As I write this, my PC system is infected with crippleware, and Norton Anti-Virus hasn’t heard of this particular burst of “untamed inspiration” yet. After discovering that my power went off after the CD-ROM drive automatically started up, which occurs more frequently than requested thanks to Windows 98 (SE)’s neural net architecture, I tried to flush the damn thing out by running my NAV in DOS, a chore which added considerably to my sleep time. The only way I could get the computer I’m writing this thing on to stay working was to unplug the power connection – physically – from the CD-ROM once the system had entered the Windows Desktop; my prime hope at this time is the successful submission of a Symantec boot scan of my computer to Symantec’s virus lab - to show them that the universe of viruses has increased by one - since the NAV Windows scan has concluded that there’s nothing unruly in my system as of today.

Slicing through world problems seems less of a priority as of now, as any Adam Smithian would understand.

This isn’t the first virus I dealt with. Back about ten years ago, I was sufficiently acquainted with E-mail to have a basic knowledge of what being “flamed” was, although I was ignorant of such subtleties as “the big picture.” This was a technique, used back in the days of slow dialup only, to send a message to a “suit” type. When a techie received management jargon that was annoying to them, they sent a response with an attached file which, when opened, would display the “Big Picture” to the original correspondent.

File formats varied, although I suspect that the JPEG format was uncharacteristically unpopular and the less compact Bitmap (BMP) format was unusually standard. Presumably, this was because the full detail of a bitmap made the big picture the clearest.

Which could be seen quite easily by the suit type – once the Big Image was finally downloaded, that is.

The above is characteristic of the ambivalence of life in the frontier part of the Internet. On the one hand, you howl like you’ve never howled before once an “annoyance” is finally dealt with, but on the other hand, if some geek sizes you up as an annoyance, for whatever reason, it then becomes less than funny. Frontier netiquette demands, I am sure, a tough-mouthed approach when it’s your turn to be fried: just close your mouth and tough it out.

Myself, I never faced a virus until 1996. One that was lodged in a program called “checkit” on my hard drive – the system-check utility. This was considered high cleverness in the virus world back then:

"Whoops, you showed your trust! You suck-er, you!"

A threat of this sort doesn’t really make for a loving and united community. If you’re wondering why a “gun nut attitude” is tolerated (if not semi-normal) here, it’s because the oldbies got their scars in that kind of an environment – one where traps for the naïve were just part of the course of life. The people that complained tended to be sized up as “not technical” – suits, in otherwords. People that were ignorant of the Big Picture scenario specific to the Internet.

Since the variety of viruses, relative to the response, was much greater back then, the expectation that you could de-fang any one that slipped into your system was totally unrealistic, unless you had the skill of a professional specialist in virus extermination. People such as myself used one or two methods that would “always work” – the usually recommended one was “back up your disks.” If you poke through the Dewey catalogue number corresponding to “Technology/Computers/Obsolete,” you’ll see at least one DOS guide with that advice, with the proviso that it was all that a person who would rather not dip into assembler language could do.

There were other tricks, ones less useful in scope than the above. One was a technique I had to have recourse to when hit by the first SirCam32 series: going through the directories, file by file, and looking for any suspicious executable. This I figured out the hard way, after spending close to a day replacing the entire Win 98 program in a differently-named subdirectory, when I found the executable SCAM32.EXE in the first Windows subdirectory in my hard drive.

This prompted the usual amateur’s response: “Why in blazes didn’t I see that before going through all this crap!?”

The same thing happened with this latest bit of assembler artistry that’s infected my system. “If only I had just unplugged the darned CD-ROM drive instead of horsing around with my BIOS and being told by Scandisk that I hadn’t set my hard drive to the LBA setting after trying to unplug the CD-ROM virtually...”

This is what is known, in the suit world, as a “Big Learning Experience.” In the hardcore part of the techie world, it’s considered a challenge of the sort which invites retaliation.

In my own kind of world, though, it’s just one of those headaches you have to put an end to. For this attitude, I can thank my father, whose sometimes humiliating lessons on how to fix things yourself (he lectured by example) ended up doing me a lot of good here.

Even if the after-effect is a grating feeling of dissatisfaction when I encounter, once again, the physical impossibility of opening up the hard drive and trying to fiddle with a wire or two. But that just shows that the lesson packages of the world are inherently imperfect, with the possible exception of 3000+ pages of Intel technical manuals.