Before I sat down to write this little epistle from the trenches, I had to kill some stuff living on my hard drive. But it's OK; I made it through. And so did all my data. I got stupid lucky on this one. Learn from what I did and didn't do.

There had been a problem with my machine over the last few months: something was wrong. Things would mess up for no obvious reason. Applications would blow up randomly with Type 2 errors. Things that should have been painless went molasses-slow. I re-installed the system. I clean installed the system. I re-installed applications. I verified the hard disk structure. I scratched my head repeatedly. Software that I was testing would fail in unexplainable ways. Even the vendors would scratch their heads when I contacted them.

I thought that I had conflicts going on in the extensions to the system. Since I look at so much software, stuff gets installed as extensions or control panels that is useless to me in the long run. Mostly this stuff gets deleted routinely when I'm done with it, but I thought some weird interaction was going on that I was missing.

Well, I got a copy of Extension Overload 5.7 to check each one of the extensions to see if something was going on. It's shareware at $20 for a single user license, and there's no better database/viewer out there to tell you what each of the extensions or control panels you have running actually does. EO pops up and notices that the first extension loading is actually a virus.

You could hear the sound of my hand hitting my head. I remembered what program actually loaded that extension/virus (commercial software, yet!) and realized I had six months of virus embedded on the hard disk. I needed sanitation, fast.

There are choices for Mac virus detection; but Symantec's Norton Antivirus program had been on my hard drive for years. When I got the new G3, I didn't bring a virus checker along due to my own sheer hubris. (That, and I needed a new version for the G3). I hadn't had a viral hit in 15 years. I got cocky. I got stupid.

I went onto Symantec's site, picked up the latest antivirus edition, gave them my American Express credit-card number, and downloaded a 2-Mbyte file. Turns out that file is a loader for the real one, which then would not download at all. Very frustrating. I called the DigitalRiver phone (evidently Symantec outsources Web delivery and the support that goes along with it). After a 20-minute wait I talk with a pleasant fellow named Dan who starts to scratch his head over the phone. Forty-five minutes of holding and he and his supervisor figure out what the problem is at their end, and I go off to finally get the real antivirus software. It installs and cleans all 134 applications that had been infected. I got a clean disk and nothing has crashed since. I even have an Internet radio station on in the background as I type.

So, here's the point of it all. Get a virus blocker/cleaner. It's basic defensive security. The Norton anti-virus 7.0 for the Mac works far faster and less intrusively than its SAM predecessor.

Secondly, until the disconnects are straightened out of a typical e-commerce transaction they are going to be second-class. Why should I need any support to get what I paid for? If there's a problem, test and fix it before you go live. If I hadn't needed that software badly, or was a normal user with a normal frustration level; that transaction would have been cancelled without hesitation. And screamed about for years as I told all my friends what a rip they were trying to pull off. Sort of what happened to eToys.

Sigh. It's not easy being me. All this stuff keeps happening. Ah well, onwards and upwards.