Since I conduct my business from home over the net, as well as my contact with the outside world, being disabled, the sven virus assault combined last night with the hurricane which had me online trying to check on friends in the danger zone (I'm safely out of the line of wind in MA) had me tearing my hair. Several other friends who were in the chat were also.

Frustration 1) an editor was trying to send me a book to edit over the net and it couldn't get through.

2) I was doing mass wipes of email. I switched from simply doing single deletes to automatically blocking sender on things suspicious on anything that got past my isp and norton, because those things kept trying to open itself and sending it to a quartentine file that I set up myself and setting up an autodelete to go with it. Between the postmaster notifications, the norton quarentines, and my own manual defenses and the firewall blinking lights it added up to over 400 tries against the system. Then I ran all my clean up programs to make certain that I had not lost the battle despite my efforts. Then contacted my isp and etc this morning. Block sender was wiping out wholescale batches. Which sped things up. So I'm learning. I am not as computer literate as I would like to be, but I do seem to be resourceful in a pinch.

3) Add in the hurrycane. I know a lot of good people in the NC area. I sat on IRC off and on all day hoping that someone in the area would come on. Early evening Pff showed up. He's west of Raleigh. Pff, bless him, managed to get hold of someone in another window who was in Raleigh and reassured me that matters appeared to be under control there. By then the eye had moved up to Charlotte which I think is West VA. (my ignorance is showing, but at least I'm always willing to admit it.)