[Sololop]

So I have a very interesting issue with my computer. At first, I thought I had a virus, allowing someone remote access to my computer, due to the symptoms.

The symptoms are, randomly, so far about once a day, while I'm typing or using the computer, I will suddenly have my windows all un-maximize, random left-clicks of my mouse occur, and then, the nearest text field is selected and the words "When I Die" will be typed out, letter by letter. It's frankly kind of creepy, and I've run multiple scans for rootkits/malware/viruses. Lastly, this just happened again while my computer was unplugged from the internet, so it must be some sort of command happening from my computer and not a remote access of someone gaining control and typing it out.

The last odd thing, is every time it types out "When I die" it spells the word "die" wrong, and backspaces, corrects it, and then nothing else happens. Sort of like it's repeating a recorded set of actions. It's just a really odd and strange thing for my computer to type out.

Or, the last possibility, is I'm just really, really haunted.

[deathspeed]

Sounds like someone scheduled a script with Task Scheduler.  I used to have mine scheduled to shut down every day at 4:00 PM and every 15 minutes until 5:30, to make my kids think they broke it if they were on there playing games after school before their homework was done.

[Sololop]

Interesting. I'll poke around and see if anything in there seems off, but I'm not really sure what I'll be looking for. Still thinking I might just be severely haunted.

EDIT: Well, it turns out it was 3 keyboard macros. With huge delays and multiple firings. I removed a virus last week, and I bet the virus did the macros, and even though I killed the virus, the macros remained. Huh. I was so convinced it was some sort of remote-access at first that I never thought to check one of the easiest ways to make my PC do weird stuff.

[Goober5000]

Post that on /r/nosleep.

[Vrets]

Or, the last possibility, is I'm just really, really haunted.

You are haunted by the ghost of a malicious application.

The application has died, but its VBS macros live on.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I upgraded my PC from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Since I already had Classic Shell installed, it adapted itself to the newer OS.

On a side note, I'm passing through this forum again.

[BirdofPrey]

I had something like that happen once.

I finally figured out it was a macro on my keyboard.  At some point the macro record key got pushed.

[Colonol Dekker]

My Stag party in just over a week!!!

(Or Bachelor party if Murican)

[Klaustrophobia]

Went to sleep at 930.  Slept restlessly until 130, now wide awake.  Tried to force myself back to sleep unsuccessfully.  Tonight is going to SUCK at work.

[Sololop]

@klaus, that's basically what happened to me yesterday. I got home at 4pm, went for a nap, woke up at 10pm, and I worked at 5am. Wasn't quite rested but could not get back to sleep

[deathspeed]

Just came in from watching the Perseids with my little ones.  My daughter was especially excited though that she found the big dipper and the north star.

[deathfun]

Nothing like waking up one afternoon and reading the paper to see some pretty interesting stuff happening

Explosion in China. Videos of that are something else

[NGTM-1R]

The Tianjin explosion thing is amusing me in a very abstract way, in that the Chinese are trying to censor it.

You don't conceal the equivalent of 24 tons worth of TNT going off in a city. Not in the age of smartphones.

[Grizzly]

When I was following it yesterday I was not really into that "censorship" claim, more that I took the casualty list as a confirmed casualty list and that nobody in their right minds walks into a gas cloud to count hte dead.

[NGTM-1R]

When I was following it yesterday I was not really into that "censorship" claim, more that I took the casualty list as a confirmed casualty list and that nobody in their right minds walks into a gas cloud to count hte dead.

Weibo and other Chinese social network sites are having posts and pictures about it taken down at a high rate, and at least some people who run local news channels have been ordered not to comment according to employees.

No, there's a real censorship effort in place.

[Grizzly]

Fair enough

[deathspeed]

I have been following some of the build threads on here with interest, as I have been trying to save up for a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM to replace my Core 2 Duo and DDR2.  I had been looking at an LGA1150 setup, with an i5-4690, 8 GB Corsair DDR3, and an MSI Z97 mobo, for about $375 on Newegg.  But then Skylake came out with a different pin arrangement - LGA1151, so I am starting over on my research.  Right now, for about $40 more, I could get an i5-6600K, Z170 mobo, and 8GB DDR4.  I read that there will be other LGA1151 motherboards with lower-end chipsets available after August 30, so by the time I have saved up another couple hundred $ and get serious about this there should be even cheaper alternatives.  Plus by then there should be some reviews and such online, and the current CPU availability issues should be resolved.

[z64555]

Updated my not-fake Facebook account since it looked lonely. May consider some kind of blog on there to keep a record of how much I'm not doing.

[Scourge of Ages]

I've been listening to the Machine of Death podcast; an audio version of stories from the book Machine of Death. If you've never heard of such a thing, I will copy here the introduction to the series:

    The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

    The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

    The realization that we could now know how we were going to die had changed the world: people became at once less fearful and more afraid. There’s no reason not to go skydiving if you know your sliver of paper says BURIED ALIVE. The realization that these predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise put a damper on things. It made the predictions more sinister –yes, if you were going to be buried alive you weren’t going to be electrocuted in the bathtub, but what if in skydiving you landed in a gravel pit? What if you were buried alive not in dirt but in something else? And would being caught in a collapsing building count as being buried alive? For every possibility the machine closed, it seemed to open several more, with varying degrees of plausibility.

    By that time, of course, the machine had been reverse engineered and duplicated, its internal workings being rather simple to construct, given our example. And yes, we found out that its predictions weren’t as straightforward as they seemed upon initial discovery at about the same time as everyone else did. We tested it before announcing it to the world, but testing took time — too much, since we had to wait for people to die. After four years had gone by and three people died as the machine predicted, we shipped it out the door. There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

And I will now link to the list of audio versions of the stories:
http://machineofdeath.net/about/podcast
Most of them are 20-40 minutes long, and very well worth listening to.

And I will now quote, in it's entirety, one of my favorite stories. It is entitled, "HIV INFECTION FROM MACHINE OF DEATH NEEDLE" by Brian Quinlan

"Well," I thought, "that sucks."

[Grizzly]

The daily mail 0_o