The Manic Mechanic

A couple of wonderful people on my f-list noticed that I had deleted my LJ for about a day on Thursday. While I was mostly keeping myself from posting due to various issues, the reason for deleting my LJ was because one of my PCs got nailed with a nasty rootkit/trojan/virus trifecta through my own stupidity. Rather than risk compromise of various accounts, I took stuff offline as I dealt with the PC and did some changing of login credentials once I had the chance. I cleansed the PC this morning and all is back to normal. So, I am still here. And I definitely appreciate the fact that some noticed my absence and were genuinely concerned. I have not been very forthcoming about things of a more personal nature here, keeping instead to lighter fare like comics, music, memes and such. The reasons are many, but part of me had it in mind that no one would care, electing to pass over on the emo stuff. Granted, LJ has been a tough venue for me lately, it's real benefit being interacting with others on their turf rather than opening up mine. I still am loathe to post here, perhaps that will change.

As for what happened to the PC, my own damn fault. Typical shady pop-up ad that served up a confirmation dialog. Rather than killing it by closing, I answered "no" (or "cancel"), which, as we all know, lets the scum run wild. For my lack of vigilance, I ended up with something ironically titled "Antimalware Doctor", a rogue mess that wrecks the system and holds it for ransom by finding all manner of fake positives and demanding money for the cleanup. Thing is, the money won't get you anything but a compromised credit card account and the program itself installs a rootkit and various trojan droppers during installation. I cleaned it all up this morning and all is back to normal. Well, except for the power brick for a backup drive that died in the middle of the night and smelled bad this morning.

Those who attempt to tell me that having a Mac would have prevented all this will be openly ridiculed the next time they take a trip to the Genius Bar. ;o)

Well, there you have it. The reason for my short disappearance, explained less with personal notes and relying instead on geekery details. Maybe I will spell things out more as they should be. maybe not. Same as it ever was. ;)

Recently, each time I update this Livejournal thing it wants to restore a saved draft of my last (successfully posted) entry rather than start with a clean slate. I don't use any of the clients, preferring to simply use the standard HTML post page on LJ itself, doing any coding manually. Has anyone else run across this? Is it just me, or is Livejournal continuing it's slow slide into non usability?

In that vein, I investigated Dreamwidth a few weeks ago as a backup for this thing in case anything goes awry. While it seems easy to set it up to mirror what I am doing here, it seems geared towards a paid model, so I axed that idea. If LJ goes tits up, it will take with it any notoriety I have. I will still live.

I finally received the big electric buffer and stand I had on backorder from TP tools. Nice stuff. Unlike my converted bench grinder from 25 years ago, this one is much larger and can run at 3600 and 1800 rpm. The latter is needed for optimum use on plastics and soft lacquered or enameled finishes since fast speeds create too much heat and distort the surfaces being polished. I can finally have an easier time restoring items such as automotive headlights and taillights that become yellowed or milky over time. The only issue I encountered with the setup so far is that in their zeal in sending me the goods, apparently the pain on the enclosed stand was not fully dry when it was boxed up. The loose packing paper stuffed around inside the box to cushion the stand had partially adhered to the finish, leaving it a mess to clean up and the finish full of marks. Since this thing will get beat up over time in the shop, I was not too worried, but still didnt relish the thought of paying for something and getting substandard goods. I received a partial credit and will repaint the stand one of these days, rather than having to deal with repacking the thing and waiting for another one. Since I will soon be repainting the two stands I have my garage grinders sitting on (one is very rusty because acid got spilled on it), I would just add that stand to the painting project. Plus, everything will match.

Now if only I can reset my body clock so I am not wide awake after midnight and falling asleep after lunch, I'd do fine.

I've kept mum in my own entries about the recently enacted "flag this post/journal" nonsense, though I have chimed in other's posts regarding it. It's time I said my piece.

I am sorry that I paid into this thing to have a permanent account. Nothing SixApart/Livejournal could have done could have upset me more, save for possibly making such determinations of content suitability themselves. There are plenty of mechanisms in place for readers to deal with content they feel is objectionable. But to put in place an automated system that allows any LJ member to take it upon themselves to rate a blog or entry against their own scale of appropriateness is vile. Such a system is ripe for serious abuse, given the fact that the blog owner has no recourse to reverse decisions made through the system.

I did a little experiment to self-rate my journal as having "Adult Concepts". When Jeff viewed my blog as a non-LJ user, every entry was reduced to a link stating to the effect that the following post might contain adult content. No content save for that statement, the post title and entry tags. It looked more like a toxic waste dump full of danger signs than a blog. I reversed the setting back to 'No Adult Content', which is actually untrue. I specify that this journal may contain explicit content in my user info. That should be more than enough.

I am sure that everyone remembers the infamous "Wardrobe Malfunction" from a few Super Bowls back where Janet Jackson's titty was flashed onscreen for a fleeting moment. The FCC soon received thousand upon thousands of complaints regarding the incident, which led to the serious fine levied against the network as well as tightening regulations regarding adult content during prime time television. A while after the incident and the noose tightening, it was determined that a majority of the complaints regarding the incident, in the upper 90 percent range, came from a single source, the Parents Television Council. This conservative organization rallied members and their constituents to fill in web forms by forwarding links to like minded individuals, whereupon the PTC the forwarded the complaints to the FCC. A single organization with an agenda was easily able to start a campaign and draw in support for a cause. This did not represent a viewpoint of a majority of people, nor did it represent a median slice of popular opinion. It was a directed campaign agenda against a specific target.

Putting a decision up to an internet vote can have unintended consequences. Just ask Mister Splashy Pants.

Now, I present to you a scenario that could easily occur here. One or more people can easily take a trip through a set of journals, say, by following a particular interest or community that has some factor they feel needs to be censored This does not even have to be anything more than ideology at work. A small christian group with virtual torches and pitchforks against various gay journals, for example. A small concerted effort of clicking a few links by some people and the damage is done.

Needless to say, it can work both ways. Those wronged can retaliate in the same way. Then where does it end? It ends up being a kind of virtual warfare with very real outcomes. My little walled garden of people on my friends list would not be affected as far as I can see, but the chilling effect will cause many of those people to stop posting or change their style, or perhaps delete their blogs entirely.

I hope cooler heads prevail in this. The flagging mechanism seems to be the simplest means that people could come up with at the corporate level to cover their asses when it comes to 'explicit content'. It seems to me the worse thing that could have been done.

I cannot help but feel that the whole '2 girls 1 cup' thing had something to do with it. The timing is way too suspect.

EDIT: It's come to my attention that Sixapart has sold LJ to a Russian company. The plot thickens. And I doubt any good will come from it.

EDIT EDIT:

Comcast has apparently changed how their 'personal web pages' are set up. The good news: they increased the storage limit per account from 25 megabytes to a whopping one gigabyte, to be rolled out in the next couple weeks. Bad news: apparently they've also changed some of the low-level server underpinnings regarding cookies. Any content being hosted on Comcast servers now has to be accompanied with cookies when Comcast is the third party host. In my case, I use the space to host my photos and other content as part of LJ postings, forum discussions, etc. The changes have caused some people to be unable to see pictures in my posts. This comes from security settings on the viewer's PC not allowing third-party cookies to be placed on their systems. No cookie, no piccie.

I have to figure out something else as far as content hosting. I have a Flickr account, but I cannot access it at work. LJ has a big space for photos as part of my permanent account, but it drops the picture sizes to clickable preview sizes requiring people to embiggen each photo to see them as well as messing up any attempts at tasteful page layouts. I prefer an ftp uploading setup. The increase in Comcast online storage has been made useless by the changes, and also has borkded all my previous stuff. I have not come up with hosting for my own domain yet, and that seems to be the best solution.

In the meantime, I will forgo any extra content in my posts till I figure things out. I'm not in the frame of mind to think about this too deeply. Today has me in a pissy mood for multiple reasons and the rest of the week does not appear to have any relief.

Well, I just finished renewing my Livejournal paid account and added the option for more userpics (for all the beefcake pictures of yours truly, heh. NOT). I figured that LJ has been the method I have been using lately to interact with people and to meet all sorts of cool folks from all over (that'd be you guys). Eventually I will customize my journal beyond the simple style I have chosen but not go overboard with it.

The $35 total it cost me for a year is less than I have paid for a dinner out, but this is ultimately far more satisfying. And sticks to my ribs all year long.

I'm gonna use this time to thank everyone once again for being such a positive force in my life. You guys rawk.