Sick Tech and Novel Progress: New Working Title

Lost the weekend battling really annoying tech issues. My laptop got infected by some malware that, as its main obvious symptom, blocked my computer from getting to anti-virus sites and forums. It also wouldn’t let me download/install security patches and wiped out all my system checkpoints so I couldn’t do a rollback and restore. Glad I had my Droid or I would’ve been murderous-daikaiju-on-the-warpath-apoplectic. As it was, I was spitting mad.

My anti-virus program (Avast!) caught the infecting files after a full scan followed by a boot scan—which took overnight-plus-morning to run—but missed the deeper, DNS registry infection. Thought I might have to do a complete wipe and reload of my laptop (aaaghh!), so I started making a complete data and settings backup, which took huge swaths of time in and of itself, but fortunately I managed to stumble upon a forum thread that set me on the right track to hunting down and fixing the problem. Finally installed an anti-malware program from malwarebytes.org which cleaned up the registry, but I had to load it from a thumb drive from Matthew’s computer and rename the executable before I could run it because the $@!& malware blocked the site and wouldn’t let the program run otherwise. So very, very maddening.

But my laptop is now clean, backed up, and up-to-date. *snarl*

Writing Stuff

In better news, I made up for the utter loss of the weekend by putting down 2.2K words on the novel yesterday. I’m now past the scene I couldn’t write three+ weeks ago and only the denouement away from zero draft.

Holy Jeebus. I might actually hit zero draft today.

To mark the occasion, I’m going to stop referring to the WiP as The Stupid Novel and give it a proper working title: Taijiya.

Probably high time, anyway. One of my co-workers who reads my updates asked me the other day if my novel was indeed going to be titled “The Stupid Novel” and seemed disappointed when I ‘splained, “Um, no.” 😳

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6 Responses to Sick Tech and Novel Progress: New Working Title

  1. Shannon says:

    Yikes! I’d better do a file backup and cleanup/scan tonight. One of my other friends also got hit over the weekend, and it sounds like it could be the same thing. What an annoyance.

    • Eugie Foster says:

      I think there’s a nasty batch of viruses going around right now. I personally know of two people who have had their Yahoo! email accounts hijacked. And this is the first malware which has made it through all the myriad lines of defense on my laptop. I’d be impressed if I weren’t so furious: “Nice bit of coding work there, Mr. Malware Developer…*stab*” 😛

  2. Joe says:

    Time parasites like that one always bite me twice.

    There’s the event itself, and then I lose more time fretting over the initial time lost to the PC/home plumbing/feral-cat-stuck-under-the-porch issue. I should learn to get over it and get on with it.

    Which seems to be what you’ve done. Congrats on the 2.2k Monday!

    Are you doing nanowrimo for 2010, or no?

    • Eugie Foster says:

      I get post-event fretful like that with some time sinks, stuff that involves family and friends and suchlike usually, but tech and inanimate object issues just annoy the frak out of me until they get resolved, and then I move on–maybe with a few grumbles and fist shakes at the universe.

      > Are you doing nanowrimo for 2010, or no?

      Urk. It’s taken me two years to get through to *almost* the end of this novel WiP. I am wholly unsuited to undertaking nanowrimo. Plus I want to spend November cleaning up, editing, and otherwise seeing if I can get Taijiya into what I’d deem to be publishable shape. (Obviously, I’m not the final arbiter in that particular call, alas.)

  3. Janice Clark says:

    I’m glad you were able to recover your files–that sounds like a terrible experience, even for one so technically adept. It would have been far beyond my skills to deal with it. Congrats on the novel progress.

  4. Eugie Foster says:

    Thanks, sweetie. The malware wasn’t the kind that destroyed data as far as I could tell–and I’ve got all my writing files backed up on three systems because I’m just *that* paranoid: a cloud application, an external hard drive, and my work machine–but it ate huge gobs of time to clean up, which, while not as bad as destroying data, is a close second in “grrr” factor.

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