Glenn Reynolds provides an enlightening look at the refreshingly bottomless topic of blog success and individual appeal. A few of his comments resonated with observations I've made over the past month or so. I sent him a letter supportive of the column. The subject-pertinent sections are good enough to reproduce for an entry, certainly.

[Glenn] brought up an interesting point about linking - how it truly has become a litmus test for trustworthy information employed in an argument, and how it is often valued directly by the number of cross-references or corroborations. I link as often as I can, particularly when hammering out some point on a comment-thread-cum-forum.

Of course, an expectation rises out of this in the blogosphere back-and-forth, insofar as "If I can't find it on the web, it must be suspect." Some subjects, unfortunately, are poorly represented on the web - nobody has yet (illegally?) dictated text onto a server or else referenced related sources considerably in their own work. I found this to be true with several topics that have become major discussions online as of late and, in the vacuum left by bloggers unable to find reading material within seconds from Google, this has lead to rampant speculation or worse.

To that end, it'll be interesting to see if the "Online Library" futura-commercials I remember from a decade ago, touting globally accessible information in the totality of a book, pan out. Until then, it's back to a heavy reliance on spine-bound paper to support ideas going straight to the weblog.

Granted, I easily found Francis Fukuyama's elusive "The End of History" speech online (on Google, within minutes); but after poring over an armload of, say, tomes on Japanese Occupation, I'm ready to take the blogosphere and online research with a well-deserved grain of salt. Hey, nothing deserves a pedestal - and by taking its limitations seriously, we're able to appreciate it more deeply.

I just spent the last hour or so cleaning spyware off of the boss' computer. He used his connection for the usual itinerary of innocuous tasks - weather, airport information, news - but after months of browsing with nothing more than an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer (we had neglected to upgrade him), his computer was, as I aptly described, "Dirtier than a Thai whore." All sorts of nasty, registry-embedded launchers, trackers, homepage-hijackers and phantom third-party software that had sought a habitat inside his laptop were immediately uncovered by our trusty copy of Spybot: Search and Destroy. After about a dozen sweeps, half of them before Windows load-up to ensure their separation from memory, we purged the computer of nearly all of them (something seems to be lurking, and we haven't found the silver bullet).

For an essay back in college I argued against the notion that computer media interconnection - which is to say, the internet - would successively deprive humanity of its essence. No, in fact, I was certain that the very stuff of humanity - philanthropy, journalism, scholarship, discovery, commerce, humor, trivial pursuits, peddling, fraud, theft, correspondence, worship, altercations and communication - would eventually master and gild the medium, and turn it into an extension of human activity no more foreign to each of us than a walk beyond our front door.

Some voices - even conservatives - decry what they see as the final shedding of innocence online, though one suspects that these people took early Eighties compuiter-cautionary tales like Wargames with such gigantic doses of salt that they consider the films works of fiction through and through; not to mention ignoring the market for pornography that was infamous by the early 1990s and well-organized only a few years later. Or the semi-psychotic behavior of serial gamers popping up around the same time who could only be restrained from chronic cheating by "No-alteration" policies or outright banning.

A few weeks ago I laughed at the thought of barely recalling those four-year-old memories of what browsing without pop-up windows was like, even pop-up windows for subscriptions or harmless offers from sites we know and trust. But it's a fair assessment, and returns me to my idea: the internet, once a bit of a close-knit community, has finally urbanized. Grant me leeway for a distended analogy: The skyscrapers are there for people who like them, as are the breathtakingly short trips one needs to take on the rapid transit system (critics can say what they want, cross-referenced searches on Google are unbeatable). A nightlife has started up, and you can almost always chat or exchange thoughts with someone of a like wavelength without much searching. The big city isn't for everybody, of course. While some ensconce themselves in it, some commute; and some mortally fear it, preferring to enjoy it through pictures per se, at a distance and at the most vicariously. The internet has its share of crooks, thugs, nutjobs, hobos, prostitutes, cops gone bad and souvenirs from sketchy neighborhoods that don't come out after one wash.

It's not a place for the complacent - probably never was to begin with, but the margin for error today is near zero, and getting closer all the time. For those of us who frequent it happily, the key is to leave naivety behind. Common sense never hurt anyone, anyway; nor did measured wariness ever destroy the enjoyment of everyday life. Being paranoid is many times removed from being a sucker.

A happy medium in perspective makes for the happy medium of webskirting. If you'll excuse me, the boss just called me back: that last bit of crap is giving a hell of a final fight.

UPDATE: It was Gator spyware, fighting me through fire and deep water. Then, I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountainside where he smote it in his ruin. Awful, nasty, purulent spyware. Spybot, incidentally, is a lifesaver.

Stories about the Mars Rovers launching NASA into the next stage of conquering the early mysteries of the Red Planet reminded me that no matter how tumultuous the affairs of men, heads are still turned upward.

Note the time index of the previous entry - yes, I drove it in this morning. My MySQL database is occasionally tempermental. I have no idea as to why - but my disposition to the problem is unquestionable. This drives me up the wall.

I'm waiting on the overwriting - the complete erasure of any and all binary data stored magnetically on a hard disk drive - of my coworker's computer's main drive. It is a ninety-minute process and the first step in upgrading him from Windows 98 Second Edition to Windows 2000. An irregular IT Tech made from serendipity, I welcome this as around the fifteenth time I've overhauled a computer system, one way or another. I've always been lucky enough not to fear computers - I grew up with them and, in fact, enjoy their capabilities quite a bit - but in the spring of 2001 I was given the task of replacing the innards of three work computers. They chugged along like steam engines in 1960, running on Pentium I processors and we were ready to pump them up to Pentium IIIs for many times greater processing speed.

What was necessary? Quite a lot. Before I was ordered to remake the trio, my experience with the inside of a computer was much like a layman in anatomy class: a whole lot of guts to be gawked at, few to be instantly recognized. Lots of small parts and ultimately, an intimidating sight. Upgrading the computers required a replacement of the motherboard and central processing unit - simple enough, but as anyone who has worked with computer software or hardware can confirm, nothing worked out as planned. Every single operation had unique difficulties, a few of them dogged.

In my lack of experience I had no idea how unstable a computer's operating system would become when major drivers like disk controllers, buses and bridges from the previous hardware scheme were suddenly disconnected from any physical function and beset by a slew of new drivers struggling to take their place as primary trains for data trafficking. One computer began reverting to an installation two times removed; another simply failed to start up. Miraculously, I managed to boot both up into network connectivity one last time before madly scraping every last bit of important data onto a safe computer. I then erased both disk drives - using the overwriting software I have now - and installed anew, repeating the process for the third unit.

Problems didn't stop there, of course. The hardware switch made nice, luckily, with the current power sources of all three computers (a luxury I didn't have when I recently upgraded a couple of computers to rip-roaring, energy-demanding Athlon XP screamers). Two of the three, however, saw to it that their 3 1/2" drives be fried to complete unusability; one went so far as to zap its CD-ROM drive and another frustrated me for a week with garbled, Space Invaders-like characters on the boot-up screen before it was determined that the motherboard itself was faulty. Intel obliged, and I was soon back to work.

But by the time I had raced through this silicon gauntlet, I had learned the geography and functions of every internal component. In the nearly ten projects since then - from modifications to units built from scratch - I've come a long way. An accidental tech, I now work to stay current, keeping my eye trained on PC Magazine's and ExtremeTech's reviews, and New Egg's prices. I'm not an expert and you could correctly say that I know well enough to be dangerous - but if hardware finagling were a game of Operation!, I'd do a fair job of keeping poor old Sam's nose from going red.

Here at work today, we thought we'd be enterprising by connecting an old laptop to a wireless network, plopping it onto a Lazy Susan in the conference room before taking turns playing Captain Picard, swinging the laptop around to people we'd just let enter by crying, authoritatively, "Come!," and showing them warp core efficiency flowcharts, personnel reports and starmaps at the edges of nebulae.

But for hardware, we chose Microsoft.

Suffice to say, I used to be quite confident in brushing aside all other complaints, economic or ethical, about Microsoft on grounds that their customer support was without equal. Polite, knowledgable, succinct, dedicated. Never disappointing, always impressive.

Since December, that seems to have changed. I had spent the last twenty minutes on the phone with a support technician before I concluded - myself - that the office terminal had been hit by the Klez virus. But before the conversation ended, I concluded that the fellow didn't know much more about code or operating systems than I did. In fact, I asked him and he answered: "Yeah, you're pretty much right. I have a screen in front of me that tells me the likely problem and steps to take."

Utterly ridiculous - on top of the fact that it took me about four attempts to pry that out of him. My queries of "Why are we doing this?" were met by silence or unconvincing dodges.

When I hung up the phone, I paused for a moment before rolling up the sleeves to clean out the five infected computers, and pondered what could be the fall of Bill Gates' empire. What happened to the computer nerds who used to be at the other end of the phone? Were their big-money positions relegated to some inner tier, now surrounded by a phalanx of off-from-college screen-readers to whom the word "tinker" meant "make 'Critical Stop' a ding instead of a chime" or "change the background to 'centered' instead of 'tiled'"?

After today's day-long ordeal, I may have seen a glimpse of pervasive mediocrity, perhaps intended by Microsoft to save money but more likely leading to a slow, inexorable collapse.

The boss made the first call: we wanted to hook the wireless network's base station into the wired network and set up connectivity software to enable computers on both networks to recognize one another.

The first Microsoft technician wasn't really sure about the whole plan, so he advised the boss to hold for a few minutes while he "Check[ed] it out."

Fifty-seven minutes later, he came back on. "Thank you for calling Microsoft Support for Broadband Wireless Networking, can I take your case number please?"

"You already have my case number," cried the boss, not at all relaxed by nearly an hour of anodyne string ensembles. "You were just talking to me!"

A string of confused half-words bubbled out of the man's mouth, and then, "Uh, what was your problem again?"

"Never mind," shouted the boss, and laid the phone in its cradle with a downward arc, generously exceeding the necessary application of pressure.

We spent about five hours wiggling about with it ourselves before we shrugged our shoulders, gave it an honest, "What the hell," and phoned Microsoft back. I made the call. The second fellow's native language was not English, but in fact the southwestern-most romance language, himself most likely from a country colonized by speakers of this tongue some 3,000-4,000 miles further to the south and west of the origin nation. Unfortunately, during my time on the phone with him, he demonstrated a classic lingual chasm. You see, when the performance value of a language is predicated upon prestissimo tempo and staccato articulation, one who does not speak the native language will be unable to comprehend verbalization that imports a) the rhythm of the native language and b) more than three-quarters of that language's pronunciation patterns into c) a language not at all improved upon by such modifications, even if nominally shared by both parties. In fact, speakers of this second tongue will become d) frustrated and eventually e) silently angry when the heavily accented, mile-a-minute speaker of the first language is f) clearly impatient with the other person's polite requests for several exchanges to be repeated - perhaps an effort to reengage g) more slowly and h) lacking the enunciative artifacts in a previous, unintelligible delivery - and, obtusely, i) does not realize the existence of items "a" through "h."

And, wouldn't you know, the poor fellow didn't solve the problem. At all.

In spite of the reported 250+ daily viewers to this site, I'm not putting chips on any budding IT techs to read this entry. Instead, the company will call on our trusty network printer provider; they're the sort of business that has its fingers in everything and works to supply every need for you. They've succeeded in expanding our relationship before - why not give them the old college try?

And besides, how difficult can it be to outperform Microsoft?

UPDATE: Good news for both our network aspirations and Microsoft's collective behind. "Ron" helped us out. "Ron" was very patient, kind and thorough. "Ron" is a pretty swell guy, so Microsoft gets to live another day.

The only demon indigenous to internet computing I loathe more than spam are pop-up windows. And, I'm sure, we all don't take too kindly to personal information, from passwords to browsing history, surreptitiously nicked from us, to be sold to the highest bidder in quarters too dark to contemplate - a phenomenon known otherwise as "spyware."

Worry no more! PC Magazine recently reviewed a slew of programs dedicated to the identification and elimination of spyware, pop-ups and other niggling little monsters that embed themselves in your registry and throw five offers for the unambiguously annoying and undesirable X-10 pervert security camera upon the instant Google loads up.

Surprisingly - or perhaps not surprisingly, one always wonders if "prevention" companies don't hedge their bets between harassed consumer and insidious marketeer - a good portion of the spy-killers produced either impaired or worthless results (even those with both purchase and subscription fees). It is of genuine distinction, however, that the Editor's Choice happened to be Spybot Search & Destroy, a shareware program cast from the forge of a philanthropic, German silicon wizard Patrick Kolla. It's easy to use, knife-edge succinct and deadly efficient; legitimate programs, such as auto-updaters for applications, can be separated from a compiled blacklist while everything else is pushed into the furnaces of bad-code hell. Don't want the gremlins to sneak back in? Weekly or bi-weekly updates have to this point issued warrants for 247 different programs that scuttle towards computers like deer ticks; with SS&D, Internet Explorer is able to block them at all times during web-skirting. You can even request a message to be sent every time one of the goblins gets swatted away.

After loading and executing the program, I have yet to see a pop-up window boil up from where it shouldn't have. Even if I didn't know the first thing about registries or discerning one automated beacon from another, SS&D could help me along with poignant descriptions - complete with wry, Continental European sarcasm. For the computer-intuitive, this gem is literally a breeze. It's powerful, reliable and free. At the end of every session, feel free to give into the ineludible urge to drop your hard-earned cash into Kolla's deserving tip jar.

"Look, can I have the eggs, bacon, sausage and spam without the spam?"

My story is the story of everyone who owns an e-mail account: each morning, while sifting through messages from contacts that arrived during the night, I delete about two times that number in unsolicited e-mails from undistinguishable sources like johnny 341 qwwxxxuritw, regarding indecipherable subject headings like And will she want the organ?. There's the licentious crowd, the easy money crowd, the vacation-for-two crowd, the crowd who has managed to randomly generate inconspicuous names of people I've nonetheless never heard of, and then the "fine art" website or webring that continually badgers me to plunk down for a John Singer Sargent - or, alternatively, submit my own work. Over the course of an average workday, I'll continue to be offered worthless purported products. I've heard some horror stories about a hundred or more junk mail arrivals; I receive less than twenty between four addresses.

That doesn't mean I'm not driven straight up the wall. I do not request any of these messages; none of my money has been set aside for patronage and, for fear of tapping a viral message, I've never actually opened one of the little scraps. In fact, just yesterday I warily scoped out a soliciation message from Orion's Blue Book, with whom I've done legitimate business in the past and from whom I might expect follow-up correspondance; unfortunately for the Blue Book, the message failed to scream "Orion Blue Book, Not to Worry!" and, thanks to the jokers flooding inboxes with disingenuous references to professional personal business, was nearly deleted.

That nearly crossed the line. I won't say that I'm not inordinately infuriated by spam - it's just that I'm too busy with far more important matters to devote an ounce of brains to the problem when I can effortlessly click twice and be done with the rubbish.

And I'm not entirely convinced that spamming will outlive its unquestionable unprofitability. I've seen the death of productless aggressive advertising: groups of two or three well dressed, fiendishly attractive, college-aged men or women would canvas office buildings in the hopes of browbeating or seducing, respectively, members of the opposite sex in order to build an array of targets for more solicitiation. We never gave them an inch - the girls or the guys - and two years ago, their kind of bad business vanished.

Good riddance (though I'd be happy to meet the women on better terms elsewhere). I have faith that spamming - really, a modern incarnation of the pushy merchant - will fall flat on its face as year after year shows a lack of commercial success; volume of exposure must eventually meet the brass tacks of sales. So while I protest not a bit to see heavy-handed regulation thrown in the face of businesses spending far more time devising methods of violating correspondance traffic than building an irresistable product, I expect to see the institutionalized harassment expire on its own.

Before it's replaced by something else, of course. But we're given a breather in between.

Mysteriously, a mouse variant displays a genetic immunity to cancerous tumors.

National Review Online's homepage has been hacked. Silver lining? We certainly know what our enemies are made of - they're idiots who can't spell "Palestine."

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds notes that this occurred at least as early as this morning. Josh Clayborn plays gumshoe and surmises that, when the hacker's callsign is cross-referenced with a suspicious URL, we're led to believe that the hacker is French.

If it's true - quelle surprise!

UPDATE II: Josh has continued to process information and reports; though I'd agree that the hacker's identity is irrelevant - Chinese hackers, for instance, deface our sites whenever an American-Sino incident occurs - we do have on our hands quite a rousing spring Sunday.