at an idle state and defrags your hard drive. As soon as you begin using your computer again, Disk Idle Optimizer will stop defragging, allowing you to use your PC to its fullest." Whether it's happening or not, I couldn't say, but it's there on my computer nonetheless. PageDefrag Sysinternals is one of those software companies that gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. A truckload of free tools that all do dark and mysterious things to keep your machine in top notch working order. I've got several installed and I don't think I know what one of them does. But I know they're there, and all is right with the world. This one kicks in during boot-up and does a mini defrag of something or other. And I'm glad it does. Contig Scary name. Short for "contiguous" which means "very close or connected in space or time; connected without a break; touching" and that's how I want my files to be. Yessiree. I wouldn't have the first clue how to use this - it is from those fine folks at Sysinternals, after all - if it wasn't for this front end: Power Defragmenter GUI This displays a choice of File, Folder, or Drive to defragment and then it launches Contig. Instead of marching lines or cubey things it tells you in words and numbers what files are in so many thousand fragments and where it is going to move them to. It's Sysinternals, so I believe them. And it seems to do a great job. So that's my umpteen lines of defragging defence; and I'm no nearer to knowing what it really means. Dark arts indeed.

Shameless Plugging - What An Inauspicious Start

So, I just wanted to link directly to my old website at A Less Brilliant Pen It saves time repeating what I said over there...over here. I'm sure whatever happens here will be as clunky as the first time behind the wheel of a car, but, as it seems to serve a basic kind of cathartic need, I'm not really too concerned. I'm sure all bloggers have a dark yearning to reach the heights of underground celebrity - "Speak For Yourself!" - but, to get there, you have to learn your chops; and don't expect to do it in front of an audience. Anyway, let's go.