You know, I think I might just make that the name of this blog. “My Life, and Other Tragedies, a blog by Michael Bertrand”. Has a nice ring to it.

Anyhow. Fate continues to fuck me over. Spent a lot of energy yesterday fighting that goddamned adware infecting my browser.

Oh, but that was not nearly hell enough, so the Demon of Stupid infected me once more and in an attempt to deal with the adware, I uninstalled Chrome, my web browser, without thinking ahead far enough to think, “Um, how am I going to re-install Chrome  without a working web browser?”.

Cue maximum duh.

So I spent a lot of time trying various measures. It IS possible, and there’s a number of ways of doing it. My first plan was to download the Chrome installer to my laptop and then email it to myself.

But no, Gmail will not let you email executables. Makes sense if the idea is to keep Grandma from running that free kitten screensaver some nice random person sent her, but frustrating to me,.

Then I tried to upload it to my DropBox, only to find that my DropBox was full. It told me I had 7.9 gigs of stuff and that my limit (after the free trial that I got with my computer expired) was 4 gigs. It told me that I now had to get a paid plan or I would not be able to upload anything more.

Luckily, I knew that was bullshit, and eventually I figured out how to access my DropBox without paying. The idea was that I would just go in there and delete enough stuff to be under my limit then upload the Chrome installer so I could download it on my PC.

But try as I might, I could not find whatever was taking up all that room. There was a few large-ish video files but together they added up to less than a gig. And all the other directories were empty or nearly empty. There certainly wasn’t another 7 gig anywhere.

So honestly, the whole thing started to seem like one big scam to me. They tell you that you are over and make it seem like you have to sign up for a paid plan now, counting on you to just assume they are right and pay.

But it’s a big ol lie. No matter how little you have, they will tell you it is full and keep you from uploading anything more. The real deal is : pay us or you can’t use the service, period. They are just pretending it is still free.

This was confirmed when I tried to download the files in the one directory that had some files of significant size in it, figuring I would download them to the laptop then delete them from my DropBox. Well whaddaya know, that didn’t work either! I just ended up with a blank html file instead.

So screw you, DropBox, you shady sons of bitches. You have competitors. Next time I will go to them,

And then I tried getting the latest Firefox via, of all things, FTP. Yup, FTP is still around and Firefox, being the only truly independent browser, still maintains an FTP site where people can download the latest version of Firefox.

Except no, FTP could not connect. Dunno if that was because of the malware or the site not existing any more or what, but that didn’t work either.

Oh, and before you ask, I couldn’t use Microsoft Edge or Microsoft Explorer because they don’t work on my computer because of stupid Win 10 reasons.

Then I decided to play my ace in the hole and consult my furry friends. They suggested many things, but they were all things I had tried to do and failed. By this point, I was riding the ragged edge of despair.

Luckily, I suddenly remembered that I actually did have another browser installed : one called Tor, which I downloaded and installed out of curiosity after reading an article about how it was this super secure and/or private browser that left no traces behind and therefore was used by like, drug dealers and such.

Turned out not to be all that exciting, so I forgot all about it until, thank goodness, it came to my rescue and let me download Chrome.

So yay…. back to zero! What a victory.

I still had that goddamned adware malware thing to deal with. So once more I consulted the fuzzies. Someone pointed me towards a rather extraordinary program called TRON.BAT which is a Windows batch file that runs a simply staggering number of programs that “clean up” your computer on every possible level, including some of the strongest anti-virus and anti-malware programs available.

So, after finally getting to play Mass Effect 2 (I beat the first one) for a while, I set the thing to run and went to bed. The instructions said that it would take between 3 and ten hours to run, and that seemed like an overnight job to me.

So I get up this morning, reboot the computer like the instructions said, then opening my browser… and the adware was still there. Fail!

However, it seems to be gone for now. Fingers crossed. Perhaps there was just a little left over that my computer had not yet eliminated, I dunno.

Even when it was still there after TRON.BAT, all I had to do was click close on the tabs it opened in order to get rid of them. So that’s not that big a deal. Very annoying, but a lot better than having it disable the browser entirely and attempt to do the same thing with my entire computer. I choose to count that as progress.

So the last three days have kind of sucked. At least I got to finish the first draft of the second version of my TV pilot script, and upload it to Moodle. So that is done.

I have other assignments that I should work on, but meh. I will give them a good try tomorrow morning and evening.

Today, I will freaking relax.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.