The past two days I've been at war with my computer - well, a better way to put it would be that the computer was a battleground. First off I had the malware Security Shield to contend with, which was a bugger in itself to remove. Yesterday, when I thought all was well and good with my computer, I found something else.

On my crappy old mp3-turned-storage-device, a 53mb folder called 'RECYCLER' that I had no recollection of putting there. I did another scan, it turned out to be a virus. So I eradicated it.

Later, I was telling Nathan about it. As soon as I mentioned 'RECYCLER', he got this look in his face - horror, and recognition. It was on his SD card. And it was on Ashley's iPod, which prompted me to check my own iPod... and it was on there, as well.

Consequently, I've spent a great deal of last night and the early morning scanning the computer drive by drive, removing all traces of infection, then scanning again for good measure. Nathan did his SD card himself - I can only hope he was as thorough as I was, because if even a single trojan is left on a device that then gets plugged into this computer... well, heads will roll.

So, I've just checked Twitter and found that my last tweet, before going to bed, was five hours ago. That's how long I was up, crushing these little bastards. The scans found literally hundreds of them. I just hope that A) this won't be happening again any time soon and B) that the viruses weren't on there long enough to cause any lasting damage. I might leave it a while before using things like my bank card on this computer, just to be safe, and maybe run a few full scans over the coming days.

In non-virus-related news, I've started to type up 'Arcane Mathematics' and 'The Timeshare Presentation of Death'. So far, including title pages and my foreword, I've got 23 pages, on which there are 7852 words. This actual count lines up pretty nicely with my handwritten estimate, which is good.

I'm having a couple of woes regarding formatting, though. Firstly, I start every new paragraph with an indentation, including ones that are only a couple of lines, such as speech (and the way I write, this means I use them a lot). I don't use indentations for paragraphs starting at the very top of a page. I was just wondering if this is an acceptable way to format a book, really. It doesn't look that bad to me, when I scroll through it, so I think I may leave it for now.

Another thing is page numbering. This has been a pain in the arse, as well. Obviously you number your pages, but a lot of books will have blank pages between chapters (if the chapter ends on an odd page number, so the next chapter begins on the following double-spread) and title pages that aren't numbered. I don't know how to include my headers/footers in certain pages, and have them blank on others. It's bugging me. I was thinking of just splitting the book into several documents - numbered pages apart from non-numbered - then printing it off and putting it together in a binder. But since I'm mainly typing this draft up for CreateSpace, that won't work. It's not essential that I fix it now, I suppose, so when I've caught up on my sleep I'll take to Google and see what I find.

If anything, it's probably even best left for when I've actually finished the book, so that all the pages are there.