August 24

Aug 24, 1995   Microsoft inflicts Windows 95 on an unsuspecting world.

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I went hiking in Claremont Canyon yesterday to clear my head.  Three hours, six miles, and 1000 ft elevation change later, I was sweaty, sunburnt and still fixated on the bug and its countdown.  While up there, didn't pay enough attention to the trail... scratched my palms slipping on loose gravel, more than once.  Now it hurts to type.

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Aug 24, 1456  Printing completed on the Gutenberg Bible.

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You know the special dates that mean something to you, but not everyone else?  (For me, March 21 will always be the day I got called to the Vice Principal's office for cutting 8th-grade chorus.  I think it's because I have a permanently ingrained mental image of the yellow hall pass that was sent from the VP’s office to collect me.) 
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Aug 24, 79 AD  Mt. Vesuvius erupts for the first time, destroying Pompei.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2004

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(tries to stop thinking about it)
 
Time for some updates:
 
Aunt Margaret wants you to know how touched she is by the flood of support we've gotten on this blog and via email.  So touched that she wants to mix a new flavor of her honey in honor of you guys — a black button sage variety, but I'm not sure she knows what to call it yet.
 
Warm fuzzies aside... the hijacked countdown has definitely gotten under Aunt M's skin.  "Strong intrusive inclination" gives her the "heeby jeebies" (her words).  She asked me if "the medium will metastasize" means that her computer is going to explode.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but unfortunately for now, I don't have a more optimistic interpretation to offer her. 
 
I hate that Aunt M is losing sleep over this.
 
Or that I am, for that matter. (checks timestamp.  Sigh.)
 
I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I understood its motives better…
 
At least I now know from Marc (first of several) that the image glitches are caused by embedded texts of origins unknown.  Not sure how they fit together.
 
I'm guessing from the some of the emails I've received that at least a handful of you are chewing on this problem in real-time somewhere...?  Is there a channel I can direct other people to, so they can sync up with you?
 
P.S. A lot of you have sent emails asking for personal information that might be relevant to the problems at I Love Bees.  To be honest, I'm still figuring out how much I feel comfortable sharing at this point.  I hope you can be patient with me. 
 

Counting down to WHAT?

So the bug — or virus, or spyware, or, whatever it is — is now apparently counting down to something, and that something looks like it's going to happen while I am somewhere in Szechuan province and I can't fix it and yeah it's creeping me out and yeah I'm not happy about this.  (The recent appearance of words like "mayday", "metastasize", "hemorrhage," and "classified" isn't cheering me up, either.)
 
What the hell is this thing.  And why would a site as harmless, I mean utterly and completely harmless, as www.ilovebees.com attract its attention?

Delinquent

Best case scenario: the delinquent site gets fixed before the 29th, when I'm flying to Beijing. There's no way I'm just going to bail and leave Aunt Margaret to deal with this until who knows when. (She bought me my All-Asia air pass in exchange for 7 years of indentured tech support, and ... I'm not going to let her get the raw end of the deal here. Not an option.)

(The trip is hard to defend. Beijing is the first stop on an open-ended backpacking trip through East/Southeast Asia, a trip I have no good reason to be taking (as my parents like to remind me), except (as I point out to them, though sometimes kind of quietly and maybe even after they've left the room) I've been "home" — in one way or another — for 22 years now, and absolutely everywhere I go is already drenched with my own history.

I'm tired of being so...known.

So I guess you could say that the point of this trip is to make the stone stony. And I'm the stone. And I'll come back whenever I'm unfamiliar enough that it won't feel anymore like home has reached its saturation point of me.)

Anyway: I really don't want to leave my aunt in the lurch. All suggestions (obvious, off-the-wall, whatever) are welcome, I've tried everything I can think of, am completely out of ideas.

www.ilovebees.com HONEY

www.ilovebees.com LINKS

www.ilovebees.com HIVES

www.ilovebees.com ABOUT

www.ilovebees.com INDEX

The Damage

In a flurry of wishful thinking, I imagine a huge demographic overlap between bee fans and webmonkeys.

This blog is born.

You're reading this, so I'll assume you've already witnessed the damage over on my aunt's web site. That's how you got here, right? (Unless your last Google search included the terms "honey," "SOS" and "WTF".) Hmm... now I'm actually curious to see what that turns up.)

Okay, focus, Dana.

I've been wrestling with the site bug(s?) myself since late last week. I've exhausted every strategy I can think of: scoured my code, ran virus checks, did the whole spyware Spyhunter thing, installed all the browser updates, and then finally just wiped the site and rebuilt it from scratch. Nothing helped.

In fact, although I might just be hallucinating from too much maté, I would swear it's getting worse.

I'm posting all of the original pages below, so you can see what www.ilovebees.com looked like BEFORE it crossed over to the dark side.