I’m BAAAACK!

And, perhaps, I’ll be posting more philosophical musings, relationshippy stuff, and the sort of thing you’ve come to know and love from this journal. But first, irritated bitching about a lot of miscellaneous stuff…

First, I’m back in the land of the living again. Last Monday, I started feeling poorly, and by the time I was halfway through the work day, I had chills and was shivering. By the end of the day, I had a fever over 104 and could scarcely stand; by the time I got home, I was hallucinating. Shelly ended up taking me to the emergency room, though they didn’t admit me. I’ll skip over the next week or so, which was pretty much all the same–lying in bed in misery, throwing up a lot, that kind of stuff.

Thursday, an appointment with my regular doctor, who finally diagnosed the problem–a very aggressive and fast-moving strep infection. She was pissed that the hospital didn’t admit me, but two different antibiotics and two different courses of steroid treatments later, I’ve finally shaken it.

Also on the bad (or at least irritating) side, McAfee’s Site Advisor Web site, which claims to “test the Web to help keep you safe from spyware, spam, viruses and online scams,” has redlisted my Xeromag.com site as a spammer after, so they say, entering their email address into my signup form and receiving spam.

Now, my Web site has no signup form, or online contact form of any sort, so they’re obviously full of horseshit. [Edit: It appears their bot software “signed up” on my guestbook, and its address got scraped by the software spammers use to hunt for email addresses on Web sites. I’ve modified my guestbook to mung email addresses to prevent this from happening in the future.] Still, it means that anyone using any McAfee security product (including their enterprise and business security products) sees a big red warning when they visit my site, and that rather pisses me off. Fucktards.

I am also wrapping up my business and moving out of my office. The company that has given me free office space for the last eight years is effectively folding up shop, and my own client base has dwindled to nothing; the Bush regime has been hard on small businesses, and most of my clients have gone under in the past few years. I spent a good part of yesterday cleaning junk out of my office.

It’s not all bad, though. I’m chest-deep in a significant rewrite of my sex game Onyx, which has been selling at a tremendous rate lately, in part (I think) due to a writeup on the Wired magazine Weblog last month. The new version is such a tremendous improvement over the current version that it’s almost not even fair to compare the two.

And finally, Shelly’s done with her summer term in three weeks, and at that point will be ready to move to Gainesville, where she’ll be attending school come fall. We no longer have any particular ties to Tampa, and may simply pack up and move in the next month or so, depending on my work situation between now and then.

I’ll post some more philosophical content here later.