Even though I used to do some IT work, I was a Mac guy at the time…and the tools were totally different than on the PC. And… that was eons ago… the internet was much younger… and spyware was almost unheard of. I had a long battle yesterday with Spyware…about 8 hours, all told… including lots of drive scans. I was tired and had pressed a button, allowing something to be installed that I normally would not have. Regretful decision.

I have used a number of tools over the years to protect myself from viruses, spyware and sluggish computers. One the biggest pieces of “bloatware” was System Mechanic (and yet, I just kept buying the latest versions when they came out each year!)… which purportedly would keep your machine running speedily and watch for errors. That was assuming, of course, that it didn’t fall asleep in the middle of the job… which it often did. Utterly maddening. I also used Avast, which is a good anti-virus program… completely free to the home user, and does a great job of keeping itself up-to-date (pretty much on a daily basis)… however, it really has a tendency to slow down your system.
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I’ve had my eye on Tim Ferriss for 2-3 months now. When I read a bit about the concept of his forthcoming book, something about it got my attention. I should begin by saying that I don’t generally buy a lot of self-help or get-rich-quick books. But something about this guy appealed to me. When the audio book came out (my preferred method for literature consumption), there were some issues with it on iTunes…many people were complaining that it wouldn’t play on their iPods. So I waited a bit to buy it, but finally broke down and did so. It’s about 9 hours of material, which I devoured in a 24-hour period. I believe that there’s some important info in this book that plays into some things I’ve believed for some time.
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Yes, it’s late at night. I’ve been up re-launching my blog (God knows how many times I’ve done this…but moving from one host to another always kills me). I should be asleep, but Jonathan Coulton just came up on my iPod…so I’m gonna take a couple minutes to tell you about him before I sleep.

There’s a long story behind this guy…he’s quite the internet success story. But none of that really matters at the moment. He’s where he is mostly because he writes some really good songs. My kids will tell you how much I hate most music these days. Not because I don’t want to like it… I have found a few nuggets: John Mayer, John Legend, Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae all have some very decent songs out. But most of the stuff on the radio is junk…and truly, I find even much of indie music to be sorely lacking. So it was with great relish that I discovered Coulton on a podcast a couple weeks back.
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