Y'all don't mind if I rant, whine, and complain a minute, do you? I sure hope not.

Today has not been a good computer today. Oh, the first half was fine. Just dandy. Then sometime late this afternoon, everything went to hell. Suddenly, I couldn't access the internet anymore. Now, our phone line was really noisy today, so I figured maybe the phone company was doing some work and it was affecting the DSL. That is, until my husband told me he was browsing the 'net on the computer in the kitchen without problems. So I rebooted Rocky. When he came back up, I immediately opened Outlook, then got an error message saying that True Vector Internet Monitor had encountered a problem and needed to close. Almost immediately afterward, Zone Alarm gave me a warning message saying that True Vector had closed down and asked if I'd like to restart. Clicked yes, then got another True Vector encountering a problem message. One more time of going through this loop and I said "to hell with this" and rebooted Rocky again.

Wouldn't you know it didn't make a damn bit of difference?

So while the laptop was going through this seemingly endless loop, I went and hopped onto the kitchen computer (my husband went to bed during this time). I browsed the Zone Labs message boards and discovered something interesting. I'm not the only person having this problem. Not only that, but it's a problem that's just started today. Some people worked around it by setting their computer one day back. I tried that. But of course, nothing can ever be that easy for me. Finally, I shut Zone Alarm down and am working with the Windows firewall. Not my first choice, but it's better than nothing.

Anyway, if you're using Zone Alarm as your firewall (I use Zone Alarm Security Suite) and you're having this problem too, somebody at the message boards claimed to have spoken to a tech, and the word is they're aware of this problem and plan to have a fix by Monday or Tuesday.

Does anybody know what's up with Audioblogger? I've received nothing but busy signals for a week now when I try to call the number, and an e-mail to them has gone unanswered. Please let me know if you happen to have the scoop on this.

Hm. There was something else I was going to complain about, but now I'm so worked up about Zone Alarm, I can't even remember what it is. Lucky for you, I guess, but now it's gonna bug me all night.

I suppose this is a sign. TPTB telling me to get of the net, finish that crit, and do some writing of my own. Oh well. Since my Internet access seems to have slowed down to a crawl, that's probably the only thing that makes sense for me to do, anyway. So I'm off to pop the headphones on my head, get lost in some music, and crit my little heart out.