On hold (while I'm on Vacation)

8:05am

I'm getting tired of work. One day something's hot, then the next it isn't and it's something else.

I spent all last week moving us from the 4th floor to the 10th floor of our building. I've gone from a cubicle next to a window to a smaller one against the wall. Then they throw pizza at us saying its a good thing. :-/

Well, this week, I've been on Vacation. Now that this is the last day of it, I wish that I had taken the whole week off. Haven't done anything exciting.

I spent both Sunday and Monday fighting a scareware on my brother-in-law's computer. McAfee missed it. It was a variant of "antivirus system pro". (Antivirus System PRO, aka AntivirusSystemPRO, is a trojan/adware program that masquerades as legitimate anti-spyware software and may change Windows Desktop and other settings.)

I worked on it, trying all the cleaning tips found on the net, which none worked. Ended up paying McAfee $100 support to clean it, which they didn't. I was pissed after that. I had to wait over an hour on the phone before talking to someone. Installed desktop control software so she could get into the computer. She was on it for an hour, poking here and there. Now, this was not a total waste. She did clean up some minor stuff and left some cool tools behind.

Sine it still was not clean, I continued to google and search and poked in RegEdit some more, and finally stumbled on the solution myself by opening a DOS window and searching for hidden executables. (If you don't know DOS, the command is "dir /s /ah *.exe". I had to do this in Safe Mode.)

The file name was "avspsysguard.exe", or something like that. I deleted the file and everything in its directory, searched the Registry for any entries for it, removed them and rebooted into normal mode, finding it gone. I immediately updated McAfee and Windows, scanning all files, etc. This mentally drained me of wanting to work on any computers...

Yesterday, I bought two new tires for my truck, costing $400. Tried to get it inspected, but since they worked on it last week, I hadn't driven it enough. They had to reset the "Check Engine" light, and so now I have to drive it at least 200 miles before it can be inspected.

Went out early about 4pm to get some wings and beer. Ended up meeting a friend and drinking until 10pm. Came home. Almost went back out but decided I was too tired (which was probably a good thing). All day, I had no desire to touch any computers.

Today, I'm thinking of driving to Galveston Island, to waste time there.

12:28pm

Just took a 4 hour nap. Still not too late to go to the Island, but now I'm becoming too lazy. LOL

12:46pm

Work just called. We have a DNS cache server in Singapore that is not working properly. I need to log in to see what is going on (there goes my Island trip).

6:05pm

OK, I'm back. Apparently, the local DNS cache server uses the global cache server for Internet resolution, which none of them were working. I finally just restarted DNS on the global cache server, and everything started working.

I'm going out for curry and some beer.