Grey's Anatomy is dangerous

Grey's anatomy is dangerous. Yesterday I was facing physical harm and, little did I know, eventual digital harm (not my fingers... they're ok).

Early Saturday morning, I promised Katie that we'd watch the Grey's Anatomy season premiere on the big TV, which is now hooked permanently up to my PC. She'd missed it Thursday since she had to work late thursday night while LSUS bussed in students to work the "call center". So, she was two days behind on one of the most important events in her universe and was very excited by the prospect.

Katie and Emma went dress shopping (Emma stayed with us this weekend), so I took the opportunity to be sweet and download an HD version with no commercials. When I downloaded it, it was compressed to make it download faster.. and when I uncompressed it, I found that it had a virus and trojan embedded in one of the files I tried to access. Computer down.

Unfortunately, I wasn't alerted to the virus by a virus scanner... I don't have one of those on that computer. I found out when a "fake" virus scanner I hadn't installed popped up, along with 30 other messages about viruses.

It disabled my control panel, regedit, the task manager, and made IE almost unusable. I was facing impending doom. I stood between Katie and her Grey's Anatomy. Firefox was my only way out, and allowed me to search for a fix... downloading some lame malware scanner which deleted a gang load of files and jacked with a bunch of stuff in Windows. I scanned, and after 21 minutes, I had to restart.

I restarted and found that Windows no longer thought my version of XP was activated. Nice. I couldn't log in to windows, or even safe mode with networking. I could, however, get in to Safe Mode with Command Prompt, then launch explorer.exe to access the usual windows functionality. After much searching online (from another computer), I found a solution... and applied the fix.

After getting back into XP, we tried to load ABC.com in Firefox and IE, and was denied any video pleasure. It just never loaded. I downloaded the player, clicked everywhere I was supposed to... but got nothing. This was way too much work for a show I don't even like...

With that in mind, I brokered a deal involving the new episode of The Office (hulu.com never lets me down), the truffle shuffle, groveling, and the fact that I cooked Chicken Tiki Masala for lunch. Crisis averted.

Anywho, as we speak, Katie's watching a different version of Grey's Anatomy on the big TV and I'm free to listen to my music on the other computer and tippy-tap at the computer. Life is good again for her, and thus for me.