Your turn: Emails, we get emails...

Malware, grocery surprises,
word clouds are among topics
drawing amusing responses

I've been accumulating reader comment, thinking it would make for a lazy-day blog -- then spent a lot of lazy days neither posting fresh stuff nor putting out your messages.

True, your comments can already be found under the relevant postings, but how many folks actually read the comments? Hard enough getting folks just to read my blog!

And this way, I not only get to put your thoughts front and center, but to make my own, hopefully entertaining, comments on your comments. So here goes, in reverse chronological order, time to open the email/comment in-box.

The Muck account of Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial celebration, and the mystery surrounding his death in 1849 brought this offering from a reader identified only as “Jupiter”:

FYI - A novel entitled "Imp: Being the Lost Notebooks of Rufus Wilmot Griswold in the Matter of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe," relates the last mysterious week of the tortured soul's life. It draws on many of Poe's short stories and portrays the poet himself as "The Imp of the Perverse," and reveals his fate to be much the same as Mr. V. Unfortunately it seems to be unavailable though it won a British literary award from the London Crime Writers Association.

Well, Jupiter, the important thing to know about Griswold is that his account of Poe’s demise was quickly discredited – and that he tried to cash in on Poe’s death by marketing his literary works for his own benefit. Griswold, alas, was a lying scumbag.

The posting on Barack Obama’s speech as a “word cloud” and its link to the fuller version in the Journeys blog of Muck-in-Chief’s s wife/art director Bonnie Schupp, brought this from our friend Rosemary the Journalism Professor:

Pretty interesting. I may just switch to reading her blog, David.

No comment.


“When less is more,” the rant on deceptive shrinking of the contents of consumer goods sold in supermarkets, brought this from the Muck-in-Chief’s second ex-wife Kathleen:

I remember you joyously picking up extra copies of the newspaper on coupon day, trying to get Maxwell House 3 oz coffee for free, and just having a great time digging up bargains. Thanks for the memory.

Well, I’ve always been cheap. The only thing better than getting it free is making a profit in purchasing an item. But as far as I can tell, even the self-checkout register won’t ring up a minus-total and spill out money like a slot machine. Damn.

And “anonymous” wrote:

Yogurt. No more 8oz containers -- now it's in 6oz micro-mini-buckets. Same price ... a 33% increase on a per-oz basis. I shop at the food outlet now, and the supposedly middle-class folks there are in about equal numbers with the obvious poor. The upscale supermarket owners can go jump in a lake.

But mostly it’s not the supermarkets shrinking the goods – it’s the manufacturers. Supermarkets supposedly have operated for years on profit margins as low as 1 percent. I suspect that figure is bogus, however, since major chains also make out on their own custom-brand products. But competition is fierce, and keeps prices from getting out of hand in areas where consumers have the widest choices of where to spend their money. I feel sorry for folks living in areas where there’s little or no competition, however.


Mitchell, adding his thought to the issue of shrinking rolls of toilet tissue:

My ass may be the same size; it's hard to look behind you, and my wife knows better than to give an honest opinion. However the issue with toilet paper is not the size of the ass as much as the size of the... output.

That’s a lot of crap.

And Rosemary observes:

As to your conclusion here -- actually our asses might be getting smaller. Simply by eating the same as usual -- you've shown we are eating less -- so the shrinkage could transfer.

On what to do with that extra second added on New Year’s Eve to 2008 on the planet’s official atomic clock, I was saddened to find that it was ticked off earlier in the evening than I supposed – not at the stroke of midnight. So I probably wasted it. Mitchell had a good idea for his second, however – in fact, you may have noticed that Mitchell has a good idea (or at least a funny idea) on any subject:

I used the extra second to feel sympathetic toward George W. Bush. Seemed like the longest second of my life. Get out of town, Dubya!

He did.

And another “anonymous,” who on this comment signed off as my regular reader and old pal Barry, seconded this way:

I'm starting my 25 volume life history, oops the second is over. Well maybe next time. Back to my eggnog.

Ellroon left a laudatory comment on Bonnie’s ‘Blogistic” guest posting here, on her successful battle to purge her computer of malware:

My daughter wants to know what kind of scented candle you like so she can light it in your honor. I have just reformatted my computer because of the Vundo and Virtumonde viruses and she had just gotten a new motherboard and freshing reloaded XP and found to her horror her computer already was infected. We used Malwarebytes and it cleaned her computer right up! Thanks for raging against the idiots who love to create these things. They need to be blindfolded and bound in a room full of angry mothers with red hot kitchen utensils...

Bonnie’s computer has been humming along since then. Alas, her workhorse Epson Stylus Photo 1270 printer (which we used for everything except Bonnie’s quality photo printing) seems to be fried. All the warning lights blink, and nothing happens – a problem that arose this week, a short time after an ink canister was replaced. It printed normally for a few pages, then decided it was not going to function anymore. Blink, blink, blink... guess that’s what designers consider a cute way of saying the machine is on the blink. Anyone need a very large paperweight?

The malware posting is the most-visited in this blog, and Ellroon was just one of several readers who credited Bonnie and Malwarebytes with solving identical problems.

On my blog introduction early last month of fortune cookie messages, Mitchell offers a trip down memory lane:

Here's a fortune cookie story you might not remember: My girlfriend (Garnetta?) and I met you for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Glen Burnie. As a gag gift, we brought you a box of MISFortune Cookies, guaranteed to have a buzz-kill of a message in each cookie. Just then a young female colleague of yours showed up, fresh from a vacation to somewhere in South America. As she stood there and described in glorious detail the young stud she hooked up with while she was there, you silently handed her one of the aforementioned MISFortune Cookies. She opened it, read the fortune, and her face turned deathly pale. You picked up the slip of paper, read it, and handed it to me; on it was printed a single word: "FERTILITY."

I remember it well, except the restaurant was a few miles south, in Severna Park. It is long closed, and for the young lady in question, who met the guy at Machu Picchu, the fortune could just as well have read “DIVORCE.”

Happily, the young lady went on to a fine career as a foreign correspondent for another newspaper – one that still has a strong commitment to international reporting.

And now, what you've all been waiting for:

Today's fortune cookie message

You have an unusually magnetic personality.
(As long as it don't erase the hard drive....)

Daily number: 754

Time on our hands

A challenge as 2008 winds down:
Don’t waste a (leap) second

The year has been bad enough for much of the world, but it’s about to get longer – tonight at the stroke of 11:59:59, some crazed scientists have determined, we must add a second to 2008.

What to do.

After all the turmoil of the economy, war and disaster – natural and otherwise – we have an extra second on our hands this year, and it seems a shame to waste it, to just let it blow past like so much atomic dust.

Wikipedia has a lengthy explanation about why we need another second added to the master clock, yup, an atomic clock, that, for all you conspiracy buffs out there, controls our lives. (For the rest of us, we can pretend it doesn’t.) I gather it has something to do with the shimmying of a particular atom, though how anyone can figure that out....

So maybe, with a bit less than eight hours before this adjustment in the time of our lives, I can throw out to my vast cyber-readership (OK, it’s not vast, and on an average day maybe there’s 21 of you, but the word ‘vast’ sounded so nice) a challenge: Suggest how we can all best use an extra second this year.

C’mon – get to it! Time’s a-wastin’!

Pray? Initiate an act of intimacy? Take a last, deep breath, or give up a sigh for the end of days, at least those of a year that’s one second longer than scheduled.

Or how about this: Just laugh. It’ll be 2009 before you know it.

And here at The Real Muck, Bonnie and I wish you all a most excellent new year.


Christmas gone at last?

The holiday has its merits. I say this as a lapsed Jew (and, for that matter, a lapsed Unitarian), Christmas is OK – particularly as a reason for families to draw together, like Thanksgiving or even the Fourth of July. Families need all the help they can get, after all.

But as a religious occasion, I am very confused. Let’s see, peace on earth and goodwill and all that, and a jammed parking lot outside the local Best Buy store. Inside, the soothing tune of “Silent Night” is a backdrop to the booms and gunfire of demonstrator video games on half a dozen high-def TV and home theater systems. Loud enough, I’m sure, to send an Iraqi diving for cover. There could be a war outside (aside from the skirmish for a parking space), and who would know it?

The day after Christmas, everything you bought is 25 percent cheaper. That, I suppose, is when the folks who celebrate Orthodox Christmas begin their shopping season – if they happen to celebrate their holiday in an excess of gift-giving.

The Orthodox Christmas is Jan. 7, 2009, based on the Gregorian Calendar, rather than the Julian Calendar which for now is 13 days behind (not counting leap seconds, of course).
For those interested in the celebration, I found a nice account on the BBC Web site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/subdivisions/easternorthodox_6.shtm

To an outside observer, it seems to make more sense than test-battling video games at Best Buy.

Blog envy

The Real Muck has had a surge of attention since Saturday, when Bonnie went “blogistic” on malware. More than 250 visits have been logged at Statcounter, most of them drawn by her account of the battle against the trojan that invaded her computer through a seemingly harmless but infected Web site.

I’ve been watching where visitors come from and what draws them, both of which are tracked in a general fashion by Statcounter. I can see whether they came through a link from another blog or Web site, and geographically the town or country of their Internet provider, among other characteristics.

They’ve been drawn from places as diverse as Claremont, Calif., and Hahira, Georgia; Sydney, Nova Scotia (we’ve been there!) and Billings, Montana; Mahwah, New Jersey, and Worland, Wyoming; Washington, D.C., and Macclesfield, Cheshire, United Kingdom, Palestine; towns in Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee – even Mexico; and places as remote as China, Japan and Thailand.

Some, like a visitor from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, departed with a click directly to the Malwarebytes Web site, suggesting they were dealing with the same problem that infected Bonnie’s computer.

And so far, we’ve had two messages from folks who, like Bonnie, cured the problem with the Malwarebytes software.

We particularly enjoyed this comment:

My daughter wants to know what kind of scented candle you like so she can light it in your honor.

I have just reformatted my computer because of the Vundo and Virtumonde viruses and she had just gotten a new motherboard and freshing reloaded XP and found to her horror her computer already was infected.

We used Malwarebytes and it cleaned her computer right up!

Thanks for raging against the idiots who love to create these things. They need to be blindfolded and bound in a room full of angry mothers with red hot kitchen utensils...

Our answer: Cinnamon will do nicely.

Today's fortune cookie message

Friends long absent are coming back to you.

Daily number: 232

Bonnie Goes Blogistic: Malware

Infected by pop-up plague, good cure tough to find

Trojan used to be such an innocent word – you know, like it was supposed to be protection.

Those were the good old days, before the digital revolution gave it a whole new meaning.

And we’re not talking about online porn stuff, either.

Not long ago I received email warnings relayed by family and friends that using Microsoft Internet Explorer might compromise my computer. I took it so seriously that I stopped using IE and turned to Mozilla Firefox as my browser.

Guess what? It, too, was vulnerable to attack as my computer was invaded by a Trojan from visiting a Web site that was Googled with Foxfire.

No, it wasn’t a porn site. I was merely looking for some UBB code I wanted to use on a forum. As soon as I clicked on this site (whose owners likely don’t even know it is infected, and I don’t remember the URL), Internet Explorer opened with no command from me and I received a machinegun-rapid barrage of advertisements.

I remember one ad being for online sports betting, but hardly paid attention to the content. I just wanted the pop-ups gone, but they came so fast I couldn’t close the windows quickly enough.

The lesson of Vanuatu

While this was happening, I remembered from years ago how our daughter’s computer at college, in a dial-up connection, got snared by a Web site where rapid clicking to close windows brought in an undesirable link to some distant place we’d never heard of – Vanuatu – and a huge unauthorized charge to the phone bill. A friend had been using the computer, surfing evidently in all the wrong places.

Because of that, I knew I shouldn’t continue clicking to close the array of windows. So I hit Control-Alt-Delete, bringing up the Task Manager where I could End Task for unwanted applications.

That worked for the moment, but not in time to avoid longer-term problems. I was infected with a Trojan.

What bothers me is that I’ve been good. I haven’t visited questionable Web sites. In fact, the one I clicked on that planted this Trojan had a green sign from my supposed protector, McAfee, which indicated that it was safe. And I keep up with all the latest updates.

I used to subscribe to McAfee. But in buying high-speed cable, it came free with the service from Comcast.

(I know – they say if it’s free, you get what you pay for.)

I have McAfee protection. I counted on it, and it let me down.

I’m not a computer geek. All I want to do is use my equipment for creativity, communication and information. That’s it.

But now I had to face geeky challenges to try to fix my problem since I couldn’t count on McAfee. Nor could I count on Microsoft – which is real good about messaging you about having to shut down, and asking if you want the problem reported. Kind of an inside joke, no doubt, for all the answers anyone gets back from Seattle or Mumbai or wherever.

Vulnerable and angry

But I was determined to fight back against this “home invasion.”

Yes, that’s what it was. It was a digital home invasion and I felt violated. I WAS violated. I couldn’t trust actions I performed on my computer for fear that I was vulnerable. I WAS vulnerable.

So the first thing I tried to do was to go back a few days to an earlier restore point. Dead end! Apparently the Trojan took care of that and all restore points were wiped out except for the day I was infected, and I wasn’t going to use that as a restore point.

The next thing I did was a full McAfee scan. Guess what? Nothing was found.

Then I rebooted my computer to safe mode and scanned again. McAfee still didn’t find anything.

During the next couple of days, McAfee was able to quarantine a malware file named Generic. And it was able to remove another, named Vundo. However, it was unable to do anything with GenericArtemis and this was a problem.

I got constant pop-ups from McAfee that I should reboot and scan. Every time I did, nothing was found and then I got the same message again. It reminded me of the old song about Boston Charlie riding the MTA. It was an unending, frustrating loop.

Unable to delete Internet Explorer (probably because it is so ingrained in the Microsoft package), I took some extreme measures – unplugging my connection to the outside world, and setting the program to its highest security level. Then I deleted Firefox.

Connecting to the Internet again, I started using Safari, an Apple product which seems not to be vulnerable.

But I still had a Trojan. I knew this because I kept getting a blank white screen. With the new IE settings, the Trojan couldn’t access the advertising sites but could still open IE –hence the blank window, which I then had to close using Control-Alt-Delete.

Next I tried to download another possible malware remedy called Ad-Aware, recommended by a son-in-law who said it had worked for him in the past. He also looked at a record of the infected files, and said, “This is bad,” explaining that the files had “hooks” which attached themselves to many other files.

Microsoft disallowed a download of Ad-Aware until the security setting was back to “medium,” and then I was able to scan with Ad-Aware, which found and removed a nasty thing named Virtumonde.

But I was not anywhere near out of the woods. There was still a problem, as some electronic critter kept opening Internet Explorer and the white screen reappeared again and again.
Neither McAfee nor Ad-Aware solved the problem.

Link to the solution?

Next, I tried downloading a program called Malwarebytes, which was recommended by a participant in a forum of McAfee users – and I seemed to have hit the jackpot! (So McAfee was good for something – one of its users had an answer).

Malwarebytes found about 40 infected files and removed some. The others were quarantined and then removed when I restarted my computer.

It’s now been six hours since I’ve done this, and so far (knock on plastic), no more ads.

I’m left angry that the good guys haven’t been smart enough to overcome the bad guys – at least, in this case, Microsoft (assuming they are good guys) and McAfee (where maybe they are smart, but just not fast enough to keep up).

I’m angry that stealth programs can invade my computer, in spite of all the right things I do. I’m angry at Microsoft and McAfee for not protecting me.

But I’m thankful to Safari for providing a free browser that doesn’t seem to be so vulnerable, and to Malwarebytes for having a smart program that helped me solve my problem.

I’m so grateful that, if a few days pass without a recurrence, I might even buy the full version.

Today's fortune cookie message

Your happiness is intertwined with your outlook on life.

(... but probably not with Microsoft's Outlook Express)

Daily number: 900

Editor's note

The Bonnie who occasionally goes 'blogistic' here in The Real Muck is Bonnie J. Schupp, the life partner, inspiration and art director for the blogger-in-chief. David has been lazy and not written very much in the past week. But he'll be back soon, and thanks you for visiting.

Note to dictionary editors

Blogistic: Venting feelings or exorcizing demons or any sort through a blog posting.