Low life

The remnants of a fine arboreal fungus in Longmead Road, just behind the orange caravan serving burgers, bacon sandwiches and such like. Stream to the left, road to the right. Seems odd now that I had not noticed it before, but a quick inspection failed to turn any such notice up.

A bit further up, that is a bit further towards the school at Pound Lane, a small flock of redwings grazing on the more or less bare ground underneath a tree. They used to visit our back garden to feed on the firethorn in the autumn, but they missed last year. See reference 1.

Much later, I thought to take a look at the healthy people at reference 2, recently noticed at reference 3. People who it turns out, deliver health over, as it were, Facebook enabled wires. The customers pay for remote access to doctors, who get some of the take - with the balance going to Maya for providing the service, for providing the introductions. Not such a bad idea in a country - in this case Bangladesh - where I imagine there are a lot of people living in small villages with not much in the way of health services immediately to hand. Perhaps there is also the issue of Muslim ladies preferring or requiring lady doctors.

So I thought I would take a peek at their headquarters in Street View, the address given being 'Level 9, Plot 96, Bay's Bella Vista, Road 11, Block #C, Banani, Dhaka 1213 '. Street knew all about a Bay's Bella Vista and a Banani in Dhaka 1213, but I still failed to parse the address and run it to ground. But I have learned that a lot of streets in Dhaka are called things like 'Road N', where N is quite a small number. You have to know what sector your Road N is in if you want to run it to ground. Unlike over here where road and street names are generally used just the once in any given area. So there is just the one Manor Green Road in Epsom. And furthermore, it was quite interesting to see what the back streets of Dhaka were like.

But, unfortunately, somewhere along the line, something called bestfaustcaptcha had managed to get inside my laptop and the following morning, that is to say this morning, started sending all kinds of threatening messages to me, via the notification facility bottom right on my screen. I have complained before about Microsoft making this facility available to all and sundry, and now the complaints are even more justified.

Threatening messages, dressed up as coming from respectable corporations like Microsoft and McAfee, telling me that I was badly infected with something or other and ought to do something about it. Presumably pay them some money. Bing knew all about these people and offered all  kinds of ways to get rid of them, most of these ways looking complicated and some of them involving me paying someone else some money.

Not keen on that, so time for a bit of (time consuming) DIY. Bring back the late lamented BT Tech Experts! First step, put the important files onto a data stick. Good job that they are as big and fast as they now are. Then fire up a quick virus scan in Defender. Nothing. Then something called an offline scan, supposedly able to fix some things that a quick scan can't. This probably worked, but gave me no feedback at all. Then a full scan, which took about four hours and found nothing. At least I was able to use the laptop while this last was going on, albeit a bit bumpily, with odd pauses from time to time. Bad notifications still coming through.

Given that the notifications had an Edge flavour, maybe the answer was to uninstall Edge and reinstall a clean copy. Except that somehow I managed to uninstall Office, and Edge did not seem to want to be uninstalled at all. But at least that meant that it was still there and that I could use it to reinstall Office. Bad notifications still coming through.

Eventually, more or less by chance, I found my way to Edge settings where I found that there were settings which could be applied to individual web sites, including one called block pop-ups. Set the setting and some hours later the bad notifications have still vanished.

Quite apart from the loss of time involved, depressing to think of all those geeks out there trying to make a living by stealing from the rest of us. One might think that someone clever enough to do this kind of stuff would want to do something better with their time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tweet.html.

Reference 2: https://mayadigitalhealth.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/for-record.html.