About Me

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Lake Mathews (Perris), CA, United States
Born in Illinois, I grew up in Wilmette, a northern suburb of Chicago. I have one sibling, an older brother. I am married, for the 2nd time now, to Butch & got 4 children in the deal. They have gone on to make me grandmother 25 times over & great-grandmother to over 20!. After many years working in industry, I got my bachelors and masters degrees in speech communication, & was a professor in that field for 13 years. I retired in 2001 & returned to school & got my doctorate in folklore. Now I meld my two interests - folklore & genealogy - & add my teaching background, resulting in my current profession: speaker/author/entertainer of genealogically-related topics. I play many folk instruments, but my preference is guitar, which I have been playing since 1963. I write the "Aunty Jeff" column for the Informer, newsletter of the Jefferson County NY Gen. Soc. I work in partnership with Gena Philibert-Ortega & Sara Cochran as Genealogy Journeys® where we focus on educating folks about Social History. More about that: genaandjean.blogspot.com. More on our podcasts: genjourneys.podbean.com. More about my own projects: Circlemending.org.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

I've got them "Virus in my Computer" blues

I have spent the month of February in a virtual limbo. It began with my email deciding to take a vacation. After much fiddling and trying plans B, C, D, etc., my dear husband finally figured out that my computer and the latest version of Thunderbird were not happy together. He reloaded the prior version and all my emails miraculously returned. But, in the interim, I had been reading (and trying to answer) them on my Evo - Sprint Android phone, which was quite unsatisfactory. And because my husband was experimenting with the phenomenon on various household computers, my email was getting downloaded on the desktop computer, his netbook, and my backup laptop, which rarely goes on line. Now I had emails spread throughout the house. I am sure I missed some, though we did try to get them all rounded up (yee-haw, get along little emails!). If I missed something from you, please forgive me an resend. I did find that Facebook made a rather efficient backup system, though archiving the emails is much less convenient.

Once the emails were back up and I was on the road, I contracted a mean, nasty virus. And I mean one with fangs! Good thing: I have a habit of backing up my materials on a regular basis so all my latest things were safely tucked away on an external hard drive in case we needed to have the laptop wiped clean. Yay, that wasn't necessary, but my "baby" had to spend a week at Staples being disinfected. And boy did they do an amazing job (and for a more than reasonable price . . . glad I wasn't paying them by the hour). The laptop is home again. I run a virus scan on it more often than ever, and I am being extra careful. I am sure I opened something that let the bug lose in my machine, and it could have been at any time (some of them have "time bombs" so that when they are released, it is days or weeks past the time they were initially downloaded).

So, after about a month of singing the "I've got them virus in my computer blues," I am now singing a happier song, but working on more lyrics for something to unveil at a later date. I hope my friends in cyber-land proceed into the rest of this year virus-free and backing up their data over and over on various forms of media and in various locations (if your house catches on fire and takes your computer and all the backups with it, where are you then?). I use 2 external hard drives, flash drives, and an off-site service.

Tomorrow: I shall share an old campaign song.

1 comment:

  1. I really hate viruses! They cause so much trouble and headaches! glad you are back and the computer is doing better.

    ReplyDelete

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