And that link works. Though Wikipedia, along with Craigslist, Google, and other sites, are doing their black-out protest of SOPA and PIPA today, Wikipedia have made sure that their detailed article on why these two are bad, is visible to everyone.

Protest, everyone in the US. This is our only chance to tell Congress and the Senate just how stupidly bad this legislation is. The fact that hardly anyone involved in it understands how the internet works is actually not the worst part about this piece of legislation. Protest if you’re outside the US as well. If SOPA or PIPA, or both, are passed into law, the US-based websites you visit every day could be lost to you.

SOPA gives a game publishing company the power to legally shut down the entire domain Gamespot.com, if they think that posting videos or screenshots from one of their games is a copyright violation severe enough that it needs to be stopped. The company making this request is not required to notify Gamespot, or ask them to remove the content–which is already their right, and if asked, Gamespot is legally required to comply–and Gamespot would remain offline until they can prove they were innocent and didn’t know that copyright was violated. SOPA also gives the MPAA and the RIAA the ability to create “black-lists” of site that they want taken down or censored, and the legal right and ability to make that happen. So in theory, if this bill goes through the US Congress, the entire world could lose access to Gamespot, or for that matter, YouTube.

WIkipedia has suggestions on how people outside this country can protest by contacting their own governments. Let’s get this ball rolling. Protest SOPA and PIPA.

Except the replacement memory isn’t working either. And it’s not working in exactly the same way the first one was not working: Whenever it is installed, the computer refuses to power on.

I express my sympathies and apologize for the hassle, and we start troubleshooting and reseating parts. The last part is a bit of a challenge, since the lady in question has never installed memory before, she paid a computer tech to come out and do it for her the first time. But she is a fast learner and good at following instructions, and we chit-chat off and on as she attempts to reach in behind the snake pit of wires inside her Pavilion computer to get to the memory slots. She eventually does, and we manage to get the memory correctly seated in the slot, and start up the computer. Or rather, we try to — nothing happens.

As we work on removing the memory, to prepare for the next troubleshooting step, the customer again comments that this is exactly how the first memory behaved as well. I try, as discretely as possible, to hint that perhaps the memory was not correctly installed, since that could cause the comptuer not to POST, but she doesn’t think so. The reason she doesn’t, is that she paid a computer tech to come out to work on that first memory module. The computer started, but didn’t recognize the new memory, so she had innocently suggested that the memory might not be installed right. To prove to her that it was installed correctly, the tech reached into the case and removed the memory and showed her how to install it, to prove that it had been done right the first time. Without turning off the computer first.

I almost managed to hit “mute” before I choked on my coffee. Almost.

When I’m done coughing and I can breathe again, I hear the customer on the other end, confused, “Hello? Are you still there? Hello?”

I assure her that I am still on the line, and apologize for my sudden silence. I then spend the next minute or so desperately groping for words that won’t get me in trouble with the supervisor that sits at the desk next to mine, but eventually I am forced to once again apologize for staying silent. This time I felt compelled to add the explanation that I was a little bit stunned, and searching for words.

I eventually manged to find a polite and kind way of suggesting to the lady on the phone that she should seriously consider hiring a technician from another store next time, and that we needed to power off her computer and take the new memory out right away, before more damage was done. I then moved on to explain, as gently as I could, the consequences of removing or inserting components into a motherbord while it is powered on, and promised that we would send a UPS driver to her house to pick up the replacement memory if she wanted to return everything for a full refund.

She said she would take her computer to another store and have them look at it before she decided, and then the very charming and well-mannered lady went into a fuming angry rant about how the first technician owed her a refund. Now that I am no longer being recorded by work, I can openly say that I fully agree with her.

While I was preparing to make coffee, I accidentally shattered the glass beaker to my French press. I have no other coffee maker.

Life is unfair.

There are, of course rumors, speculation, and all sorts of gossip, but I don’t particularly pay attention. He stopped at my desk on the way out and said goodbye, and I said I was sorry to see him go, and wished him good luck.

Not only did work just become considerably more difficult… it also just became a lot more boring.

Lvl 1 rep: Who does our Tech Support from China? I have an email from a customer and I don’t know where to reassign it to.

Me: Well, the European office does the European countries, but everything else goes through us here in the US.

Lvl 1 rep: So I’ll redirect him to the UK office?

I am scared now. And I want to know which school she went to, so I can warn my friends not to send their kids there…

The parking lot behind work, 10:20 AM this morning. About time!

My name is Mimsy and I am a makeup addict. It has been a little over a day since my last purchase.

It was a black tinsel mascara. It is shock full with small silver flakes that grab on to each individual lash and make them a discretely glittering black and silver. The mascara itself is lengthening without causing lumps or spider legs, and the wand is small and easy to use. It is one of the rubber elliptical wands with spikes that has become so popular with mascara makers recently, but because it is small and the bristles thin and long, it works surprisingly well. Reaching the small lashes at the inner corner was easy and there was no mess whatsoever. In addition to that, after the over-whelming Sephora fragrances it was a nice change of pace to wear a mascara that smells of practically nothing.

It started when I was, I think, 7 or 8 years old. I used to try and borrow my mother’s makeup when she wasn’t looking, and as soon as she discovered that she put them away, out of my reach, and I started using anything else I could find that left colored markings on rough surfaces. The red sharpie was a mistake… though it looked stunning until it stared causing a rash.

And then the break-through happened, that really got me hooked. My uncle started dating a nice woman who was a professional makeup artist at a Max Factor store. They were allowed to take home anything that expired or went out of style, and needed ot be removed to make room for the next big collection, and she gave it to us to play with.

I took one look at myself in the mirror with bright purple eyeshadow and blush, matched stylishly with equally bright orange lipstick, and have never looked back.

I have learned a lot about makeup since I was nine years old, and not only that one should never mix purple and orange, unless you’re a part of the home crowd during a Phoenix Suns game, but other, less visible things.

I have learned that if you’re on a tight budget, it’s still a good idea to spend a little extra on a very good cleanser and moisturizer. I have also learned that extra virgin olive oil is a better eye makeup remover, at least on my eyes, than anything you can buy at Sephora.

I have learned that if you’re in a hurry in the morning, take your time with your concealer, primers and foundation, and rush the rest. If the foundation is done well, you can slap on a bronzer over the center eyelid, a black eye pencil on your lower water line and mascara, do your lip gloss in the car, and the end result will look very good when you arrive at work. On the other hand, if you rush your concealer and foundation, it doesn’t matter how good your eye makeup is, the blotches around your nose and under your eyes will ruin the effect. The foundation and concealer create the canvas the colors go on, and a canvas of poor quality makes for a bad panting, no matter how skilled the artist or how high quality the paint.

I have learned that when selecting and applying your colors, you should balance them so that the focus is either on your lips or your eyes. Only goths are allowed to apply heavy and/or dramatic colors to both.

Tangent.

If you are goth, invest in some quality eye pencils and shadows. Heavy black eye makeup that smudges and runs, spills, and falls out all over your cheekbones and eye sockets is ugly and makes you look like cheap white trash. :P

If you’re short on money, there are all sorts of outlets and clearances stores online where you can get good stuff at a reasonable price, as well as a multitude of small businesses making their own products and selling them online.

End Tangent.

Another thing I learned is that if you just make sure that you’ve bought a high quality base coat and top coat, you can make the bright colors in the dollar store clearance bins last for days with just a little bit of edge wear, and no chipping at all.

I have learned that primers do help and could even be considered a necessity. They make eye shadow last longer without creasing and make the colors brighter, and they prevent foundation from smearing on the chin, around the nose, and from gradually going blotchy in oily spots.

I have learned that there is a reason there are so very many kinds of makeup brushes and that they all have their purpose. That synthetic bristle dries slower than natural hair, that I don’t care for the paddle-shaped foundation brushes at all, and that applying mineral powder foundation with a large kabuki brush is by far the quickest way to do it.

I have learned how to blend, and how not to over-blend. I have learned how to do precision work with thin eye line brushes, how to apply lipstick in a way that makes it last a lot longer, and how not to be afraid to experiment with any color combination, now matter how insane it may seem at first. As a side effect of that last lesson, I have also learned exactly what works, what doesn’t, and what to put around my eyes to look well rested when I am anything but.

Above all, I have learned is that by putting on different shades in different ways, I can become whoever I want to be. We humans judge by appearance, and makeup alters appearance more than I think most people realize. What we put on our faces tell people who we are, or at least who we want people to think we are. It’s a more complex form of a mask, it’s a subtle way of taking control over how the world around us perceives us.

But most importantly, it’s fun, and it is an addiction I hope I will never recover from.

B tells me her sister has a laptop that is her life-line to the world. She takes online classes while desperately looking for work, and she can’t do either without a working computer, so B is trying to help her get the laptop fixed as soon as possible, without it being too expensive, since it’s refusing to boot. The sister is on a borrowed netbook for now, so she can get her classes done, but that is obviously not a good long term solution.

Instead of booting the laptop goes to a black screen with white writing that says, “A disk read error has occurred; press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart”. When you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the laptop restarts back to the exact same error message, and stays in that loop until you cut the power.

B is one of our customer service agents. She is not a computer whiz by any stretch at all, but she does know all the basics of how they work simply because she has to know that in order to do her job, and that’s how she got involved in this laptop situation to begin with. Her sister asked her to come with to meet with a computer tech she found via Craig’s List, who promised to charge only a meager $75 to diagnose and fix any computer problem. The sister apparently has about as much computer knowledge as Homer Simpson’s grandpa, and she wanted B to come with and make sure she wasn’t being scammed by someone trying to take advantage of her desperate need for a working laptop. (So while the sister might be ignorant, she obviously isn’t stupid.)

They arrived, with the laptop, powered it on, and the tech looked at the black screen with the short error message and the reboot loop, and then declared that the problem was due to a conflict between Norton 360 and Windows, and they needed to do a repair install, and he’d be happy to sell her the recovery disks.

That’s where I interrupted B with a “Please tell me she didn’t pay him…!”

B shook her head and scoffed. “I got us out of there before they tried to charge us for that kind of crap. I mean, I’m not an expert, but I thought that message meant the hard drive is bad?”

It does.

The laptop is on the floor behind me as I type, and failing a disk diagnostic test more spectacularly than I’ve ever seen a hard drive fail. I doubt I’ll even be able to get any data off of this thing. So when I see B again tomorrow I get to tell her that the good news is that she was right. The bad news is, her unemployed sister will need to spend some cash on a new hard drive and a couple of Toshiba restore disks.

It usually begins in roughly the same way as when someone tries to scam you. They send you an email. In that email they put a message deliberately written to startle and alarm you, since a person who’s a bit rattled is less likely to remember to be careful with their log in information or to pause and think for a moment. The email might look like this:

Dear Skype Member:

Attention! Your Skype account has been limited!

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the Skype system.We recently contacted you after noticing an issue on your account.We requested information from you for the following reason:
Once you log in, you will be provided with steps to restore your account access. We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.
Click here to activate your account **URL removed for security reasons**
2010 Skype Limited

This email looks genuine, and anyone who has purchased Skype Credits, or is paying for one of the services they offer (caller ID, voice mail, et cetera) is of course not going to want to lose that money. That’s why the first line says “Attention! Your Skype account has been limited!” It’s intended to frighten you and distract you from paying too close attention to the rest of the email. If you are unfamiliar with this type if email scam that opening line is an open threat to take your account away, and worried and perhaps a little frantic, you immediately click on the link in the email to reactivate and verify your account.

When you do, then as soon as you type them in your user name and password are recorded by the scam website. Your log in information is now in someone else’s hands, and by the time you have finished reading this sentence, so is their Skype account and the credit card information stored in it.

Even if you stop when you realize that the page doesn’t look like the official Skype page, and close the window and delete the email, you could still lose your account, just from clicking on the link; sometimes just visiting a website is all it takes. Sometimes opening the email is all it takes.

You see, emails can have scripts and/or html-code in them that activate when you open the email, and attempt to install malware, hijack your browser, and various others nasty things. If you have an MSN email account, you should be familiar with the yellow bar that appears at the top of emails with the phrase, “Attachments, pictures, and links in this message have been blocked for your safety”, and a link that lets you view the blocked content if you want to. Microsoft added this feature just to stop attacks like that, and to give you a chance to look at the email and judge whether it is safe to show the extra content or not. Use it wisely, by pausing and thinking it over before clicking to see the links.

As a matter of act, all email clients, either web based email ones like Yahoo or Gmail, and installed ones like Thunderbird and Outlook, have their set of risks s well as their own lines of defense.

The vast majority of web based clients today have contracts with anti-virus companies to help keeping the email secure, for example if you have a Yahoo Account, all your email attachments are scanned with McAffee before you can open them. If you are using Outlook, your resident anti-virus will offer to act as your email scanner on installation. (You want to accept that offer, by the way. You really do.)

This takes us to the next part of this little guide…

…EMAIL ATTACHMENTS ARE DEADLY

Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. However, nearly every single friend or co-worker who needs my help removing a virus from their computer needs that help because they opened an electronic greeting card from an email address that looked vaguely familiar, or because they opened a file named adorable_puppies.gif that a stranger sent them, without first scanning it with their anti-virus.

If you’re lucky, these types of malware attachments are simple nuisances, like a little browser hijack that redirects your google searches to porn websites. Granted, this becomes a bit awkward if your 12 year old daughter uses this computer for online research for her school projects, but it’s not at all the worst that can happen.

The malware may take over your computer so completely that nothing can be done. Hopefully you had copies of those tax records and wedding photos, because you probably won’t get them back once you’re done reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling your Operating System…

Still not the worst that can happen.

The worst that can happen is that the email attachment installed a keylogger, and the next time you log in to your online banking account, the keylogger registers your keystrokes and memorizes your login information. You never know about this, because the first thing the keylogger did when it installed itself was to disable a few processes here and add a few others there, and hide itself from your anti-virus, so it can sit there and phone home to its heart’s content, sending over all the information it has memorized. This gives the origins of the keylogger access to your banking information, your credit card information, your mortgage… oh, were you among the millions of Americans who submitted your taxes online this year?

I’m sure you can see where I am going with this. A worst case scenario rarely happens, but that’s not from a lack of trying on the malware authors’ part.

SO WHAT DO I DO?

Thankfully, the threat of email attachments is easily avoided. To begin with, make it a rule to delete any and all attachments from people you don’t know. It doesn’t matter who they claim they are, if you were not expecting them to send you a file, delete it without opening or downloading it.

If you are expecting a file over email, or if it is from a person you know, you still want to be very careful. If they have malware on their computer without knowing it, they will give it to you via email. Yes, malware spreads by emailing itself to everyone in your Outlook address book. Your college professor, or the company you just emailed your resume to, will probably not appreciate that…

Because of this it’s important to remain cautious with any and all email attachments, regardless of who they’re from. Never open them straight from the email, never run the file, even though Internet Explorer will want to do that rather than save it. Always, always, save the file to a location where it’s easy to find, and then scan it with your anti-virus. Only open the file if it comes back clean; if the anti-virus says it’s infected, follow your antivirus program’s recommendation for what to do with it. If you’re not going to follow its advice you might as well uninstall it since it’s not going to be of use to you anyway.

Remember, paranoia is a virtue, and no one on the internet will ever give you anything for free. Not even advice.