(Image nicked from Modern Humorist – not entirely germane, but I couldn’t resist sharing.)

I’m almost ashamed to tell you this, but… well, I picked up a virus over the weekend.

No, it’s not that kind of story – and my wife knows all about it – but it was kind of embarrassing. I downloaded a trial copy of WinRAR from a normally reputable source, but it turned out that it was a ‘cracked copy’ into which someone had inserted some nefarious code.

As a result I got a silly message popping up on my laptop every few minutes, and every time I tried to log on to the interweb I got redirected to some spurious-looking site which offered to sell me a security fix (for the problem it had caused). Tch.

Anyway, I resolved it – if you also suffer the ‘intervalhehe’ virus, you can sort it out by following Andy Greenwood’s instructions here – but I was concerned for a bit that all the scripts on my computer were in danger, a prospect I was far from keen on.

So kids, learn from my mistake – if you’re downloading files from the internet, make sure it’s from a source you know you can trust!