Day Forty-eight: late evening of September 19th 2009

I was very tired today. My head felt a little stuffy, and when ever I sat down, I started to doze off. I had Scribblenauts by me and would dabble in the sand box area, whenever I woke up. The words that appeared today that were surprising were: sleeping dart gun (it worked for a short time), handcuffs (that worked, but you have to align the connection points just right), fire hydrant (that squirted water, when it was activated[?]), roller skates (worked, smooth ride and a bit faster than walking). The strangest words that popped up, happened when I misspelled a word, I don’t remember what it was, and when I was notified about my error with the subsequent “Did you mean?” message, followed by kaseem (Arabic for divided), kazeem (a variation of the previous word), and keftedes (a Greek or Mediterranean meatball). Like a serious gamer, I returned to the word generation screen to retype the game, without seeing what the object would look like (of course, I could type it in anytime I want now). I managed to show it to my wife before I returned to the game. It didn’t dawn on me until I started writing this that it was an unusual occurrence.

Later, this evening as I puttered around in the depths of the internet, the Windows warning screen popped up to warn me about a viral infection (some list with a trojan horse, malware, and some other threatening thing). I wasn’t really paying attention, I mean it looked authentic, when I clicked to correct the issue. Then a dialog box pops up asking me if I want to run the application after I down load it. A current e-messaging acronym, WTF, made its way into my thoughts. I’m using McAfee for my antiviral needs, and this message didn’t ring true. I looked at the URL address and saw that a companies name was there. What a sneaky thing to do. I wonder if my antiviral software would have warned me if I took the next step, but I didn’t. I’m glad that I was aware of how my McAfee software worked, and that I had just run a scan yesterday. But what if I hadn’t, because that initial warning looked like the Windows page. I wonder what kind of entanglement I would have gotten myself into? You really have to stay more that just alert, when you fool around on the internet.