Tricky Situation

Something I saw tonight gave me flashbacks to my miserable childhood.

I was eating at a fast food place on a busy street. A white car pulls in. A man and boy get out. The boy looks to be about 13 so I'm guessing father and son. I can't hear them but I can tell the man is yelling at the boy. He makes him go in to get food. The boy looks anxious.

It takes a long time for him to get waited on because the drive-thru is busy. At that point I went to the counter thinking to make sure he got waited on so the man in the car didn't get any madder. But the boy was holding a receipt so I figured he's doing okay.

I finished eating and went out to my truck. There was a single spot between me and the next vehicle. The white car was parked a few spaces down opposite from me.
Now I can see there is a woman (the mom?) and another boy in the car. Family of four out for dinner? The boy comes out with the food. Instead of waiting for him the man jumps out. Now he's all smiles and opens his arms wide and yells out, "What a good boy come give daddy a big hug." I find this mood swing very disturbing. The boy doesn't want to do it, but he's afraid not to. He inches towards the man. The man throws his arms around the boy, who looks miserable, and covers the side of the boy's face with kisses. I sit there to see what happens next. The boy gets in and the man is now laughing a maniacle laugh. He gets in and revs the engine. Instead of backing up like a normal person to pull out, he comes flying right at my truck, swerves suddenly and dives through the small space between me and the next vehicle. I thought for sure he was going to hit me. At this point I think the guy is off his rocker or flippin' drunk. By the time I get turned around I can't see the car so I don't know which way it went on the busy street.

Minutes later I was so mad I had left my cellphone at home. I was also mad that I hadn't thought to jot down his license plate. At least in CA you can call 911 and report drunk drivers. I hesitated because I didn't have enough info for the police until the guy almost took the mirror off the side of my truck and then it was too late.

All along I could have been jotting down descriptions of the people, the car, the license number and so on.

The other problem I have is I don't trust the govt. much. Say they arrest the guy. Suddenly the family had no bread winner, and the kids end up in foster care where they get abused even more. It's hard to know what to do. But I'm pretty sure I failed.

Blog TV Experiment

I just signed up for Blogtv. So I'm going to see how this URL thing works.
Supposedly you can watch me while you are parked on my blog. If you can, or if you see me, leave me a comment if you please so I know it's working. Thanks.

My Computer is Sick

One of my Etsy chatroom acquaintances introduced me to blogtv.com. So I made my own broadcast that worked great the first night. The next night I was tweaking my profile and clicked on a button to put my broadcast in the proper category.

At that moment, my firewall exploded. I've got a doozy of a computer virus. Can't surf the Internet at all. If I open a page, the virus immediately hijacks it and tries to get me to buy some superpro antivirus program. Is that like a tire store slashing your tires to get you to buy new ones from them? I've run over 6 hours of virus scanners, which do find the threats and remove them, yet still when I reboot the pop-ups come back insisted my computer's been infected and I must try their program.

Now tons of people on are blogtv.com, so I have to think and hope mine is an isolated incident. I'm on a borrowed computer at the moment and he's forbidden me to go on that blogtv.com site because the last thing we need is another computer with a virus.

So if any of you know a fix, or have that issue, or know how to reach tech support for that company, please share the info in the comment. Thanks.

Trojan Fakespypro

Today was challenging to say the least. I just spent most of the evening trying to get rid of a trojan I picked up called trojan:win32/FakeSpypro. When I try to go to an URL a warning page comes up telling me to buy their product. It blocks me from opening the webpage.
This blogger page is the first page I've gotten to open all night. When I restarted my computer after a scan and deleting malicious files, the problem recurred so I didn't get it all off my computer. But it's 1 AM and I can't keep my eyes open so I'll have to try again tomorrow.

Kontera Vs Project Wonderful

I was quite content with my Kontera keywords existing hand in hand with my Project Wonderful ad squares. Until today when Project Wonderful deleted all my ads. Evidentally they take issue with having to compete with Kontera. I love the Project Wonderful format because I feel like I'm helping other small businesses have affordable advertising on blogs and websites. And it's definitely prettier and more creative in the way it displays on some of my blogs.

On the downside, I make more money (I think) from Kontera. I just got my first $100 check from Kontera a month ago. Right now my Project Wonderful account has about $20. in it. Granted half of that goes into the ads I run on other people's blogs. The advertising program pays for itself.

So my choice now is to take Kontera off some or all of my blogs and reapply to Project Wonderful. I'm still thinking about it. Eventually my Project Wonderful account will be empty as my paid ads will eat it up with no new revenue from people buying ads on my blog. What are the rest of you in this dilemma doing? I have a feeling PW just did a big sweep of blogs and a lot of people are in the same boat I am in.

New Dawn, Eclipse, and Spirits White As Lightning

I’m behind on this goal but haven’t given up. A few days ago I finished New Dawn, the second book in the Twilight Series.
I’m just about to finish Spirits White As Lightning by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill. I’ve started on Eclipse, the 3rd book in the Twilight Series. I’m also reading Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman. No matter how many concurrent books I may be reading, I can still only read one page at a time. It’s frustrating.

See more progress on: read 100 books in 2009

Library Snafu

A few days ago I went to the library looking for the last 2 books in the Twilight series. Being popular books, they were already checked out so I put them on hold. A few days later I get an automated call from the library that both books are in. Usually it costs .50 per hold but if you go in right away and do the self check-out they don't charge you. Less work for them I guess.

So there the two books were with a white paper with my name on it rubberbanded around them like a sleeve. I took off the wrapper to make sure it was the right titles, then I grabbed some other books, and headed to the self check-out monitor.

I did the other books first, which went through just fine. So I put up the first hold book and the screen says, "Too many objects on the console, please remove and re-scan." So I did. This time the screen came up telling me to have the librarian check it out.

I tried the other book. Same deal.

So I waited until the librarian was free. She was young as librarians go. She takes my card and the books and tries to check them out. Then she tells me they are not on hold for me, and I have no holds on my account, and she personally put one of those books over on the hold shelf for someone else and did I have another person in my family with a different card that the hold was on.
Then when I said no, both by words and by facial expressions she implied I was lying about the whole thing. I could see this was getting nowhere. And that if I wanted the books, I had to go put a new hold on them and wait my turn.

Now I can understand library snafus and problems with computers. What I can't tolerate is when someone screws up and then their staff tries to make me out to be the villain. So I ask to see her supervisor. On the way I take the paper out of the trash that had my name on it to prove the books were indeed on hold with my name.

The supervisor is a young man and he in at another section of the library. So he goes over to the back counter, picks up the books she took away from me and goes to check them out for me. She jumps in and tells him I can't have them.

Non-plussed, he tells me he is going to take them to the back room and research the history of the holds and try to figure out what is going on. Meanwhile I'm standing at the counter where Ms. Snooty is helping others and glaring at me in spare moments.

Eventually the supervisor does give me the books. What he thinks happened is that the first time I scanned them, it checked them out to me, and when the error message told me to scan again, the machine checked the books back in, and the automated system erased my hold and notified the next person in line that their book was in. He said it was some kind of a glitch they'd have to look into.

Why on earth the first librarian would jump to the conclusion that I was trying to 'steal' the books placed on hold for another person is beyond me. Think of the logic of it? How would I know the books were even in if someone hadn't told me? Or if one book was for me, why would I look for the second book, remove the hold sleeve, and put it in the sleeve with my other book? She did go check the shelf and found both the name that she thought she's reserved it for under another person's label, and also one of the Twilight books under someone else's name. What a mess.
What really miffs me is she never apologized.