I'm getting REALLY TIRED OF THIS.

Klez notices in the morning. Klez notices during the day. Klez alerts from someone who's been on vacation and got a mailbox full of !&(*. Klez-infected files being spoofed with our email address, with other people's email addresses, with my email address, with the addresses of everybody in the address book of someone from another company who was assured she was safe. And when it's not Klez it's emails that can't be deleted because my users haven't all gotten the message yet that the preview pane needs to be turned off, so when someone's spam or other malware gets into their inbox, they go to highlight the email and it automatically tries to open and causes a crash - and then the users get all stunned-bunny about the idea that looking at the contents of the email message, even if it's only in the preview pane, is in fact a form of opening the message...

arrrrrgh.

I remember the days when Jan Harold Brunvand solemnly insisted that computer viruses were nothing but an urban legend of the cyber age. Of course, that was about two weeks before Robert Morris and his little internet worm (the prat went to my high school's brother school, which is why I remember the guy's name and not the worm's). I remember when you had to worry about strange floppies and infected downloads, but email wasn't any kind of significant worry. I'm not even 29 yet, let alone 30, and I'm a firping dinosaur - the generation coming up through the schools now probably hasn't got any kind of idea of what it was like not to have to worry about any of these things.

You know, considering the sheer number of epidemiology, international health, and maternal and reproductive health courses I took in college, I rather expected to write a paragraph like that about a different sort of virus altogether. Sheesh.

Today's pulp survival tip is #87. Don't try to get into a sanctuary only permitted to members of a certain religion unless you look like a member of that religion even when stripped naked for an hour.

"Jason, when you're at school,"

"do you get a sense that the other kids are different?" - Andy Fox, the mother in the comic strip Fox Trot, by Bill Amend.

Veggie Heaven, the local vegetarian Chinese place, now sells bubble tea. It's chock full of ice bits (too small and slender to be cubes, but too regular in shape to be crushed ice), and they didn't seem to have a head of foam on it when I bought my cup, but hell - it's bubble tea and it comes in six different flavours, and the mango variety is very good. So is their tofu with ginger and scallions lunch special, and normally I despise ginger in pieces that size. Even the brown rice was good... between the fact that I can finally get this stuff again (cold tofu and Lundberg Farms rice cakes with hummus just ain't the same), and the fact that one place can now meet the noontide needs of stomach, conscience, and thirst, I am a very happy camper. Mind you I'm a happy camper who got all suspicious for a moment when she looked up at a stoplight and saw a vehicle from Triad Security Systems, because she was flipping through some of her Feng Shui books the other night, but even so.

On another note, I registered for a three-Saturday course at the Culinary Institute of America this week. I'll be taking Flavours of Southeast Asia - Tastes of the World, with Chef Griffiths, was sold out, and Asian Cooking with Chef Shirley Cheng was offering the same stuff I learned last year. This class is being taught by a man named Hinnerk von Bargen, and Chef von Bargen is pretty good about this kind of stuff. I've had class with him before, a three-Saturday course in Fusion Cuisine: Meals for Two. He's this giant German whose stand-up chef's hat doesn't do him any favours (the CIA is a former Jesuit seminary, and the ceilings can be a bit low in places). Really friendly, incredibly enthusiastic, happily makes his CIA interns clean up after class instead of having the students taking the course do it. Offered us the chance to make pureed lentil soup with either a food mill or a submersible blender once. The blender turned out to be LONGER THAN MY ARM (no exaggeration) and looked like it was manufactured by Binford Industries, or something. Apparently they normally use it for sixty gallons of soup at one go. (We were making three.) It all worked out for the best then, so I'm hoping this works out for the best; my first class will be on 14 September. This'll be the first time in two years I'm taking one of these and not being all uncomfortable about the class falling during a dietary-restriction time frame (i.e., Lent, when I usually give up meat). Should be fun. Can't wait to invade their bookstore again, the campus bookstore sells great cooking textbooks, ordinary cookbooks, souvenir clothing, knives, and other cooking paraphernalia - and since you're a student for the day, you get a 10 or 20 percent discount. On the knives, that really adds up.

Crap, Mozilla is bein' laggy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and have a look at how to arrange friend-groups. condotierre and I have been coming up with fresh new lemony-scented evil for VicMage.Asia, and it is evil on par with the goodness of monkey pirates (or possibly monkeys piloting giant robots in the course of their piracy, because there is nothing quite as good as giant robot monkey pirates - at least not without involving ninjas). And when you have monkey pirate caliber evil, you just have to share.