Hello Friends:

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. There are three issues that have been preventing me from posting:

1. Grant and research deadlines at work have prevented me from having time during work hours to post.

2. Family illnesses (including four doctors appointments, one hospitalization and two emergency room visits) for three members of my family have kept me very stressed and very short of time.

3. A damnable "trojan horse" that has invaded my home computer and prevents me from accessing the internet (it uses all of the available bandwith of my dial-up connection other than roughly 50bps (yes, not kilobytes, 50 bytes) which prevents me from accessing anything on the Internet from home.

That said, there is hope....

1. The grant/research crunch has come to a plateau this past Thursday, Friday, & Saturday. I anticipate relaxation and contentment shall be able to return to my mind on this score beginning Monday evening as I shall have passed the last major deadline I have currently for grant/research activity.

2. My family members have weathered the bouts of illnesses and illness scares successfully and are now all feeling in reasonably good form.

3. Beginning on Tuesday evening, I shall begin in earnest to figure out how to fix my damnable computer. The Grumpy Old Man (GOM) has been a true friend in offering advice on how to repair my damnable machine, but I am feeling quite timid about attempting the fix. The issues I have to deal with are as follows:

a. My home machine is a damn DELL that received the even more damnable Windows Me as its operating system the few months that it was offered in 2000. I was able to upgrade approximetly one month ago to Windows XP, but have done so via an upgrade CD.

b. GOM tells me the best bet I have of getting rid of the damnable trojan horse is to reformat my hard drive. This makes sense, but I am concerned I cannot reinstall Windows XP on a reformatted drive as I only have the upgrade CD. The original Windows Me was installed directly on my machine and either 1) I did not receive a Windows Me disk or 2) I do not know where the damnable disk is.

c. To take my computer to a repair shop and have them reformat the disk would cost between $100 & $150 and seems an awfully foolish amount of money to spend on such an old computer.

d. Regardless of which method I use to reformat my hard drive, I am fearful of losing many programs and files I have ammassed on my machine. The reason I am fearful is that the CD writer that was installed on my machine (remember I had Windows Me) was incompatable with Windows XP and I cannot make backup files on CD from my computer. The files are especially troublesome, but even many of the programs are problematic as well as I do not know where the hell the original disks are.

e. I cannot download any possible upgrades (if they even exist) for my CD Writer program for my computer because I cannot access the damn Internet from it.

So I am stymied. I am frustrated with the machine. Part of me would like to take the whole system outside and stomp on it and then douse it with Zippo Lighter Fluid (although it more valuable for my lighter) and ignight the damn thing.... and then go out and buy a new computer. However, my wife and I have agreed that we are going to wait to buy a new computer until summer AFTER I renovate the home office (aka, my den). I do not want to rush into buying a new machine if I can at all avoid it.

There is my life in a nutshell at the moment. Wish me luck and I hope to be able to start posting more regularly again in a couple of days.

One final thought... I doubt I shall ever buy another Dell computer. I have never had so many frustrating and annoying things happen with a computer since I have began to own computers at home in 1989. I am seriously thinking of going back to Gateway the next go around. Dell customer service is horrid and they have shipped out all support to India and have employed people with very poor English skills and at the same time have them talk over some sort of hackneyed phone line that is even worse than a damnable cell phone. Gateway has outsourced some (but not as much) of their customer support it seems as well, but at least they seem to have people with stronger English skills and better phone lines.

If all goes well, I think this upcoming Friday afternoon will be hopefully spent with my elderly father-in-law at the tobacconist sampling and buying some of the Spring series of tobaccos and then going back to his wood shop and building things, drinking ourselves silly, and smoking our briar pipes heavily and strongly. Wish me luck on this dream to look forward to.

PipeTobacco