Greetings from Blog Land Mar '09

I’m not exactly sure where to start. It’s been a while and I’m all rusty for being idle for so long. I’m sure I’ll probably get dirty looks from those who’ve experienced it but at worst it feels as if I’ve survived the lahars of Pinatubo, and at best a small fire. This was my first major virus and I just had my PC reformatted. I took it to a friend and of course since it’s a 110V, he plugged it into a 220V socket. Yup, the power supply blew out. That’s what happens with us cheapies, trying to save a buck by not taking it to a regular computer shop. So I ended up spending more. Anyway, back to the virus…

My hard drive was contaminated along with all the other drives, folders, not to mention my laptop, my external hard drive and even my digicam memory stick! I had some contaminated pictures stored in my PC so I had them transferred to my contaminated external hard drive, as well as the ones from my contamindated memory stick.

Does anyone out there know how to clean out a WD external hard drive from viruses? ALL MY PICTURES ARE IN THERE!! So now you can understand why I feel as if I’ve survived a small disaster – alive but losing all my priced possessions.

Friend Ruston said memory sticks are so cheap now so I went to CDR King at the mall to get a new one to upgrade the 512MB which Rach gave me as a Christmas gift three years ago! The 4G one cost a measly 380 pesos which is roughly less than 8 bucks. I got home and inserted it into my camera – of course it does not work! The day after, with my camera in tow, I tried to exchange it. The store tech said it was not compatible with my camera, something about the gig being too high. So I told him to give me one that’ll work. He had me try a 2G which costs 80 pesos less. I inserted it into my camera and that was fine. I asked him what happens with my 80 peso difference and he said, “You have to consume it, Sir.” Then he further told me I have to pick out an item with equal or higher value after realizing I didn’t know what he was talking about with consuming 80 pesos. The stupid look on my face probably gave me away. That’s how I ended up with a set of 80 peso head set that I don’t know what to do with.

So now I have a memory stick which allows me to take gazillion pictures, a freshly reformatted PC with a 220V power supply and a 110V monitor, but no Internet. Didn’t want to mess around trying to hook everything back up jeopardizing burning something out so I had my niece Jack (a hardware expert) and her friend Remy come over to help me put everything together. Did I say I can type so many words a minute but that’s about all I know about computers and anything hi techie stuff for that matter? So of course they were here plugging things here and there and I was basically watching trying to get out of the way. Jack even hooked up my stereo Bose speakers so I can potentially watch and listen to YouTube once again.

After everything checked out, here comes the Internet issue again. I wanted to switch from SmartBro to PLDT DSL for some savings in the long run but Remy suddenly suggested “why don’t you go dial up?” I basically told them to explain dial up to me as if I’m a third grader. It’s been a while but I remember dial up from the old AOL from years ago. The way it works is that one buys a card not too different from a phone card and it allows a user to enter some numbers in the computer and dialing up a phone number accessing the Internet that way. Remy happened to have some cards with her and she set things up for me. These cards are part of Jack’s business here. It’s a bit slower than DSL but for my purpose, it’ll do. I figured I’ll think about getting DSL when we come back from the California. By the way, if you’re trying to call us through our land line and you get a busy signal, chances are I’m on line in which case you’re better off calling us through my or Donna’s cell phone.

And now that that’s off my chest…

I’d better take advantage of this momentum since my writing juices seem to be flowing at the moment. Pardon my lack of pictures – see above.