1st January: Happy New Year

The Daily Mail in their consumate wisdom have recently (literally about an hour ago) published an article titled 'Happy Flu Year' which cannot be, by anyone's book, a really inappropiate pun of 'Happy New Year' at all. I mean.. what would possily make us believe that The Mail have somehow lost it and have to traumatise all those poor Flu sufferers by using them as a pun.

Besides.. Happy Flu? Who is happy with the flu? Of course, some people may be happy that certain others have it, but that's besides the point. I was lucky enough to escape it, and am not planning on catching it any time soon.

Although, as with most diseaess, it's not really anything you have a say in. I'd say that the only sort of diseases you have a say in whether or not you want them are STDs, although - naturally - there are other ways. If you are standing next to someone whose jugular has just been cut, when you happen to have a major cut somewhere on your person, whilst the person whom you are standing next to has an STD such as AIDs or any other disease carried through bodily fluids, then you run a risk of catching the disease. I also think that if you're standing next to someone who has just had their head sliced off, or their throat cut, then AIDs is the least of your problems.

You know how hard it is to get blood stains out of clothing?

I occasionally wonder what would happen should I drop dead.

Think of all the things which I never said to people; questions left unasked, veiled truths left unreleaved, outright lies left undenied. Then I think of the reasons why I never said those things to those people and realise that after I'm dead it doesn't really matter. Metaphorically, I'd have to get over it and find out what's going on after I'm dead. There'd better be an afterlife. Otherwise there's a gap in the market, which I'll rapidly fill. Custom-built afterlives? Of course... however, you'll owe me one thousand hours labour for every thousand or part of spent in your afterlife.

Of course, the part of bit could mean anything. I could say that one thousand hours is actually one thousand one thousandths of one thousand hours. Mathematically I'm correct. In practicality it doesn't quite work like that.

Apart from the things gone unsaid, I also wonder what would happen to the online identity which I'm building up. Admittedly, I'm not quite a household name such as Zezeima or some of the other famous people out there, but in certain circles I have recognition and - more importantly - some form of respect given to me. Would people ever wonder what happened to mediaboy? Would people ever wonder why mediaboy never seems to log on?

I mean - it's not like I'm going to tell you I'm dead, and there's no other point of reference for you to find out. It's a scary thought.

However, there was a contingency plan. Should I try to fly tommorrow, in an attempt to find out whether or not I do suffer fall damage, then there used to be a rather depressing folder on my computer called 'Read Me.' It basically contained letters that would say things which I'd never said in real life. Only nice stuff though; the nasty stuff could just be ignored. It contained an entry for this blog to be uploaded in the event of my death. It contained lots of other small wonderful things.

It was, basically, a great idea with one fatal flaw. I'm a security freak with this computer. To hack into it would take serious effort... and really - to be honest - by the time you've managed to work out my password, find the right folder, get through the junk and patter that I fill everything I write up with then it's all a bit irrelevant anyway. Whose in the right state of mind following someone's sudden death to go digging through their password-protected laptop in an effort to find files which they are oblivious to?

So, that was the great idea down the drain.

Don't worry, however! If I die, you will find out. Somehow. Generally me not logging onto MSN for a million and one years would be a good bet, although if you're still alive after a million and one years then I'll think that I'd missed out on something there...

Recently, as you would probably not expect, I've been coding totally random pieces of junk to sit around doing pretty much nothing. I'm using a mixup of MS-DOS Coding and VBScript to write little programs that do not much.

For example: I have one program whose entire purpose (remembering that this took me 10 minutes to code) is to insult people for 30 seconds whilst shutting down the computer, to be opened on the opening of another file, which crashes the entire computer through a memory overload. It's fun writing these programs, and having looked a little into coding, it's worrying just how easy it would be, for example, to write a virus which loads up your computer, aquires access into an administrator account, sets up network sharing with another computer, transfer the entirity of your computer HDD to another's and then delete itself and the link, leaving practically no trace of it ever being there other than a few mistimed 'last accessed' entries.

It's even easier to write one that starts up behind a fullscreen application where you can't see it and then rename one folder on your computer which is required for startup, completely trashing the drive until you reinstall windows. Or prehaps, if you were feeling particulary nasty, one that lets you load up the computer and log on before promptly logigng you off again... every single time.

Viruses are remarkably easy to write. The hard bits of using them are spreading them around the world and hiding them from anti-virus software. Although, having run a few scans on my computer to see what happens with these nice wonderful programs I'm writing, it seems to not class them as threats... even though they have the potential to wreck any computer which runs the application whilst having admin rights and a few other computers as well.

I do need to start testing the same applications when they are told to autorun, and while they are hidden as well. I need a junk computer to muck up though, as this laptop has become invaluable to me. Anyone got a computer that needs mucking up bigtime? I don't mind having a few test subjects.....

On the cheerful note of me being some sort of uberhacker, I think that I'll stop for the moment. I might continue at a later point.

PANIC!

Hehe.