And likely to stay that way.

I’m away right now, on a business trip in CA. Although I used to keep my computer on from about 6 AM to 8 PM every day, even when I wasn’t there — please, no green lectures; I am aware of the wastefulness — I’ve got my computer shut down this week. That means no Webcam.

I’ve had a Webcam on my Web site for as long as I can remember. It was easy when I hosted my sites from a server in my office — the computer had to be on and running flawlessly anyway. But the server has moved to a better place, so that’s no excuse to run the computer when I wasn’t around.

Then, for a while, I was using Back To My Mac, a Mac OS X feature that enabled me to access the contents of my hard disk from away from home. For some reason I still don’t understand, that simply stopped working. I have had the time or inclination to troubleshoot it. So that’s no excuse to run the computer when I wasn’t around.

For the past few weeks, my computer has been acting weird. While I don’t think it’s a virus, it could be something like that. Mac users are notoriously careless about these things since there are very few viruses out there for us to fear. I have virus protection software on my machine, but it was turned off. Typical.

The symptoms of my computer problems include freeze-ups, applications that unexpectedly quit, spurious restarting, and kernel panics (dark gray screen with multi-language instructions for restarting). Lately, I had a Time Machine backup disk tell me it was write protected — until I restarted the computer. Yesterday, many of my e-mail preferences reset themselves. WordPress can’t seem to remember if I’m logged in or out. And my permissions are screwed up and can’t seem to be fixed.

It’s either a hard disk problem — time to reformat the hard drive and start fresh — or a more sinister logic board problem. I’ll have to troubleshoot one and then the other when I get home.

Until then, there’s no reason to keep the computer running when it’s likely to lock up anyway. Plus, on the very remote chance that it’s been hacked into, it’s much better to keep it turned off anyway.

Annoying, inconvenient, but not earth shattering. I do have three other computers — well, five, if you count the ones in the garage waiting for Craig’s list — to get work done on.

But it does mean that the Webcam is off for the week. And if I find any evidence of hacking, it’ll stay off for good.