A crippling virus and a foot of snow.

Wow. I didn't expect to be derailed so thoroughly and so soon. From a marketing standpoint I'm not sure that it could have happened at a worse time. It's almost the perfect example of what not to do when trying to develop readership on a new blog: Advertise in advance all over your other websites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) and create a buzz. Come out with a bang, guns blazin' and boldly tell the world there's a new sheriff in town. Write a long, detailed commitment promising your new readers to post regularly and without fail. Follow that up with a single post and then disappear for weeks without a word like a thief in the night, to never be heard from again. What have you stolen? Their trust, respect, attention, time and any chance they'll continue to follow you. Maybe I'll write a service piece called, "How to Kill a Blog Before It Learns to Walk."

My derailment was the result of a crippling computer virus that I contracted on Facebook, rendering my entire laptop completely useless. This was the H1N1 of computer viruses; devastating. On top of that, a day or so later, a major winter storm pummeled my area with a foot of snow and trapped me on top of my mountain completely preventing me from pursuing computer access elsewhere or seeking help for my critically ill laptop. I'm still partially snowed in to this day, but I'll talk about that and my recent snow adventures in a future post.

One thing, among many, that made contracting this virus so frustrating was that it was an honest and innocent mistake. When you catch a virus while surfing porn sites you're slightly more prepared when the bad news hits. Sure it still sucks, but you knew you were playing with fire. No one wants to get attacked by a 20 ft. crocodile while swimming in a river in Africa, but the reality of the attack is easier to accept than when it occurs while swimming in a lake in Indiana. It's the difference between being told you got AIDS from your one-night stand in college and being told you got it from your bowl of cheerios that morning. I feel bad for both recipients, but it sucks even more for the cereal guy.

Despite my "innocence", however, my carelessness and foolishness are partially to blame. I guess my guard was down. I use to get 7 -12 invites a day on MySpace from half-naked women asking me to come check out their websites. I would delete invitations without a second thought. My eye was so well trained that I could spot the impostor even if the picture was of a fully clothed girl next door simply seeking "friendship". I could smell a rat.

It's been months though, maybe a year, since I've gotten any friend requests period on MySpace and every friend request I'd ever gotten on Facebook had been legitimate. Things have been so good for so long that I just stopped locking my door. Sure I didn't know this girl and we had no friends in common, but she wasn't dressed that slutty. Maybe she was the distant, slightly slutty friend of a distant, slightly slutty friend. Stranger things have happened. I was skeptical, don't get me wrong, but Facebook had never let an impostor through to me. Maybe their was something to it. In my limited computer knowledge I thought that I was safe to examine her link (which didn't show any signs of porn in the URL) as long as I didn't click anything within that link if it turned out to be illegitimate. I didn't know that you could contract a virus through the link itself and I trusted my McAfee virus protection to guard me otherwise. With hesitation I clicked the link and sure enough a porn page popped up. "Well son of a gun", I thought as I quickly closed the page, feeling confident since I did so immediately without clicking any links. No sooner had I exited the page than my computer went completely nuts. The only way the ambush could have been any worse would have been if my laptop had burst into flames right then and there. I struggled fruitlessly for awhile to save my sinking ship, but this wasn't a boat with a hole in the bottom. This one had been blasted to smithereens by a torpedo. I was floundering in the water for pieces of wreckage to grab onto as opposed to bailing out water with a bucket while the orchestra played.

Although I know it's dramatic and shows that my perspective needed adjusting I actually put my head in my hands and casually stated to the empty room that my life was over. I had the same grief stricken, partially shell shocked response of someone who's just lost a limb. It seemed like so much of my life and communication was wrapped up in that laptop and the immediate, daily Internet access that it provided.

Over the next few weeks on the rare occasions that weather permitted me to barely escape my mountain or for a friend to barely get to me I sought the computer skills of friends and family. I owe it to this team of "doctors" that I'm writing this post on my laptop today. I can't say thank you enough to Steve, Evan, Big Chris, and Clint. They brought my computer back to life in stages, each time bringing it a little closer to full recovery and building on the restoration done by the person before them. I think my troubles are over, but I don't want to be too quick to promise as my computer is still doing something a little different at times when I try to shut down. On top of that, I'm still at the mercy of the winter weather here and things have been more about survival lately than anything else.

I'd like to kick the door open and confidently exclaim, "I'm back b****es!" but I've recently learned just how much that is ultimately out of my control. Maybe I'll leave it at, "I hope I'm back...we'll see."