So I hit the road. I had been debating going down to The Liffey for dinner, find a restaurant somewhere else, order room service… I ended up driving home. I had a couple Norton Anti-Virus disks back there and thought I’d try using one of them to double-check for a virus, see if I could get things back in order. Mind you, it’s at least a twenty-minute drive, but at that point, I had other things on my mind than mileage on my car.
I walked in the door and no one was home. (I’m still not sure where the parents were, but I imagine they might have been surprised by the few changes that occurred while they were gone.) I peeked in the mail and found a package from Bill (from B&tG), so I pulled it out of the pile and moved it into my mail slot—I didn’t have the time nor patience to mess with it for too long at that point. I also turned on the TV, changed the channel to FSN and found out that the Timberwolves lost. Even more good news… But I managed to find two disks (there was a third, but it looked kinda old and I left it behind), so I packed them up and left.
On the way back to the hotel, I decided to stop at Perkins for dinner. I wasn’t thinking about getting anything spectacular, just something that’d fill up my tummy for a while. I ended up getting a shrimp and bacon wrap (something along those lines, anyway)—it tasted pretty good, but it also fell apart onto my plate. The waitress said they’d started making it that week, so they’d only had two days practice to get the proper wrapping technique down. Yes, I was still peeved about what was going on that night, but I told the waitress I was fine and that having to pick the food off my plate wasn’t a big deal.
When I got back to my hotel room, the first thing I did was try the two disks to install a different anti-virus program that might find the problem and take care of it for me. There was just one problem: they were waaaaay outdated. Even if I’d installed either one, it might not have worked, so I tossed both disks into the trash next to my desk. Since I still had the hotel’s wireless gizmo, I used that to click on the Security Center and it let me download the software (I got a free two-year subscription with my laptop, so it better have let me download it…). Thankfully, it was a DSL connection—if I’d been using dial-up, I probably still be in that hotel room hoping to God that I wasn’t picking up any more viruses…
Once I got the program set up again, I got the most recent updates and did a virus scan: nothing. So either the virus was doing an extremely good job of hiding itself or there was something else that was fucked up with the computer. I was out of answers and I still hadn’t used the hot tub. It was not a good day.
After another restart or two, I noticed that my laptop kept connecting to a network that wasn’t the hotel’s. It had a weaker signal and wasn’t nearly as fast, so I kept having to click on the “wireless connection” icon to change it around. I’m not sure if it was because I had to keep making that change, but I eventually went to “Network connections” and found a link to both networks. I also saw an icon for the wireless card in my computer. It said: “Inactive.” I activated it, restarted the computer… problem solved.
The only thing I can imagine is that when I turned on SofTest, it turned off everything else. And I mean everything else. I didn’t have a problem with that when I first registered the program to use during the bar exam—it obviously worked when I first got to the hotel—but maybe when I ran an actual test as opposed to a practice exam, the program deactivated the wireless card (it won’t let the user run any other programs, so why the hell not?).
To be honest, I haven’t checked and I’m not sure I want to. What happens if I’m wrong? Is the wireless card just taunting me before it shuts down permanently? Is my laptop shot to hell for the remainder of its existence? Am I infecting all of you with a virus by writing this and posting it on my blog? Like I said, I’m not sure I want to find OIsahtoiw7e90851o2hb5sDLTKHsaodthoqh5087ytoWuhgouLKishogls…
