I TOUGHT I LOST MY BLOG TONIGHT

You know my Mac is hacked.  I say that because it is true without a doubt.  The a-hole took over my little 17-inch iMac 5,2 and turned it into a Leopard server.  I read that Tiger 10.4 Macs made very good servers.  I won't go into all the torment, persecution, money and jobs lost, sanity threatened, well-being undermined, etc.  You can guess if you have half an imagination.

I got desperate to get rid of this guy the other day, not that I'm not always desperate, but now he's used up all but a whif of memory and the poor thing is dying.  I went to the Ethical Hackers Network forum and posted my problem looking for advice.  What I really wanted was for some good soul, some once black hat and now white hat hacker to come forward and tell me he'd hack my Mac back.  But instead I got two replies telling me to pack it up and move on.  The one reply suggested that I might try not broadcasting on the Internet or something like that.  I didn't know what he was talking about until I saw the link there.  I clicked on it and was staring at MsRefusenik's 400 Google mentions, many of them taken from private sources.  I flame across the Internet and I guess now I am paying the price.

I checked my Gmail account today and happened to notice a lot of drafts--over 220.  That didn't look right to me.  I started opening up the ones that said "no subject."  They were all scripts--probably Trojans he put there.  I began to delete and there were so many I just got overwhelmed and gave up.  I had to get out of there.

Then tonight I went back to pull the plug on Buzz.   I had just read the above article, "Top 10 Privacy Tweaks You Should Know About," by Kevin Purdy,  originally published in Lifehacker.  It's a really good article and one you should pick up just for the links on how to do a background check on yourself if nothing else.

I had just been wondering last night what this Buzz was that has appeared on my Gmail page.  I read somewhere on Google that you would get more traffic for your blog by linking to it, so I did.  Kevin says no, no, no.  It's the last thing you want to do.  Buzz exposes parts of your e-mail; namely your contacts and a profile page, and I'm not sure what else.

So I'm there to try to get Google to limit my public exposure, and lo and behold, I see above all my mail a huge banner with a picture of me, parts of profile taken from my blogs, and a bunch of personal info.  They wanted me to give out my e-mail address too.  All of this was going into Google pages I read.

I could not believe it.  Without reading the whole thing, I just checked where it said "delete."  The last line I saw vanishing said that my blog was attached.  I was outraged.  How could Blogger do this to me?  I have about 50 posts in this thing, and there's some sentimental value as an online journal.

My heart was beating fast as I jumped all over the help pages looking for how to undelete it.  I searched the topic in the help forum and was relieved to learn that some people actually got there's back.  I followed one suggestion and went back to my dashboard and just kept clicking on the "Save All" or whatever it says on the bottom of the page to bring up the extra blog there's not room for which is always the only one I still use.  I kept pushing that sucker and suddenly as if  by magic my sweet blog reappeared.

I still am angry at Google and Blogger.  Don't they know that we don't live in a world where we can afford to advertise ourselves anymore?  I'm re-thinking Facebook even though two good friends just re-entered my life after about a thousand years of being gone.

I have been a bit publicity hungry because I like traffic.  I like to have readers write to me, and I write back.  I think I've learned my lesson.  When will Google?

Anyhow I get to Gmail tonight