Nightmares

[doug][david]

Our son, David, is at the age where nightmares are common, and often wakes us up when he’s had a bad dream.

Sometimes as adults we forget how troubling a bad dream can be, as our nightmares (for most of us anyway) are very infrequent.

It has been a very stressful week. Work was busy, and worst of all, our station wagon died, leaving us with a 6-person family and a 5-passenger car. Last night I had a horrible dream, for which I am holding my co-worker Doug “JavaDoug” Ross partially responsible:

I dreamed that, despite the fact that our SMC router's firewall prevents detection of machines behind it, and protection via Norton Antivirus (I do not recommend any other product), our two computers were infected by a trojan that allowed someone from outside to remote control the machines.

No matter what I tried, the remote-operator would write taunts to the screen, install and launch games one after another (Duke Nukem was one, for some reason), and prevent me from using the machines.

What was really scary is that in the dream I hit the button which disconnects the cable modem from the outside world, to eliminate the attacker’s access and start cleaning the damage, but the malicious remote operation didn’t stop!