I have to get up in 6 hours… have to teach a lab. At least I made out my notes. Hopefully I won’t sleep in. Slept in today. Slept through my one class, and karate. Woke up on time, but went back to sleep… It’s all Michael’s fault. Kept thinking about his, “well, I hadn’t slept in this semester… figured it was about time”… I don’t think I had much choice in the matter. I only got 4 hours sleep.. was on the phone with tech support.. microsoft of all people. They’re all stupid and couldn’t help. They also couldn’t get my win2000 pro and ME boxes to talk to my XP box.. if any random networking gurus out there want to take a crack at it, be my guest to shoot me an email. I hesitate to ask the one guru I know since I’ve bothered him so much lately that I made him sick… so sick he’s missing work… yeah, I guess I am that annoying…
speaking of annoying, back to microsoft… since I was calling about networking, they got my IP address. Then something odd happened. within a couple of hours of hanging up with them, I got my very first virus. a nasty one, at that. all of a sudden, something started renaming jpg files to eml files and turning them from 50k files to 10 meg files and then scattering them randomly throughout my harddrive. and if that wasn’t enough, it gets better. It changed some XP files, and then the stupid thing ate all of my XP restore points, so I couldn’t go back. THEN it did something with internet explorer so that when you tried bringing up a web browser, it started some other set of programs running that respawned themselves quicker than I could kill them. I think those were the programs that were scattering 10 meg files everywhere. THEN the main windows explorer.exe started eating up processor time and ram. before I got my computer shut down, it was eating 98% processor (which is impressive, considering my computer) and it had over 407 megs in ram and was growing at about 1 meg/second. I was a little curious what it would do when it ran out of ram, but I decided not to find out. Anyone remember that email about the world’s worst computer virus that like broke your refridgerator and turned your washer and dryer against you? yeah, that’s about what I thought I was fighting. I just couldn’t keep up. I tried everything.
In the end, I took my computer to Best Buy. You know what they told me? ok, this was just funny. This is what they told me: For $40 they can sweep the computer and remove the virus, but then I’ll need to format the harddrive and reinstall the OS. so without thinking, I replied, “then why in the world am I paying you $40?” Luckily, I know the techs there. They’re going to sweep it and then restore the OS, rather than FFRing my computer.
Ironic, isn’t it? I get this little broken laptop up and running and think to myself, Hmm… what am I going to do with this laptop? Now, it’s the only thing I have for the next few weeks. Good timing, fates.
In other news, my roommate got a DVD+R/RW for Christmas. We’re learning how to copy… err… scratch that.. we’re learning how to back up DVDs… and burn downloads onto DVDs… Anybody need anything backed up? Actually, it’s pretty painful. It takes his computer about 24 hrs to convert files to dvd format. We’re hoping to make use of the Beast’s brute force to help speed things up a bit. when it gets back, that is. First thing I’m gonna try is putting my VCDs on DVD. I hate having to get up and switch out discs in the middle of a movie. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.
ok.. I’m actually starting to get a little tired… which is a good thing. I have to teach class in less than 6 hours. I guess I’ll sign off here and write more later.
later….
figures…. I write a novel and blogger won’t post… stupid thing… actually, blogger didn’t just not post… it completely erased this entire entry. Luckily, I’m used to blogger being worthless, so before I hit any buttons, I copied the entry to a word document. ha! take that, blogger. still very annoying, though.