I'm so angry .......

Morning All

hope everyone is well?

I was going to make mention of a few things that had bothered me this week.

I had managed to do nothing during my birthday week ( I have a personal tradition of taking leave on my birthday as I refuse to try to hard on that day), but the trapped nerve in my shoulder, that I have made mention of a couple of times before, put paid to doing little else than a little web surfing and , for a change , a little painting.

Do you like her?.

I know I'm not as good as some, but it keeps me quiet.

I even did a little "fiddling" with various Graphics programs I have on the computer, just to see what I could do with them.
But, I suppose it’s my own fault. They seem to be really good programs in the whole, but all I have ever done with any of them is to “cure” a couple of photo’s of some red-eye. But, for all the filters and Special Effects you can apply I still think I prefer the original.(left)

The best of the altered ones (mainly because it is so obviously different from the original) is the Pen and Ink filter image (right). The other attempts where so "inconclusive".
Maybe it was the type of image I was trying to alter?
As you can probably see , the “finished article” barely fitted onto the optical bed of the scanner, and some of the "full size" images I tried to take with the digital camera were just plain awful.

Anyway, back to the original "moan".
I have just spent the first hours of Sunday Morning trying to remove some "additional" software that I didn't ask for.

A couple of days ago I down loaded a couple of programs, one a game and the other a plug-in for MSN messenger beta 8, and hadn't got round to installing them until yesterday.

It was one of those things that happens, I guess. Games are always a good thing to find in our house. Although we have quite a few “favourites” that seem to have moved from computer to Computer as we have upgraded the hardware over the years, it is also a very good thing to try something new. And MSN is one of those programs that everyone seems to use, to some extent, but I have never really got the hang of (or particularly liked). but, after reading a few items over the past few weeks, I thought that a little extra “facilities” may well have been the cure for this malaise.

As the Rugby was on last night (well done Wales - GRRRRRRR) I just turned the computer off and settled down to watch the match (weren't England just terrible - Wales played well and deserved the win). Anyway I turned on my computer this A.M. to find that the spyware detectors were going mad. Both the home page and search defaults were trying to be altered (Microsoft AntiSpyware - beta was the program in question - and what's the world coming to?. Someone recommending a Microsoft program -  ). Not only where these functions of Internet explorer being stolen off me (because that's how I feel about this sort of thing - they are stealing your right to choose away from you) but the SpyWare had added two additional "dubious" tool-bars to the IE front page.

In the first instance I'd blamed the game - as I have had "problems" with things being attached to seemingly good free games , so I removed it. I then did the usual “paranoid” type things that I do in these types of circumstances (system restores, scans with both Adaware/Spybot and then a virus scan on top - paranoid or what?).
But it wasn't the game.
It was a supposed "safe" plug-in for MSN Messenger.

What annoyed me even more was the lack of warning.

Other programs had had the courtesy to pre-empt you about what is going to happen - but this did nothing of the sort . Not only did it steal my Internet explorer settings, but also those of Firefox.

I am seriously ANGRY.