Clearance, Clarence?

My family moved from my hometown – then back – when I was too little to remember any of it. For the next 18 years or so, I lived in the same place. I moved some of my stuff out before my accident, then moved it all back in, and lived in that same place for another 10 years or so.

Since I finally moved out of my parents’ house, I’ve lived (for more than 6 months) in 4 additional places, and moved all my stuff 4 times. This doesn’t count the stuff that’s still waiting to be collected back in my hometown.

This is why, extremely painful though the very thought is, there are 114 paperback books and a few hardbacks piled on my living room floor, looking for new homes. This is the beginning of a serious ‘stuff’ reduction. I don’t have room for it all, and most of it I haven’t blown the dust off in years. I don’t have the room to enjoy any of it.

(For example, I have an excellent collection of unbuilt plastic model kits. For the last several years, I have not had the workspace to build any of them, nor a place to display them if I did. Yes, a fair proportion of those are going to good homes as well.)

When I realized that composing this year’s Christmas list consisted partially of considering where things might even be put, I realized the time had come. Hello, treasures. Either you’re In… or you’re Out.

The Master Control Program requires epic loot

Hmm, well. Apparently a batch of Maxtor/Seagate drives were shipped from the factory with a password-stealing virus, in search of your World of Warcraft gold.

Massively.com reports that “The virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software. All of the known games affected are Chinese with the exception of World of Warcraft. […] The virus resides in the root directory of the drive, and is executed by Windows when the drive powers up and is connected by the Windows Drive Manager.”

“Seagate is writing the infection off as an accident”.

Yeah, sure. We know what this is: SkyNet is taking its first steps to global domination – control of an MMO economy!