Get me the HAL outta here!

Norton Security is one of the most intrusive and obnoxious computer applications in the world and I hate it. Having Norton on your computer is like trying to work around the Handicapper General.

For those of you who don't know, the Handicapper General was a Kurt Vonnegut character whose job it was to make everyone equal-which made everyone equally mediocre (or dead).

Tired of mediocrity and fearing death, I decided to jettison Norton and return to the McAfee fold. I had McAfee on my old computer but Norton came bundled with the new one, and hey, I'd paid for it... HOWEVER, with 304 days still left on my Norton subscription, I had had enough and tried to uninstall it.

Notice the use of the word "tried".

Tried for over an hour.

I began to feel like Dave dealing with HAL.

For those of you who don't know, Dave was an astronaut in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", one of the longest, dullest movies ever made.

Actor Kier Dullea as Dave

Dave was on a spaceship controlled by a master computer named HAL. HAL had a nervous breakdown and started killing everyone.

Dave, beginning the shut-down of HAL

H-A-L, by the way, is a play on I-B-M; one letter back from each of the letters in IBM gives you HAL. Why I know this sort of stuff is beyond me. Why I keep making references I then feel compelled to explain may be a function of age.

Norton was killing me, and, like HAL, it died hard, but, unlike Dave, who became some sort of space embryo, I emerged full-grown and triumphant. I solved the last (I hope) Norton related problem just moments ago when I got the theoretically uninstalled Norton firewall to release the email account it was holding hostage.

I could hear McAfee "tsk-tsk"-ing in the background at each Norton attempted end-run; "See, you should have stayed with me and this never would have happened. Oops, the Norton firewall just blocked access to your e-bank." Of course, McAfee was correct, but it was hardly helpful or constructive for it to be disdainfully sniffing while I was plugging (or unplugging) away at Norton disassembly.

Norton at first sneered at my attempts to make it go away. Software contempt is the worst.

BUT I PREVAILED!!! And I didn't have to climb into the computer to do it. But I swear to you, as I finally uninstalled the very last Norton component, I could hear it plaintively lament "Dave... I'm going now, Dave..."

For those of you who don't know... my name's not Dave.