About once a week my anti-virus program intercepts a virus-infected
email from some computer that is running without virus protection.
It is clear from the spoofed "sender" name that the person owning the
infected computer has an interest in mechanical music, because the
"sender's" name that the virus picks out of his address book to put
the blame on is the name of someone I know through my mechanical music
interest.

That is a source of wonderment because it is hard to imagine that
someone so intelligent, creative, analytical, and artistic as to be
intrigued by mechanical music could be so careless of his own computer's
health and so heedless of the common good as to run without virus
protection.

But lately I read about viruses that can sneak by Symantec's and
McAfee's anti-virus software and disable them.  There is a small, free
program called Stinger that can check your computer for 16 such bugs
that may be lurking in it undetected.  You can download and run Stinger
from  http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger  Then rest easy.

Matthew Caulfield (Irondequoit, N.Y.)

P.S.  One of the prime offenders in this area seems to use Mapletronics
as his ISP.  If you are a Mapletronics client, please run Stinger now.