-- Thursday, March 9, 2000 --

1:53 a.m. Well, I'm suddenly having a bunch of computer problems and I'm asking for help. I've really never seen such a cascade effect of trouble here on my little Mac as I've been experiencing tonight, so in the off chance that someone who is reading this has also seen the trouble I'm seeing ...

First of all, my plan was to download and install Eudora and get away from my ongoing troubles with Outlook 5. (Oh, how minor those troubles seem at the moment.) So I went to the site, downloaded the program, and installed it on one of my sectioned hard drives.

Then I took a nap. Little did I know. My plan was to get up, try to get Eudora to work, and escape from the ever-growing blob that is the Outlook "messages" file. I had big plans to take back my files from Microsoft.

Well. Of course I couldn't get Eudora to work -- it won't talk to the server correctly. I'm not filling in something properly ... so, ok. I can live with that. I'll just go back to Outlook, check my mail, and maybe get to some of that email I have to answer.

But first, I see this little folder on my desktop -- thrown out of my system by the Eudora install. It was called Text Encodings and it was full of these weird documents ... well, maybe I shouldn't have trashed it? Maybe that's the source of all my woe?

My Outlook program will not open now. I installed a new Outlook 5.0 and I keep getting Type 2 errors, whatever that means. Next my Explorer browser is all screwy -- full of foreign characters instead of text -- just a total mess.

New downloads and installs of those two programs are still not working. Could I have a virus? Has anyone out there ever had these problems?

Help, I plead ... help? I am so tired. I am so frustrated. I am so sorry for trying to get away from Microsoft -- I just want my computer back the way it was ...

I'm currently using the old Outlook 4.5, which miraculously works, and Netscape, which sort of does. I sort of blew out my cute little SiteMeter thing when I went to check it and had to look up all my codes ...

I realize this is horribly boring, but maybe not for that one reader who might have heard of some of this happening before. Does a browser full of Cyrillic and odd stray characters mean anything to anyone?

Does the file called "Text Encoding" ring any bells? Does "Type 2" error mean anything?

It goes without saying that I thought I was getting ahead of things today. Tonight I was going to get caught up on my email. And get to bed early. Plus, I had a spiffy piece planned.

It's a miracle, really, that some of my stuff is working. The trouble is with the Microsoft stuff. You don't think the gentle Eudora has taken a page from the Microsoft play book and gone into my system and wrecked things?

I'll stop now. Help? Even paranoids are right twice in a while ...