I bitch too much

Barney told me something the other day that I didn’t really think about: I bitch too much about my life on this blog. Really, I’ve been bitching about my bills, my back, my work, etc… , but I really haven’t been very positive, and I do apologize for that. So I’m going to sum up things without complaining too much. Really.

In all my complaining, you might have thought my back pain was still bad. In reality, my back pain is far better than before my surgery. I’ve been back at work for two weeks now, and obviously have about four zillion projects that need to be taken care of. I started driving a clutch a few days ago, which was a big step (the week before I was driving my sister’s automatic).

I’m able to walk around, stand up, and work fairly well (can’t sit down for too long, per the doctor, though I’m still able to sit very comfortably). All in all, the surgery worked quite well, and I’m very happy to have had it, despite my bills.

My family is doing good. Baby’s growing up too fast, and is just about six months old now, and starting to get a lot more personality. I think she’s mad at me for going back to work as I was home more before. She protested quite a bit when I came home from work for the first time in a while. Hannah just turned four-years-old last week, she’s going on 13 all too fast.

My wife’s doing well. I can’t help much yet around the house, so she’s still having to do most of the housework, but I’m slowly being able to help her a little bit. Tomorrow I start on my exercise regimen — basically just slow steady movements to get strength back to my legs, abdomen, and back. I’m actually quite excited about it.

There, hopefully that wasn’t too much complaining 🙂

January 14, 2004

That’s a messed up system

A co-worker of mine wanted me to look at her computer as she complained it was running really slow and had a bunch of “illegal stuff” (they were windows Illegal Operation Errors) and had a bunch of porn pop ups.

After running SpyBot and AdAware, I found there were about 450 (no joke) entries found between the two programs. Ran AntiVir XP, found another 90 files infected with about a dozen different trojans. Ran Windows Update (which had downloaded all the critical updates in the background, but nobody bothered to install them) and got everything up to date, and now have an AV program running in the background (she had McAfee, but it was disabled for some reason). She already has a firewall on her dial-up setup (she’s not on broadband — thankfully, or this would be much worse), so I’m leaving that as is. I also told her to not let her friends touch the system, as she claims her boyfriend’s friends were downloading porn or something. Based on the types of dialers and such that were on the system, I told her to keep an eye on her phone bill to make sure these things weren’t “calling home”. It was a mess.

But I have to say, in all my time that I’ve been working on systems, this is the messiest system I’ve ever come across.

Update on 1/14: Oh man is it so messed up.

OK, so I spoke too soon. I thought I had it all cleaned up, and life was good. Ran two different anti-virus programs and three different anti-spyware programs over and over, and the system came out clean. So I plug back in the ‘net connection to install the various MS Office updates. Just for kicks, I ran SpyBot again, and it starts finding more stuff. “Oh crap” I thought. I look at the network activity in the XP Task Manager, and every few seconds, there’d be a large spurt of activity. I throw a packet sniffer onto the system, there’s piles of HTTP requests going out to nasty sites and they’re coming from explorer.exe.

Lovely.

So I open up the previously-emptied MSIE Temporary Internet Files folder, and the thing is loaded with cookies, graphics, and a whole ton of other crap.

From that I can tell, somehow explorer got over-written or hacked to include a virus that “calls home” the minute it finds an Internet connection. It’s a mess, and every time the anti-virus software says it’s cleaned it, it comes back and starts doing stupid crap again.

So what next? A reformat. There’s no personal data left on the system as viruses gutted the My Documents folders for both the users on the system. So this weekend I’ll be doing a low-level format and then use Dell’s recovery disk to reinstall everything.

Man, what a mess.

January 14, 2004

Some scary e-mail statistics

Not only does a recent study show that up to 40% of legitimate e-mail never gets delivered, but 63% of all e-mail now sent is spam. It’s no wonder Chris thinks RSS is bigger than Jesus. Hell, I had trouble with my UtterlyBoring.com Headline List and AOL blocking e-mails from it. More and more people are reading this site via my RSS feed, and, considering these stats, I’m starting to see why.

January 14, 2004

Car dealer lets 14-year-old kid test drive a Cadillac

And the kids turns around and steals it (or at least tried to):

The young man was test driving a 1996 Cadillac Seville when the Brotherton Cadillac salesman accompanying him got out to use the ATM machine at the Bank of America branch at 300 Burnett Ave. S. When he did, the 14-year-old drove off in the car.

…

[A] motorcycle officer spotted the car at Talbot Road South and South Grady Way, and tried to stop it. The youthful driver ignored the lights and siren and continued south […]

A short chase ensued, now the kid faces various felony accounts. Idiots. Both of them.

January 14, 2004

Those damn algebra-teaching terrorists

A “news story” that I got via e-mail — and some of these jokes math geeks will appreciate…

At New York’s Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, an official said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

“Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,”, he said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like “x” and “y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns”, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle,” Ashcroft declared.

When asked to comment on the arrest, he said “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes.

“I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence,” he said, adding: “Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line.”

He warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.”

He said, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertain of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks….”

January 14, 2004

Nude model seeks husband in internet contest

Apparently the pregnant model is looking for a husband after the father of the child she’s carrying decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Are you single and looking? Thanks to Chris for the link.

January 13, 2004

Man survives leap into lion’s den

The guy heard voice from God that told him to jump in. Lion heard voices that said chew on the stupid bastard.

January 13, 2004

That’s going to sting a bit

He’s got a bad headache, but he survived a long nail being driven into his skull.

January 13, 2004

Help John Get Divorced

Quoting helpjohngetdivorced.com…

I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t pissed off at my future ex-wife, however, I am not bitter about our divorce. Quite the contrary, I would like to move on with my life, but she is not allowing this.

The purpose of this website is to poke a little fun at my divorce and show the absurdity of not only my ex-wife, but the whole divorce process.

So how can you help me get divorced? You really can’t, but I just thought having a website named helpjohngetdivorced.com was catchy and easy to remember.

January 12, 2004

School suspends “hacker”

A thirteen year-old kid gets suspended for three days for using a DOS command (net send * “Hey!”) to send a one-word message to all 80 computers on his school’s network. What’s even more disturbing was the fact that his teacher is obviously a complete moron. Full Story.

There’s a follow up response from the kid who did it (with links and more comments — the kid’s parents are pretty cool about everything), that describes what exactly happened.

January 12, 2004