Man, Stupid is as Stupid Does.

Having a unshakable belief that the British State is both competent and has it's citizens best interests at heart my father is quite clearly an idiot. The evidence of his idiocy is so clear and manifold that it makes my every waking moment a constant battle to avoid stabbing him in the eye with a fork. Chief amongst his imbecilities though is that every time a dialog box pops up on his computer screen asking the simple question "Would you like to download the following software?" he is both mentally and physically incapable of clicking on the "No" button. This means that our shared PC rarely operates without the full complement of Google taskbars, Yahoo Taskbars, Microsoft taskbars and every other taskbar you can imagine. As nobody actually uses these background programs they serve no other purpose then to run on the system sucking up memory and processing power.

About 18 months ago, on one of my frequent trips to remove these vampire programs, I discovered that my PC had a virus on it but not any old virus. This virus was bespoke, having been designed specifically for that PC, meaning that it couldn't be detected by any off the shelf anti-virus software. Not only that but it had actually been specifically designed to nest itself within the Norton anti-virus software which I actually thought was quite clever. Obviously on discovering it I would have deleted this mal-ware straight away but it also had written into it a defense mechanism that meant any attempt to delete it or it's host programs would trigger it to attack the registry destroying those bits of software that told the PC that it was a PC. Since then anyone who has used the machine have been told in no uncertain terms not to touch Norton or they will destroy the computer.

Last night my father had the bright idea that he was going to update the computers security by first deleting the Norton anti-virus package. Obviously this triggered the defence mechanism, wiping the registry so now my home PC thinks it's a nest of occasional tables and I'm sitting here in an Internet cafe.

If this current system shutdown was a deliberate attempt to stop me talking about Zimbabwe, the economy, the defeat of the anti-terror bill or the legal action Iceland have started against the UK government I wouldn't mind that much, mainly because it clearly hasn't worked but there is no conspiracy here. The offending virus has been sitting on my PC for months like an unexploded bomb waiting for someone dumb enough to come forward and hit it with a shovel. Step forward my dad, what a plum!

It is a bit annoying though because I was planning to spend the day looking into the details of the apparent deadlock in the Zimbabwe power sharing agreement and possibly build up a portfolio of the more impressive torture photos so I could send it to my favorite charity just to remind them of the stakes of the game they seem to think they're players in.