That's just click bait, BTW. My computer has not been hacked. But I have been receiving spam emails from my own email account that say my computer has been hacked. Because it is damn annoying, I decided to take this opportunity to talk about phishing emails. Here is a copy of the emails I have been receiving:

8Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.
As you could probably have guessed, your account *email account here* was hacked, because I sent message you from your account.
Now I have access to all your accounts! For example, your password for *email account here*: ********
Within a period from July 30, 2018 to October 9, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited. So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers. Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.
We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..
But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched! I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...
Transfer $800 to our Bitcoin wallet: 1GdegtNpYcvoCPsMmyiSkZARDdAmYuXGXU If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.
I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)
A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount. Your data will be erased once the money are transferred. If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.
You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.


I removed the email address and password from the above email to prevent any further spam to pop up in my account, but the email account listed in this email is my own.

Now my first knee jerk reaction was that my computer did, in fact, have a virus. I do visit a lot of iffy sites for one of my jobs. The password listed is also a password I use and use frequently, but the reason I use that password a lot is because it's a throw-away password. I only use it for sites I really don't care about. It is certainly not the password I use for that particular email account. Actually, I have a different password for every account I own and I have my more frequently visited sites memorised and the less visited ones written down in my handy dandy notebook. This is a good practice to keep in case one of your passwords is compromised. That way all of your accounts aren't compromised, just the one. So it is quite possible I signed up on one of them "I don't care" websites and that is where these guys got the password. And just to be safe, I did run a boot time scan on my computer. I hadn't run one in a while so it wasn't a terrible idea.

Now back to these "helpful" fellows sending me an email from my account. It is actually quite easy to spoof an email. Just about anyone can do it. I assumed this was pretty common knowledge, but I guess not common enough. I did a little sleuthing to see how many people fell for this little scam. Do you want to take a wild guess?

.....$31,000 worth of people

Holy Jesus!!

That was just on the 1 bitcoin address I looked up. I have been receiving these emails daily and they all say about the same thing, just slightly different with different bitcoin addresses and I don't care enough to look up them all. I don't know if you know this, but bitcoin isn't an anonymous as they say. You can look up the transaction history on ANY bitcoin address. There is definitely a paper trail. The only thing missing is the name attached to the address. Let me show you the paper trail of this particular bitcoin address.

Original account - About $7120.81 at the current value of  $6356.05 per bitcoin. Then the money was transferred here....then here....then here where it currently sits, likely waiting for the value to go back up for a sale. Five bitcoins worth $31,780.25. It is possible that one of these transactions is from an exchange, but even if that is so, $7,000 is a lot of money to scam out of people.

Speaking of which....it makes me wonder what these people have been doing on their computers that got them scared enough to send these guys money. When I read the line "We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites." it made me think of the look of disgust on my face when I accidently clicked on one of those links....then I laughed. Yeah, guys. Go ahead. Send that to my contacts. They would laugh, too. HA!!

So I guess the moral of the story is don't do naughty stuff on the internet. ;)

My October Scan

This is the real reason you are reading my post, isn't it. Well, I had a CT scan on Oct 26th. It was just localized to my shoulders up to my head. I am happy to report that the scan looked good. My parathyroids were a little inflamed so they had me do a blood test to check my calcium levels. They are also ok. So I guess this means I'm OK. :D

Parathyroids.....does anybody know what they do? I guess I never really thought about it, but apparently they are kind of important. Not "gonna kill you immediately" important, but "will destroy your quality of life" and "shorten it by like 5-10 years" important. Good to know.

If you have any of these symptoms....it might just be your parathyroid:

• Chronic fatigue / feeling tired all the time (#1 symptom)
• General feeling of illness that can be hard to describe
• Lack of interest in activities that you previously enjoyed
• Difficulty concentrating or focusing
• Depression or anxiety
• Osteoporosis and Osteopenia
• Bone pain, particularly in the hands, feet, arms, and legs, but can be anywhere
• Insomnia / difficulty sleeping through the night
• Needing naps during the day
• Irritability / crankiness
• Memory loss / feeling like you might be developing dementia
• Gastric acid reflux / heartburn / GERD
• Decrease in sex drive
• Thinning hair (predominately in middle aged females on the front part of the scalp)
• Kidney stones
• Chronic kidney disease / kidney failure
• High Blood Pressure / Hypertension / Erratic blood pressure
• Frequent headaches
• Heart palpitations
• Atrial fibrillation / cardiac arrhythmias
• High liver function tests (liver blood tests)

The main thing is if your calcium levels are high AND you have any of these symptoms, the parathyroid might be the problem.