Deeker's Message of the Week

August 17, 2003

What A Week!

As some of you may have read in the media, or worse yet had perhaps personally experienced, there is a very nasty virus/worm that has emerged on the Internet, called the Blaster virus (read more about it at www.sarc.com. I will refrain from making editorial comments about the assturd(s) responsible for unleashing this cyber-crap and go on to say that I was one of the people who was hit with the virus. I thought that my Norton anti-virus software was infallible and would always be there to protect my system from such nastiness. Much to my surprise, my system was exhibiting some unusual behavior, such as svchost.exe crashing. Next I tried to access Microsoft's support page, only to be shut out from it and thus being unable to download the necessary patch. I eventually was able to get it through Mozilla. Upon reading about the virus I discovered that my system was hit. I checked my virus definitions and was dismayed to discover that my definitions had not been updated since July 19th!. What the holy hell fuck?!

I tried to update the definitions manually, but I was getting errors and unable to download them, and consequently getting very pissed off. After doing some searching around Norton's site I found out that my version of software (2001) was no longer supported!. Thanks, Norton! Now I was twice as pissed, seeing that I have more or less been forced into having to upgrade to the latest version. I was desperate for a working anti-virus package, so I paid to download the latest software. About halfway through the goddamned download halted! I don't think there is a word to describe how pissed off and furious I was at this point. I screamed and cursed as loudly as I could and I smashed the fuck out of my keyboard. After I got calmed down I went to Wal-Mart to purchase a new keyboard, and a new, different anti-virus software package. I decided to go with McAfee this time. I was too pissed at Norton for what it had put me through and how it failed to deliver to me the updated version, after more or less forcing me to get it, never mind the fact that I renewed my subscription for another year's worth of updates back in June.

In the meantime, I had backed up all of my files to CD-RWs and reinstalled Windows 2000 from scratch, along with my applications. It took some time to get things back to the way I had them before, and because I was offline for a couple days and had to deal with getting my system back in order, I fell behind on emails. I think I have gotten back to most of the people who had written to me within a few days of August 12, the day the system went down. I'm just glad I don't live in the zone where the massive blackout occurred in the eastern United States. I'm sure there were people in that area who were trying to get their own computer systems restored, only to be unable to do so because of the power failure. Things could have been worse.

Guestbook Re-Opened

Some of you may have wanted to sign the Guestbook in the past few days, only to be greeted by the following message:

Due to current abusive activity from spammers, the Guestbook will be closed to new entries until further notice. My apologies for this inconvenience.

Some of you may have even been fortunate enough to have seen the unflattering message I had left for the spammers themselves:

To the FUCKWAD SPAMMER who has been posting his SHIT every day to my guestbook: You are wasting your time. I moderate this guestbook and I closely monitor the activity here. Every time you drop one your feces on my guestbook I DELETE IT RIGHT AWAY! NOBODY EVER SEES IT BUT ME! GO FUCK YOURSELF AND BURN IN HELL YOU FUCKING WORTHLESS PILE OF SHIT!!!!!

In spite of my rude message to them, spammers apparently don't read such messages, are incapable of reading (which I don't doubt other than the fact that they possess sufficient literacy to compose such garbage in the first place), or, they are so used to being flamed and berated for their very existence that they are numb to threats and insults, or perhaps they just don't care that they are the most reviled creatures in the history of mankind to be wasting oxygen. After I posted this angry, venomous message, I once again found a link posted to some porn site in a new entry. Even though I was deleting the spams before the guestbook was updated with the legitimate entries (nobody was seeing them except me), I was still getting tired of having to scrape their feces off of my Guestbook every time they stopped by to take a shit on my site, so I decided to suspend new entries for the time being and hope that the spammers would give up and find another site to wipe their asses with. I will continue to monitor the entries, but if the spammers and their ilk return I may have to suspend new entries again. Such a shame it is that all it takes is one turd to make the entire punch bowl's contents undrinkable. In other words, one rotten apple spoils the whole goddamn barrel.

Dude, Where's My Story? Part II

After enjoying some good weeks with several new stories and updates, the submissions have been rather lean in recent weeks. Perhaps I can blame the blackout for part of the reason since it affected a sizeable portion of the U.S. population and obviously these people cannot access the Internet if they don't have power and don't have alternative sources of energy. During such times when submissions are few I may be more lenient with posting the submissions I do get. Three of the submissions that I received, however, were not accepted in spite of the fact that I have so little going into this week's update. They all fit the Guidelines as far as content is concerned (only boys in diapers, no boys wearing girlish shit, etc.), but two of the stories were too short, and one of them was too poorly written to be worth my time to correct it. I've said it before, and I must say it again: size matters, and spelling, punctuation, grammar, capitalization, etc. do count. I don't grade stories as if I were an English teacher, and I don't demand perfection, but when a story has so many errors in it that I have to spend a half hour on each page to correct them all, it just isn't worth my time. For this week time has been especially crucial because of all the problems that I dealt with. If you expected your story to be posted but didn't, please consider the length of your submission and the quality of the writing and try again.

Drawings Page Corrected

Early in the week I was informed that the latest drawings were not available. I was not able to correct this problem since I did not have Internet access from home for a few days this past week and had all my web site files stored on backup CD-RWs. By the time I got back online it was too close to the end of the week to bother correcting it, so I decided to just correct the problem today and set the posting cycle to every other Sunday, starting with 8/17. I apologize to those of you who could not get any drawings this past week.

EARLY UPDATE FOR 8/24

Because I will be gone for most of Sunday and will be leaving early that morning (going to a family reunion), I am going to post the updates for 8/24 on the previous Saturday evening. This means that any submissions received late Saturday afternoon or that night will likely not be posted until the following Sunday (8/31).

Top Ten Story Downloads for Week of 08/10/03 to 08/16/03

Rank	Title	Section	Hits
1	JJ's Tapes 2	Contributed Stories	1653
2	Anon	Contributed Stories	1211
3	A Wizard in Diapers	Contributed Stories	926
4	Forever in Diapers	Deeker's Stories	391
5	JJ's Tapes	Contributed Stories	252
6	Europe With Grandma	Contributed Stories	218
7	Chris	Contributed Stories	207
8^*	Brian's Dilemma	Contributed Stories	205
8^*	Aunt Mandy	Contributed Stories	205
9	A Mother's Solution	Contributed Stories	190
10	The Ad	Contributed Stories	188

^*Tie

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Stay happy and thickly diapered!

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