Day: April 23, 2007

Love, friendship, and the great divide…

D'Arque Bishop

Misty was given a bit of bad news yesterday. Actually, “bad” doesn’t quite cover it. She hasn’t exactly been handling it well, and I daren’t say I blame her. However, before I tell about it, let me give a bit of background on us…

Misty and I met on IRC something like twelve years ago. While we became close friends back then, we became involved with other people. Misty ended up having something of a relationship with this Australian named Craig, and I ended up having something of a relationship with Missy. Over time, both Misty and I ended up breaking off our relationships with Craig and Missy respectively, but we both remained good friends with them. Misty and I both accept that they have special places in our hearts and we have absolutely no problem with that.

Anyway, Misty had been on edge recently because Craig had been out-of-pocket due to eye surgery he had a month or so ago. She finally got in touch with him yesterday or the day before, and he apologized for not answering her, as his PC had been auto-signing on to his IM services. So, of course, Misty asked how he was doing… and he dropped the bombshell on her.

“Dying, actually,” he replied.

Apparently he was diabetic and had not been taking care of himself. As a result, his vital organs were beginning to fail on him. The doctors are unable to tell how long he has, though, but he’s making peace with himself. Misty’s not been handling it well, but I’ve been trying to comfort her as best I can.

It’s tough losing a close friend like that. I know I probably wouldn’t handle it well if something were to happen to Missy (which is a reason she never tells me when she goes in hospital or gets very sick). Still… at least we get the time we had with them, and such friends affect our lives profoundly, whether for good or bad. And losing such a friend can be an especially lonely experience; the best I can do is hope to be there for her, to comfort her as best I can.

I hope I’m up to the task of comforting her, and I hope Craig’s time left is as comfortable and free of pain as possible.

All right, Channel 2… what the hell?

D'Arque Bishop

Before going into this story, I have to admit that I have a low opinion of our local NBC affiliate to begin with. I tended to call them the “Shiny Things News Broadcast”, because of their emphasis on bright shiny graphics and little actual journalism content. In any event, I simply avoid them whenever possible. This afternoon, though, they managed to cause my opinion of them to drop even lower.

I got called into the administrative assistant’s office, to take a look at her screen. I walked in, and saw a popup from a site advertising something called DriveCleaner. She had tried to go to Channel 2’s website, and the popup had come up. She tried to click it closed, but we clicked the wrong part of the window and it tried to run a false drive scan. We closed it, and it attempted to force a download of the DriveCleaner installer. Fortunately, our proxy server blocked the download and all was finished.

Still, I was rather annoyed at what happened. Having spy/malware distributors as advertisers only lowers your reputation, and even I’m surprised a reputable station like Channel 2 would allow that. Ah, well. The problem is solved for now; I’ve blocked both the DriveCleaner and Channel 2 websites on the company proxy server, so hopefully we won’t have to deal with that crap now.

Of course, I’ll have to deal with coworkers asking why it’s blocked now, but I can handle that. :-)

EDIT – 8:35 PM – What the hell? The Houston Chronicle site did it to me too! Damnit, it looks like I’m going to have to write a couple of nasty emails to these sites…