Call for Volunteers

So, Monk is doing a kinky event next Saturday night - an event at Max and I will, of course, be guests - and he needs some staff. He's looking for smart, reliable people to help out with very basic stuff like being a door person, food and drink support team, and cleanup. In return, you get some fabulous handmade Twisted Monk rope, and you get to hang out at a cool party with me and Max and Tambo and all the rest of the weird, glamorous, sincerely perverted gang. If you'd like to volunteer, drop him a note...

Wow, it's hot. And I hate the Blue Angels. I don't hate them as much as my cat does, but still, we're united in our deep, deep dislike of this whole jets-screaming-right-over-the-house thing. In fact, I pretty much hate SeaFair in general, so I will be a cranky Mistress indeed this weekend. Luckily for you, you can just go read me. Bah.

Ah, the dreaded blogger fatigue.... I do feel this way some days. So maybe I'll take a break today. Back tomorrow...

PostScript: But wait - this is hopeful news. Goverment may back down on some parts of new adult entertainment regulations 18 U.S.C. 2257.

Still Catching My Breath

Whew. It’s been sort of crazy around here since we got back from Denver. Last week the gods of all things mechanical definitely frowned upon me, as first my car went dead and then my computer was infested. Luckily, I got both issues resolved fairly easily. (The car was easier to deal with than the flipping computer. I’m still plucking small bits of adware out the innards, but it’s way better than it was.)

And we’ve had Midori here as a houseguest for the last few days. She’s stayed with us so often, though, it’s now kind of a non-event. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that she’s become like one of the family, which is nice. I was too busy fighting viruses to go to a certain barbeque that she and Max stopped in on Sunday night, but he tells me I had some readers there. So: Hi, sorry I missed meeting ya’ll. But yes, that was MY Max. He said the food was amazing, BTW, so kudos to the chefs.

And no sooner will Midori leave us than we’ll have another guest. Bondage instructor Mark Yu arrives Thursday to stay with us for his weekend of workshops. It’s like Hotel Kink around here, I swear. But it’ll be interesting to meet Mark, since both Max and Roman speak highly of him at seeing him at ShibariCon. I’m sure his classes will be great, I’m looking forward to them.

And hey, ladies: Mark’s single, and he’s looking for pretty girls to tie up while he’s in town. I haven’t seen him, but Max and Roman say he’s nice-looking, and he certainly knows his way around a suspension point. So show up and bat your eyes at him, who knows what could happen.

That’s all for now, I think. I’m still getting caught up on my life. But I have a long post brewing in my head about sex work for later this week. It’ll talk about why doing sex work can be good for some people, but not so good for others.

I'm about to head off into my afternoon, but I had to put this up: If you go to college in Wisconsin, stop fucking! Unless you want to get pregnant and/or an STD. Contraceptive Rights Rolled Back In Wisconson.
Amazing. It won't stop there, either. Wait for it.

Okay, I think we have it under control. Finally. You guys were extremely helpful, thank you. Max liked your suggestions and booted in Safe Mode and twiddled some stuff, renaming and so on, and I think it worked. I'm being cautious and waiting before I declare certain victory. But I think we may be okay here.

God, spyware software writers are scum, aren't they? Maybe next time someone wants me to do a scene where I'm mad at them, instead of pretending they're Karl Rove or Rick Santorum, I'll pretend they're malware people. I'd tear them up...

We'll return to non-emergency blogging tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm going to do all the stuff I was going to do this past weekend, instead of wrassling with my machine.

The Perfidy of Spyware

All right, here's an appeal to the software geeks out there. Friday night, after I clicked on an ill-advised webpage, a huge flock of adware/spyware - and one Trojan virus - settled onto my computer and proceeded to wreak havoc. Grrr. (No, I didn't agree to download something - I'm not that stupid. It just leapt on me. I wasn't wearing a short skirt or anything.)

Now, after many, many tedious scans and sweeps with Norton and Spysweeper and Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy, I've quarantined and deleted nearly all of the offending parties. But there is one thing, though, that keeps popping up and throwing SpySweeper into a panic. It's something called "system service62". Every time I reboot - and there's been a lot of rebooting in the last 36 hours - up pops SpySweeper telling me oh, oh, oh this is something bad. But whatever it is, it craftily evades our attempts to isolate and kill it. Thanks a bunch, SpySweeper, you're a regular Cassandra.

What is this and why is it freaking out one of my spyware program ? I've googled it, but found nothing comprehensible. I've checked with these guys and they don't recognize it. But it seems like it's something nasty, because while I think I've mostly got things under control, there are still some little glitches that make me think there's some funny stuff lurking under rocks. I'm definitely running a little slow, and something keeps changing my desktop background, re-arranging my icons, and resetting my IE* home page to MSN.com, all of which is highly annoying.

Suggestions? Other than "get a Mac" or "get Linux" which aren't helpful at the moment.

(*Yes, I should try a different browser, yeah yeah yeah... Up until this moment it's not been an issue, okay?)