Flashes of Panic

It seems like half the office is making the three-day weekend into a four-day weekend. Meanwhile, instead of unwinding gnarly problems in a rewarding manner, like yesterday, I’m doing the IT equivalent of cleaning bird $#!+ off cars.

I’m not sure of the what, why or whens but when I go online today, instead of the [normal home page], it pulls up lots of garbage, that I have trouble closing.
Can you help?

I’ll give you three guesses what it was, and the first two don’t count.

Spybot S&D, which I keep handy on a CD for just such occasions, found something like 180 spyware and hijack-ware “problems” on this system, including the (in)famous CWS. It took two scans and nearly an hour to get it all clear, and even that didn’t get rid of two separate folders of bookmarks which I honestly don’t believe were put there by the user. (Does anybody with a sound mind create a bookmark folder called “Adult Sites” on their work computer? To begin with, I don’t think she knows how to sort bookmarks into folders.) When I finished, I didn’t even offer a choice. I removed the Internet Explorer icon from her desktop, installed Mozilla, and made it the default browser. I showed her the icon on the desktop and said, “Here’s how you’re going on the Web from now on.”

Fortunately, she was disturbed enough by the pop-ups she couldn’t make go away (which might have been a harassment suit in a larger company) that she asked for a copy of the CD I was installing from so she could take it home and install Spybot and Mozilla on her home system. Then her neighbor came in and asked me to show her how to use the labels SpamAssassin puts on our email to filter spam out of her inbox. “What did we do before you came?” they asked.

Well, this kind of bottom-feeding, invertebrate parasite-ware has really sort of been a 21st-century thing, and I started here in 2001, so you really didn’t have these problems before. But unfortunately, even compliments like that get me thinking about something I’m not doing well, which is documenting what I do and how I do it. My motivation for this is making sure things keep running after I (inevitably) leave for grad school, but I joke, when I’m showing others how things work, “…so you’ll know how to do this if I get hit by a bus while I’m out on a run.”

Then this came up on a running list I’m on…

The last point of the run that I remember was about 2 ½ mile mark—running on the left side of a road that runs between the park and the East River. Next thing I knew, I woke up in an ambulance. Don’t remember the incident, but I’m told from the ambulance staff that I was the victim of a hit and run driver. … My theory is a school bus/small truck nicked me on the face with a rear view mirror …

Holy knock on wood, Batman! I think I need to start documenting stuff better just so Murphy’s Law will protect me from actually getting smacked.

Now playing: Deep Inside My Pocket from Tarantula by Ride