This past Tuesday was marked by over thirty tornadoes confirmed on the ground in our area. While there was a remarkable lack of direct damage from these storms they did result in a complete power outage for the surrounding cities lasting, for us at least, until earlier this afternoon. These events have forced me into a reluctant conclusion: I am addicted to technology. These last two days without electricity have been miserable, and I have no wish to repeat them. Unfortunately I may have no choice as the weather forecast shows many more such storm heading our way over the next few days. We can send men to the moon but it seems burying our power lines underground is beyond us.
The other day Avast antivirus released an update which caused many respectable websites, including Yahoo.com, to be designated as malware. This was a temporary inconvenience for many, but for a few it is an ongoing disaster. My grandmother is one such. Like many elderly people she has a limited knowledge of computers and she tends to trust what her security software tells her. Her Avast started telling her her computer had multiple viruses and naturally she started running a full system scan, in this case a boot time scan. Unfortunately she also trusted it when it started telling her most of her OS files were infected and she proceeded to let it delete them. After a while she decided something was wrong and called me. I went over to assess the damage and found her OS would no longer boot except in safe mode. After six hours of trial and many many errors I came to the conclusion that it could not be saved. Even an OS reinstall is not an option at this point because her restore partition was also corrupted. Not a fun day for her or me.
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
~G. K. Chesterton To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
~G. K. Chesterton |
Archives
June 2017
Categories
All
|