In which I do some maintenance. For the good of the household.

When I got on the laptop today, there was a new icon in the systray and every few minutes it would launch a popup to tell me that the machine is infested with spyware. I think it came bundled with a codec I downloaded when I got online, which makes me feel like an asshole – even though the codec appeared to be from a reliable source, and I even scanned with AVG it before I opened it.

Ah crap.

I force-quit out of everything I didn’t recognize, went through Add/Remove Programs, disabled the IE toolbar it had installed, and then manually cleaned up the Programs Folder.

Then I rebooted. And the pop-up is still running. I have no idea what it’s called, so I can’t figure out how to kill it! Which pisses me right the hell off.

So I go to the web site the damn pop-up wants me to go to, and there are no removal instructions for their piece of shit little adware. I began surfing for info: is it known adware, did it come with the codec or not, how do I remove it, etc.

An hour later and I’ve settled on an ad-, mal-, and spyware remover and am running it now. At 13% complete, it’s already found 56 instances of malicious software on the machine. This freaks me out because spyware, as you know, often contains keystroke loggers, which is how people lose their passwords. I am feeling the itch to change all of my passwords, even though I no longer have any sensitive or financial information on the web.

The scanner hasn’t even gotten to my pr0n folder yet. *bangs head on desk*

Update: 119 instances were removed. Gah. (I’m so ashamed. I know better.) But the problem is still there… turns out it’s a little beaut called Spydawn or maybe Spylocked, and removing it doth sux0r mightily.

Update: All clean. SmitfraudFix rocks.

In other news, the wire in my iPod headphones broke last night, so now I can only listen to the right channel.

In which there was an electronic exchange between myself and my bro-there.

Jayrob 7:03 pm: These are the ducks at my work telling me about the day.

Mush 7:08pm: Egad! Quackers! Where’s the soup?

Jayrob 9:23pm: Every day those lil fuckers waddle right up to me on my break and try to control my mind.

Or get free bread.

Hard to tell.

Mush 9:43am: *lol*

In which Vuboq thinks I’m crazy.

I say watermelon is sold by the pound. Vuboq says they’re sold by the piece. What do you think?

Fifteen of the first 17 votes were Vuboq, btw.

RESULTS ARE IN!: 4 to 20, in favor of by the pound.

In which I babble about a few unrelated things – mostly technical, some travel.

Three days ago I installed a WP plugin called Bad Behavior. It stops bots from leaving comments on the site, and therefore reduces bandwidth usage. In the brief time Bad Behavior’s been installed, it’s stopped 1680 access attempts. Which makes me very happy, of course.

I did receive an email from a real person who wasn’t allowed to comment, however, and that makes me unhappy, of course. Is anybody else having any problems leaving comments?

Yesterday was net radio silence day. It was considered a huge success but net radio’s still in danger, folks.

Today I’m listening to a last.fm station based on Fear of Pop, which I’m super into this week. It’s freakin’ hawt.

Also, the latest last.fm client now scrobbles iPod plays! I’m so pleased!

Today’s beloved Firefox plugins are FoxyTunes and TwittyTunes.

In other news, I’ll be seeing Amma next week, all week – Monday & Tuesday in Coralville, IA and then Thursday & Friday in Chicago, IL. I’m so excited. Bghead even said he’d feed my dog.

In which we talk about comments spam and ID3 tags.

We’ve been getting utterly hammered here at goblinbox by spam comment bots for lo, these past 12 hours, and Askimet isn’t catching them because they don’t have any links and they’re not from known IPs! It’s crazy! Bandwidth-eatin’ mofos, a pox upon you all: I’ve just installed Bad Behavior.

While I can very nearly understand the spam for ‘tranny hunters,’ ‘pee clips,’ ‘black cheerleader sex,’ ‘phentermine,’ ‘farm sex,’ ‘pictures of gay men using their dildos,’ and ‘amateur sex,’ what the hell is ‘anal bondage’? I honestly can’t even imagine the device one would need to purchase for that particular kink, and I’ve got an active imagination.

Heh.

On a completely different topic, I’ve been thinking about organizing my MP3s better and I wanted to ask y’all how you tag your tunes. I sometimes want to listen to a class of music – say, disco or R&B or jazz – but since my genre tags are so crap I can’t do so without creating a playlist, an activity that requires me to scroll through my entire library to find the stuff I’m in the mood for.

The vast majority of the files in my music library were already tagged by the Gracenote db or by the person I got the files from, and I have really no idea how to classify music anyway, so I haven’t messed with them much. (And some of the tags are just terrifying. I once downloaded Etta James’ Tell It Like It Is, and the genre was – I shit you not – “jungle music.” I have three other tracks under the jungle tag, but they’re actually jungle beat tracks so the tag’s not a racial slur. I have many hundreds of tunes tagged “rock” that are only tangentially related to one another. Songs that should be tagged jazz are tagged rock or fusion or swing or whatever.

Plus, how do you determine genre? By the artist, or by the song itself? Because nearly every artist belongs in more than one genre, but most albums have all the songs in the same genre. Which means you can end up with a country song in your ‘rock’ genre, or a baroque piece in your Gregorian chant genre, or the Basie Band and Maroon 5 in the same genre (which is clearly just plain WRONG, even though both tunes may technically be swing).

The point is, there are too many damned genres to be of any use, and it will probably be awhile before someone figures out how to code for a tag cloud. So I’m thinking of simplifying everything into the broadest categories possible: rock, dance, R&B/soul, jazz, classical, and world. But then I think that would just piss me off because if I selected a shuffle in the jazz genre and ended up with a 1930’s blues track right next to a Paul Simon track, I’d explode. So then I was thinking of using subcategories, like rock_classic, rock_soft, rock_arena and jazz_modern, jazz_fusion, jazz_classic, but that sounds like a clusterfuck, too.

Anyway, I want to know how you organize your music: do you even bother to organize by genre? If so, how? Do you use other ID3 fields for your own information? Do you ignore genre altogether and simply listen to a particular artist or album as the mood strikes? Or do you just shuffle your library and hope for the best?