so, i ended up spending yesterday morning trying to figure out how to get a new ip address, which turned out to be rather difficult. in the end, i decided to just turn the modem off again around 14:00 - and i got one when i finally reconnected after 13:00.

my calculation of my total bandwidth for the calendar date of the 26th would be around 650 mb. my isp is trying to tell me it was closer to 8 gb. 

i have a new ip address now, so we'll see if it tapers off today. again - i was physically disconnected for the first 13 hours of the day, so i should have exactly 0 bytes of usage over night, which i can measure from 2:00-8:00. that will at least help me understand when the ip dropped.

but, what did i do?

after i turned the modem off, i slept for the afternoon and was up a little bit before midnight. i've had to think some things through carefully, regarding what's actually going on here. what exactly are the police doing, here?

as mentioned: this started after i got a spike in electrical usage when i was gone. if changing my ip address doesn't help, it must be a cloned mac address or otherwise some kind of split in the line.

this is just relentless. they're insistent. and, i don't remotely understand the purpose. all they've managed to do over the last week is watch me try and figure out what they're doing to spy on me; when surveillance loses it's stealth, it becomes pointless. like, i know...

but, how do i adjust? what do i do?

they've tried hacking in over wireless, and i managed to mostly get around it. so, now they've apparently spliced my cable wire, and i haven't the slightest clue what they're actually doing - only that a large amount of data is moving from some unknown source to some unknown destination, and it's being assigned to my account, incorrectly.

i think i have to face the facts with this broken laptop that i keep trying to bandaid over - it's too infected, or too compromised, or too vulnerable. i keep booting back into it, and thinking i can just fix it enough to use it, but it just keeps getting worse; the more time i spend trying to bandaid over it, the more i realize just how bad it really is. the last time i booted it up, i found all kinds of scripts in the system directory of what i designated as my clean install that i'm certain were not there before, indicating that somebody has logged into my desktop and dropped all kinds of scripts into it. they must have the password. so, i decided that i'm not comfortable connecting it to the internet until i understand what's going on with the bandwidth.

i can powerwash the chromebook between uses, but i want to stop troubleshooting my computers and get back to finishing what i'm doing. this chromebook is intended strictly for traveling & emergency use and doesn't have the software i need to do any actual work on it. so, what windows machine do i not mind exposing to the storm? the 90s laptop...

i mentioned previously that i realized the 90s laptop appears to have been hijacked, but i decided i didn't care because i don't do anything on it of any interest. i just connect to youtube and watch educational films. does the government want to know about that? whatever. but, the more i looked at it, the more i realized it was more or less the same kinds of things. 

there's a difference, though - i can reinstall the 90s laptop with a winlited xp, and that's what i decided to do. but, i had to tweak it a little, so that's what i spent the morning doing.

the source for this is a physical disk, and it comes with a script that i initially wrote in 2008. this machine will not be difficult to hack, but i'm less concerned about stopping them from hacking in and more concerned about ensuring that i have a clean image i can push down to undo it.

i have no interest in getting into a hacking war. that's fucking boring. i want to work on my art, i don't want to be a hacker. and, i don't imagine i'd have the aptitude for it, either. for all my focus on math, i'm well aware that i'm starkly right-brained - i'm quite confident that i would lose a hacking war pretty badly. and, i could get taken down over the next few days more than once.

i don't care. i want to focus on my art, which means i need to have an easy way to reinstall from a stable source, and i think i've got that.

i'm going to get something to eat, and may sleep for a while. hopefully, i can get to writing that man or astroman review before midnight.