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I stole this from homicial_nny

20 Questions to a Better Personality

You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

Attack of the zombies

I figured that was the cause when I couldn't connect to LJ last night or this morning.

I know this doesn't apply to anyone in my friends' list, but I feel the need to vent. I agree with Brad's post on this matter up to a point. I think he is misguided when he says, "One thing you can do to help is not run Windows." Uh, sorry Brad, but I don't think it works that way. Let's just suppose the wet dream of all the "mom's basement" crowd came true and suddenly every single windows user out there suddenly converted to Linux or OSX. Instead of clueless users running insecure Windows boxes, we'd have clueless users running Linux or OSX boxes - with even LESS idea of how to secure their systems.

The solution is simple:

IF YOU ARE GOING TO RUN WINDOWS THEN PLEASE SECURE YOUR FUCKING SYSTEM. There is no excuse for not securing one's system except for ignorance and/or laziness. Apply the patches - they're free. Get a virus scanner - AVG is free. Get a firewall. ZoneAlarm is free.

Better yet, spend the $30 for a router with a built-in hardware firewall. If you must use Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express then KEEP THEM UP TO DATE AND TIGHTEN UP THEIR SECURITY SETTINGS. It's not rocket science, and it's not even that hard. If you don't know how to do it, ask someone. We'll be happy to help - it's to our advantage if your system isn't the equivalent of a bug-infested, phlem-spewing toddler in a crowded elevator.

If securing IE is too much for you to figure out then dump IE and use Firefox. It's a vastly superior browser anyway. Scan your sytem with AdAware and/or Spybot Search & Destroy occasionally and break the fingers of the last person using the computer if they find anything. If you can't figure out how to secure OE then get a fucking Hotmail account and have people mail you there.

I am growing tired of making housecalls to people whose computers are riddled with spyware, adware, viruses and trojans. These are people who should know better. Sometimes their kids have disabled the virus scanner because it "slows the computer down too much". Not to be insensitive, but if that's the case then get a faster computer or get off the fucking internet. There are three people who I have been cajoling and brow-beating to change their ways when they are online and, bless them, I think some of it is finally starting to sink in.

When somebody gets behind the wheel of their car and drives it through a crowded fruit stand, the least we do is take away their license. When somebody gets on the internet and, through ignorance, laziness or incompetence, hands the keys over to some junior script-kiddie, the least we should be able to do is pull the plug on their connection until they can prove that they have changed their ways. If that doesn't work then I'm all about putting a bullet through their CPU as a mercy-killing. Grrr.

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I will let atara tell about it since she was there too, and she is better at relating these things than I.

I do need to grouse about the fact that I didn't catch any fish. Oh, and it was fucking cold and wet almost the whole time we were there. On the plus side that kept the black flies down, and there were no ticks. On the down side... mosquitoes mosquitoes mosquitoes. We got swarmed up there, then returned home to swarms of biblical proportions.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures from the trip.

( Behind a cut tag, of course. )