Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I have just leveled up in computer knowledge.

Drawbacks include the fact that I wasted most of my night doing this, that the knowledge gained was largely unnecessary, and that my writing session may or may not be shot as a result.

But hey, knowledge.

It all started when I wanted to know the voting breakdowns of the AL Manager of the Year. In the old days, media outlets would provide the full voting summary of any given award in the same article where the award is announced. You know, with the number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes and then the complete vote total at the end. But for some reason, at least in the last year or so, a lot of outlets stopped doing this. Especially Yahoo!, which for whatever reason (fantasy sports tradition, I guess) has become my personal favored provider of sports news.

So I went looking for the AL Manager of the Year voting. You see, I happen to think that Mike Scioscia was a pretty bad pick and I wanted to see who agreed with me. Not that Don Wakamatsu, rookie Mariner skipper, was a shoo-in or anything, but I actually think Ron Gardenhire deserved the award, with maybe Ron Washington and Wak duking it out for second. Since I agreed heartily with the AL Cy Young (even though my boy Felix Hernandez didn’t get the award) and NL Manager of the Year, I figured the voting on AL MOTY had to be closer to reflect my dissent.

One of the first sites I found, however, failed to tell me the full voting record. It turned out to be someone’s personal ballot, probably not even a baseball writer. And then my manual cookie-acceptance filters started going crazy and extra windows started popping open and I tried to shut down Firefox as fast as I could. Firefox closed and instead of shutting down my computer as fast as possible, I stupidly reopened the browser and started looking for those elusive vote totals.

I found them (Wak got 2 first-place votes! Gardenhire was second overall! Generally intelligent votes abounded, save for the inane voting for Joe Girardi), but also soon found that there was a weird-looking virus “detection” pop-up message on my screen too, letting me know that a program called “System Defender” had found all these viruses and wanted me to take action right away.

I’m not a fan of anti-virus software in general or even conceptually, since almost every anti-virus software program I’ve ever found either (A) charges money, (B) is actually a virus, or (C) both. Making differentiations between the programs seems almost impossible and their effectiveness is often dubious even at the highest level. Recently, though, I have had a good bit of success with the popular (and free) Malwarebytes Anti-Malware program which seems to be pretty well regarded and has yet to act like a virus itself.

Judiciously wary of the purported software, the name “System Defender”, and the Windows-look-alike shield that just says “I am phishily trying to trick you” all over it, I avoided clicking on anything in this program and furiously got my Anti-Malware running. It found several problematic files, then did its magic, and I figured I’d be all set.

It took about three full restart runs of this pattern (restart, swear at the fact that the System Defender dubiously reappeared upon restart, run Anti-Malware, restart, repeat) before I started looking for an end-run solution around this tried and true methodology. And then I had to go to intramural basketball (my triumphant return after a week of illness), so I just shut my computer down for a while to let it think about what it had done.

This post should just be about basketball and my love of the game and how good it felt to be healthy enough to play and still fell I was getting air to my lungs, how I need to start playing twice a week with or without IM’s, how my muscle memory has preserved my downtown 3-point shot but the streakiness of said shooting remains, how we lost by a point in a hard-fought struggle, and so on. But System Defender had other plans for my night.

I won’t regale you with every twist and turn in my battle with this nefarious software or my ultimate conquest. Some highlights of things that I learned or remembered along the way, though:

• Internet forums are generally helpful in aiding the deletion of known virus software, but they only go so far. Eventually, you will be on your own and have to outwit the beast.
• You will have to reveal hidden files, INCLUDING system files that Microsoft warns you against revealing as though it were the file that proves Microsoft is a monopoly.
• You should search by date and try to pinpoint files created within the first 2-3 minutes of infection. Narrowing file searches by date will allow you to find and delete most everything.
• Safe Mode is your friend. Restart in Safe Mode by pressing F8, then delete the files that won’t go down because the nefarious program is still running.

Even if this doesn’t help you, this list will be invaluable to me in the future, so chalk it up to notes on how to combat the dangers of the future.

Of course, once I’d finally deleted everything, had a successful restart without the bad program, danced around the room, and gotten over my euphoria, I realized that Task Manager was still down. It had gone down in the wake of System Defender’s original attack, never to return despite repeated pressing of control-alt-delete and right clicking of the taskbar and so on. Even with System Defender defeated, it had left this one vestige of its success.

To which the answer was, of course, System Restore. That only took 3 Internet forums and several bad pieces of harder advice to figure out. System Restore timestamps the Windows settings every 24 hours or so and saves them for a while in case you want to backtrack in time from a serious mistake. This alone would not have wiped out the virus, but it was enough to put a bow on the restoration effort once I’d taken out all the mysteriously buried files it had installed.

For those of you reading this narrative in terror for the status of my novel which has been written in its entirety on this computer, fear not. I’ve been backing it up almost constantly in several different locations, including my secret cache under the mountains of Utah (seriously). By far my larger concern was lost time in working on the novel if the problem persisted or if I would have to get a new computer or do some larger restart of the whole thing. Not that this program ever looked threatening enough to do such things – after all, I could still access all my files, just with an annoying series of occasional pop-ups in the background.

But System Defender may have won this night, if not the war. My beloved word counter in WordPress tells me that I’m closing in on 1200 words for this post, aggravating if only because that would be a half-decent night of writing, but instead I’ve been regaling the torments of my last few hours. Sigh. Maybe there’s something still left in the tank. Time to go find out.

After working on it on and off for a few weeks, I’m proud to announce the full-scale relaunch of the State Quiz, replete with new images and merchandise.

I guess it’s not technically a relaunch if the quiz was never down, but it’s a good opportunity to, as they say, “take it again for the first time.” The images represent the fulfillment of the original vision I had for them over five years ago when the quiz launched, which was to be state-shaped cutouts of the state flag, rather than outlines that featured the flag in awkward partial locations.

An example, with my current state (one of the better images, if I do say so), is here:


You’re New Jersey!
You don’t just live in the suburbs, you define the culture of all Surburbia. You drive everywhere you go, love to eat at diners, and pretend to have a garden. While everyone knows that your house was built on a toxic waste dump, you do your best to hide this information and keep referring to those mythical gardens. Driving on a road without paying for it was a revolutionary experience you once had that you still think about all the time. You owe the Mafia so many favors that you’re thinking of renaming yourself Sicily.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve also added the full complement of merchandise available on the now-prodigious Cafe Press site, just in time for the holidays. So if there was ever an old design or description you were looking for on a shirt or a mug, now’s your chance.

And while you’re out and about looking at links and holiday cheer, there are some of you who might not know about my Mom’s latest sock doll project, Buttons and Socks. There’s some pretty neat stuff available there too, all hand-sewn by my very own mother. I mean, can you turn down a face like this?:

I thought not.

Now if I can only get the pumpkins down from this page and start writing again, I’ll really be in good shape!

Being sick is like being in a time warp. Hours, days, even weeks are just taken from you while everyone else seems to go on living out their lives. One attempts to foggily submerge in a book or a handful thereof, in some sort of visual media, in something sufficiently distracting to keep the focus off the pain and on something that’s not pain.

And then, eventually, after a set amount of time, one starts cracking back in to real time, catching up with the events and liveliness that everyone else takes for granted, becoming a real person again. Much as though one had been abducted by aliens or had some other reason for missing time.

I’m not back yet, though I’ve looked at computer news and e-mail and things for the first time in days. I spent a good chunk of yesterday (it feels much longer ago) at Princeton’s clinic, wearing a swine flu mask that made me hyperventilate (I don’t have the flu, but I have been mighty short of breath), breathing through a nebulizer (felt oddly like I’d imagine smoking would), getting a chest x-ray (turns out no pneumonia), and an EKG (hey, I have a prior undiscovered irregular heartbeat – neat!), only to be told that I probably just have a bad and strange cold. Even my ears are behaving this time around, which is pretty impressive work for their usual standards.

What I really don’t understand is why people tell you to get plenty of fluids when you have a cold. As far as I can tell after three decades of experience, deliberately dehydrating oneself at a level just above life-threatening is the appropriate reaction to cold symptoms. This tactic probably doesn’t speed recovery any, but it sure minimizes one’s experience of draining, congestion, watery eyes, runny nose, etc. Without the fluids to grease one’s face, a cold is mostly just exhausting and annoying (once the sore throat phase, which this cold pretty much mercifully skipped, is over). And certainly every time I’ve dallied into cold medicines, all I can feel them effectively doing is dehydrating me. So why get a chemical to do what oversleep and underwatering can accomplish?

I’m not all the way back and I’m hoping very much to avoid the quick relapse that so often accompanies debilitating illness. This is my first real attempt at writing anything (other than my last post) in the better part of a week, which is frustrating but not maddeningly so. I’ve pretty much made peace with having just under a month to finish the book and while it’s going to be hectic and a little scary at times, I think I can do it and be ready. Plus sitting at the monitor while exhausted, annoyed, symptom-riddled, and unable to concentrate isn’t going to do me any good and I’m well aware of that. I handle being sick worse than just about anyone I know, so I’m well aware of when it’s time to just cut bait and hope to crawl out in a good mental space on the other side.

So I’m taking it slowly, preparing to prepare myself. And in the meantime utilizing instant Netflix to further my filmic education. Or at least help me get into the next dehydrating session of sleep.

Just a quick line so that you all know I’m still around… the lack of any updates has mostly been the result of an ambiguous sickness I’ve contracted recently that I have tentatively diagnosed as potential walking pneumonia. It may just be a weird cold, but I’ve never heard of a cold without nasal congestion where it all goes into the lungs directly instead.

Anyway, it’s been a good few days, illness aside. The Rutgers team broke (made the elimination rounds – it’s a good thing) for the first time in two years at American Pro-Ams last weekend, prompting perhaps more excitement from me than even the kids at the time. They dropped their quarterfinal, but by all accounts it was close. Our speeches in the round, which was about pregnancy quotas in a post-apocalyptic liberal democracy, were recorded and are being posted on YouTube.

I also played intramural basketball on Monday, having joined a Monday/Wednesday night league that fits pretty well with Tuesday/Thursday debate practice, giving me something to do out of the house most nights. Although playing as hard as I did on Monday without having played in a long time may have had something to do with breaking myself down enough for this illness. It’s not entirely clear.

In any case, everything’s more or less fine except that I’m exhausted and this is playing a little havoc with my ability to write anything interesting, so I’m having to take a longer break than is ideal when up against the December 15th deadline, now perilously close to just a month away. This last month is going to have to be a barn-burner, especially if this sickness lingers in any way.

Overall, though, things are good. Debate and writing and life are all going pretty darn well. If I can just take a full deep breath, I’ll be set.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today, I had the rather surreal experience of voting in a New Jersey voting booth. It was surreal because I felt like I was at John King’s touchscreen on CNN, pressing things on an oversized board to make them light up. It was fun.

It sure beats the heck out of Alameda County’s old fill-in-the-blank-with-a-pen-till-you-run-out-of-ink system. The green lights were very clear and made it obvious where and how to vote. Em said she worried that her big board display may have been misaligned or just gone off into the ether, but I think it’s just as easy to burn or discard paper as it is to fail to count something.

My vote really counted, today, though, because I was more than 0.05% of a movement! At current tallies, with 99% reporting, only 1,987 others joined me in voting for Gregory Pason for Governor of the great state of New Jersey. It looks like he’ll finish 9th (of 12 candidates).

I considered voting for Chris Daggett, the independent candidate you’ve heard of in the race. Despite poll numbers topping out at around 18-20%, being widely regarded as the aggregate winner of the debates, and the endorsement of the largest NJ-based paper, Daggett’s running a disappointing 5%+. He still beat Pason by a margin of about 66:1.

I liked Daggett as an independent vote, as a third party (rather than, say, a ninth party), as the man who won the endorsement of the Sierra Club and supports a lot of reasonably progressive things. But ultimately his focus on tax reduction and reshifting burdens to regressive methods was just too onerous for me to sign on to. While I liked his impact on the campaign, I wasn’t really convinced that I’d like him as Governor, and thus voting for him would just be piling on to someone who people had heard of the same way most voters pile on to someone they think has a chance of winning. Not the way I prefer to vote.

So I supported Pason, a man whose portion of the overall vote count was almost as small as my vote was a portion of his total support. There are about two-thousand people who would prefer socialism at this time in New Jersey, at least of those voting and bothering to show up for something like this, and those not choosing to compromise their vote or voice in some way or another.

It seems to bear recognizing at this juncture in history. I’m not saying Jersey will change or anything will, but it’s worth at least recording how things stand tonight. But the next time you hear anyone accused of socialism, it might bear noting how many people are actually supporting socialism, real socialism, these days.

And then you can tell them that you know a real socialist. If you don’t mind not speaking to them again.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

October 2009 is one for the ages.

It wasn’t the spookiest October, though one could easily argue that the moment I resigned myself to death made this the literally scariest October on record. Certainly one hopes that this much abject fear is not revisited frequently. And the renewing inspiration of surviving what looks like a deadly threat is always worth experiencing… it had been since May 2005 that I’d had a near-death experience!

It wasn’t the most volatile October by any stretch. Most any prior month seemed stormier for one reason or another. Not that this was devoid of ups and downs. The obvious aforementioned down aside, Em struggled with a more difficult time in grad school than anticipated and I flitted between exhaustion, frustration, and excitement in wrestling with my book and getting some perspective on debate coaching.

What it might have been, almost certainly was, was the most productive October ever. And given that October tends to be high-energy and high-productivity for me, that is saying something. I have tended, the summer of Loosely Based aside, to write more in October and to feel more inspired during the month than any other time in the year, although March tends to be competitive. But this October, though there are about 38 hours remaining in the month (that I won’t be writing during), I have written 34,533 words of American Dream On, making it arguably the most prolific month of my life. That’s over 1,100 words every day, on average, counting several days of no writing. It’s also ~138 pages total, putting me on pace to write well over 1,500 pages a year at this pace. Not that I’m saying I can keep that up, but at the same time, it makes my 3 books/year aspiration look pretty manageable.

American Dream On now stands within 1,000 words of Loosely Based, meaning the next writing session will almost certainly make it the longest piece I’ve ever written. The target size is increasing a bit over time, standing now in the vicinity of 125,000 words as I try to tie everything together and leave myself enough time to explain things. It may run longer as I’m thinking I may need 65 chapters instead of 55, which may even put my December 15th deadline in some jeopardy, though this can be mitigated by stepping up my game. After all, I’ve hardly felt like I’m writing at a breakneck pace. This has actually felt pretty comfortable, pretty sustainable. I’ve likened it to cruise control. I think I could get closer to 50,000 words a month if I really pressured myself.

I know I’ve talked about all this a lot, that I’m probably becoming a rather dull stuck record on the numbers games, writing, and the issues entailed therein. But the discovery of this productivity, really unfolding and getting into high gear this month, is almost certainly the second most exciting discovery of my life (behind finding Emily). The idea that I could conceivably write six books in Princeton, creating a serious portfolio for myself after nearly three decades of struggling with endless ideas and only one manuscript, this makes my whole life seem worthwhile. Let alone if any of those six books catch on, securing some sort of life for myself in this state on a permanent basis.

I’m trying (and failing, evidently) not to get too far ahead of myself. One book at a time, one idea. This book, being in the works for eight years, is certainly going more quickly than something that I just came up with might. It may prove to not be very good when I get around to editing – I can already anticipate that it will require more revision than LB did. There’s a lot of slogging to come and I can’t imagine that I’ll really end up averaging 1,000 words a day over 365 days.

But it’s possible. And after going to sleep at night for the better part of three decades asking myself what I’ve accomplished, telling myself that I’m falling short of my potential, it’s a mighty fine change. I somehow think it would be hard to keep up that narrative for myself if I wrote 4-6 books by the time Em’s done with her program. So, yes, one book at a time. But I can start to see the light on the edge of my life and it feels like the culmination of most everything that’s ever mattered.

And I can’t wait to have people start reading.

UPenn this weekend – debate has given me the perfect break and pacing and interspersing my secluded life with real human contact and discussion, just as planned. Very excited about the teams that are going and the potential to do well. Every weekend, like every book or chapter, is a new opportunity to maximize potential, to start fresh. Every round one starts with the possibility of winning the tournament. It’s amazing how easily I’ve been able to manifest my own need for competition into the vicarious joys of coaching. Maybe not that amazing, if one thinks about how competitive coaches can be, but it’s a relief for me that I don’t feel a big void from not competing. And if I start to, there’s always APDA Cup.

If you need me, I’ll be in the rented 2010 red Corolla with a spoiler and a sunroof. I miss the Prius already.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I love how a bad day can be salvaged by a good session of writing.

I love how I can transform from feeling utterly unproductive, a blob waiting around for nightfall and wondering why I’m squandering my time, into the most productive joyous person graced with a ticket to hang out on Earth.

Most of my days aren’t bad now, most of them have been productive in their own right with shorter works or web projects or just taking care of the household chores. But when they are, what a nice surprise it is to be saved by the “work” of these days. How strange would it have been for any prior job to save me in this way? To keep me going when the chips were down in other parts of life, even if for only a day at a time?

This must be what it means when people say they love what they do.

I spent the better part of a decade, let alone what kind of a use of time even more years at school were, spinning wheels at pseudo-productive pursuits while somehow claiming that this prevented me from doing what I really felt driven to do. Always apologizing to myself, others, the world at large, my earlier years, that I wasn’t able to be productive, wasn’t on the road I needed to travel.

How satisfying, then, that this is what’s going well in my life now. That this, my work, is the antidote to any troubles that arise.

I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging. I hope it sounds like inspiration. To you.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.