SGL Virus Free

I have received reports today that SGL is infected with a virus or malware and is downloading bad programs onto people’s computers.  However, these reports did not come with any troubleshooting details so we don’t know exactly what people are seeing and if the exploits being witnessed are coming from us or if they are coming from someone pretending to be us which is a popular route as well.  What I can tell you is that according to McAfee SiteAdvisor as well as Exploit Prevention Labs’ LinkScanner SGL is clean as a whistle.  We also have gotten no reports of mischievous behaviour from any other sources.  I ran the site in the most dangerous of web browsers, Internet Explorer, tonight on my completely updated Windows XP Pro machine running Live One Care and it found nothing bad either.  So, I am pretty convinced that we do not have a problem on our hands.

Just to be on the extra safe side I did an operating system update manually but found that we were completely up to date.  I am also undertaking a WordPress update too.  Might as well go all the way, I guess.

April 27, 2008: Mario Kart Wii Day!

Nintendo’s Mario Kart for the Wii releases today to much fanfare. This is one of the “must have” games that we have been eagerly awaiting for our one and only current console system. The game comes with a steering wheel “controller” for the system in addition to the game which is pretty cool. We are extra excited to get it because our nieces are getting the game today or soon and will be able to race against us online which is very cool. I also have a mate in London who was able to get the game last week when it released there and has been looking for people to race against online. We haven’t had any games that we could play online with anyone so far so this is quite exciting and will really let us test out how cool this next generation of online consoles really is.

We slept in a bit this morning. As you can imagine, I was pretty tired after having stayed up so late working last night. I am glad that I did, though, as I got some really great work done and was able to do a bit of my homework for the week. This week is purely discussion based work for school and almost no one is discussing anything which makes it extra difficult. So I posted some discussion material and am hoping that that will kick off some people to respond today so that I will have people to have an actual back and forth conversation with.

We called Ramona at eleven as we were planning on doing brunch. She was ready and we tried to leave right away but it ended up taking a full hour to get our car from valet services. They always go down to just two valets on busy Sunday mornings and it is always one poor girl working as hard as she can and one guy who isn’t quite sure what is going on and not really being helpful at all. They are supposed to have three people on at all times but effectively only have one on Sunday mornings. It has become quite a problem.

It was twelve thirty when we finally got over to Ramona’s crib in the Ironbound. We picked her up and drove down to Elizabeth. Dominica was in the mood for Perkins (apricot syrup craving, I am guessing) but when we got there the parking lot was packed and there was a twenty-five minute wait for seating so we decided to just go on to the Seaside Diner where we usually go (which I prefer anyway.)

We came back to Eleven80. I walked Oreo and then took a walk down to GameStop on Broad in Newark, just two blocks away from us which is awesome, and picked up Mario Kart Wii and two extra steering wheel “controllers” for a total of three.

Dominica and Ramona watched Stir Crazy which Ramona had from Netflix. I worked with Andy for a while, caught up on SGL, did some homework, did some eBay shopping (it has been a very good eBay week for the HP d530 units), managed the Handbrake process and more. No breaktime for me.  They ended up being pretty unimpressed by the movie.  Actually, “awful” is how they described it, I am pretty sure.

Dominica did laundry today.  I did the dishes.

Ramona left around six.  She had a show in the city to go to.  The city is, of course, Manhattan.  It is funny living in a major US city, the largest in the state, in fact, and calling the city two cities away “the city”.  Dominica did some work on her homework and we ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  Min was going to cook dinner but she had to cook Oreo’s dinner tonight and that keeps the kitchen busy and uses up a bunch of her time.  So instead of cooking we just ordered in.

My night consisted of homework, of which there was not all that much, and web site work.  It was light work tonight but more was done and I am happy about that.  I did play Mario Kart Wii for about forty-five minutes before Dominica went to bed.  It is pretty cool.  The game itself isn’t amazingly groundbreaking compared to the Game Cube or Nintendo DS versions (we have it for the DS as well.)  What makes the make really awesome is just how easy it is to play it online against other people.  The DS is supposed to work online but I tried it once and it failed and I sort of gave up on the process.  Nintendo didn’t have the online setup system working at that point.  Now it works beautifully. You just say that you want to play against some people online and the game takes care of all of the details setting up a twelve person race for you to compete in for points.  Quite fun.  It is so much nicer playing online that just against the Wii itself.  This really changes this type of game significantly.  I can see myself playing this pretty regularly.

April 26, 2008: Crash Test Kitchen

Dominica is addicted to Crash Test Kitchen.

Today has that feel of being a lazy day indeed. It was really late when I finally got to bed last night and Oreo was exceptionally snuggly. So we all slept until noon today. Then we got up and pretty much headed straight out to go to IHOP for a late brunch. The IHOP up by UMDNJ is really excellent. They have consistently good food, the wait staff is always excellent and everything is quite fast. Of all of the IHOPs that I have ever been to that one is by far the best. It is truly impressive for an IHOP.

After lunch we came back to the apartment. Before too long I was paged out and ended up doing roughly two hours of work for the office. Dominica and Oreo snuggled up on the recliner and napped the afternoon away there. It is impossible to leave Oreo when he is being so snuggly like that.

Andy was on IM this afternoon and we talked over IM for several hours.

Dominica has been craving another trip to Mompou in the Ironbound all week since we went there with dad last Saturday. So tonight we have been planning on going back again. They will be happy to see us. The manager wonders where we have been if we go too long in between visits.

I have been running Handbrake around the clock on Dominica laptop trying to get as much stuff on DVD as possible transferred over to MP4 so that all of the DVDs can go back into storage and not have to sit around the apartment.  I have a large box of DVDs and books to ship to dad’s house the next time that we go there.

Our schedule is extremely busy over the next several weeks.  This weekend I am doing some homework and quite a bit of web site development work.  I really need to do some testing consulting work as well.  We will see if I am able to get to that or not.  Next weekend is Dominica’s crazy end of semester weekend with tons of project work due which is really going to be tough.  I have a bit of homework due next weekend.  We will see how that goes.  Then the weekend after that is when Dominica is leaving to go to Texas for nine days to be with her sister.  So Oreo and I will be alone for a whole week.  Logistics with him and daycare and my office will be tough.  I don’t have a good plan for that yet.

The weekend of May 26th is the only “free” weekend that we have together for more than a month.  And we probably have stuff going on then too and just don’t know it yet.

Then on May 31st Min and I are heading down to Florida for four days to go to Walt Disney World.  Then the following weekend is out to Louisville, Ohio for my cousin’s high school graduation party.  We are going to be so exhausted going into mid-June.  I can’t believe that Min wanted to go to WDW in the middle of all of that traveling.  She is really going to be missing Oreo going for thirteen days without seeing him over such a short period of time.

We went out to Mompou a little after eight.  Dinner was awesome as usual.  We took the shuttle to the restaurant but walked back.  It was a nice night for a walk and the exercise is good for us anyway.

Dominica pretty much turned in for the night after that just watching some AppleTV.  I stayed up until three thirty in the morning doing web site design work and reading “Agile Java Development“.  It was a very late night but I did managed to get a lot of work done.  It was a very productive night for me.

April 25, 2008: End of a Light Week

The weather is a little bit colder but we are stuck using the air conditioning at night because Dominica is getting allergies from the outside air.  The plants are loving the constant movement of air, though, and are all doing wonderfully.  The rosebush with its mildew issues is really thriving now that it is getting constant air between all of its leaves and any mildew has a really tough time attempting to grab a hold of it anywhere.

It is a Friday and that means a long day at work.  Today was not nearly as long as many Fridays and definitely not as long as the last few have been.  This whole week has been dramatically slower than the last few weeks.  It is good.  I needed a little break.  I did find out today that I have approximately twenty-five new servers being assigned to me – an expansion on a project that I have already been on for over a year.  So that is bound to keep me quite busy in the very near future.  Twenty-five additional machines is actually quite dramatic as many companies, most companies, expect a system administrator to not be responsible for more than twenty-five to thirty machines.  It is practically a full time load all on its own.  Good job security.

I got a late breakfast at Food for Life today.  Just my usual.  The #15 “The Round”.  It’s a large sandwich with two aquatic sausage patties (salmon cakes), egg, cheese and moon sauce.  Very delicious and for some reason just $4.50.  It is exceptionally inexpensive for such a large and filling item there.  It is definitely the poor man’s breakfast.  You can easily skip lunch with that in your tummy.

I did, in fact, skip lunch.  When Dominica got home she was in the mood for Food for Life too so we got take away from there for dinner as well.  I went the whole day eating nothing but FFL.

I didn’t have to work nearly as late as I would have expected tonight.  I had to work late but that that late.  While I was wrapping up work Dominica watched Enchanted on DVD that we have rented from Netflix again.  This is her second time watching it.  We watched it together earlier in the week.

Once we had the opportunity to eat together we put on Do Not Disturb with Doris Day and Rod Taylor.  Definitely not one of Day’s classic films.  The budget was low and the writing was horrible.  The characters were immensely flat and pointless.  It’s one of those movies where  nobody trusts each other and you can’t stand anyone because they are all so stupid and annoying.  Very poor writing and one of the movies that Day became famous for in her later years that portrayed women as nothing but cooks and annoyances.  Definitely not a woman friendly film.  Day was noted for playing increasingly pointless, airheaded characters as her career waned.

Dominica went to bed early and I did some web design work most of the night.  I was being extremely productive and ended up pushing on until two in the morning.  I am working on converting an old, static HTML based web site with tables for layout into a new, modern, PHP management site with no tables whatsoever, all CSS separated out and total XHTML 1.1 compliance.  It’s a fun project and I am enjoying it.  It is quite a bit of work though.

April 24, 2008: Riverdance at NJPAC

For dedicated Dilbert readers who have noticed that Scott Adams and United Media have gone the way of the pointy haired boss and forced a broken, worthless website down the throats of their customers there is hope. Dilbert is now available through RSS feed: Dilbert RSS from FeedBurner. This is now the only real way to get Dilbert as the web site was built using every best practice “don’t do” in the book. For many of us the site is just advertising and nothing else but a blank space where the strip is supposedly going to appear. Every comment left on the site is about how upset everyone is that the site is awful and broken but nothing seems to be being done. Even on my 12Mb/s connection the site is so slow to load that I can’t bear to wait for it to even respond let alone finish loading – if it even does anymore. Nevertheless, the RSS feed is working great and isn’t just an excuse to force advertising on us. So use that and boycott the Dilbert page until they stop using middle school interns to design the page!

In the middle of the night Oreo got up and decided that he wanted to go out into the living room and sleep on his pillow. It was very strange. We had the air conditioning on in the bedroom so the doors was closed. So I got up and walked him out to his pillow where he was very happy to lay down for about half an hour. He came in to check on us once but saw that we were in bed and ran back to the living room to his pillow. We could hear the clicking of his toenails on the hardwood as he ran the whole way. Eventually he gave up on that idea and returned to bed. That kept me up for about an hour between two and three in the morning with him going in and out and opening and closing doors for him.

This morning I had to get up with Dominica so that we could go down to Ryan’s apartment and feed his fish. Ryan is in Florida and we are looking after the sealife for him. I have not taken care of his fish before so I didn’t know what to do. So my night was rather short after going to bed after midnight, being up for an hour and getting up at seven. 🙁

At least today is my day at home with Oreo. It is yet another bright and beautiful day here in Newark.

Today I discovered that our ivy plant that I like so much has a spider mite infestation. Because the plant hangs so high I didn’t notice it until it was pretty heavily infested. So now I have to figure out how to take care of spider mites. I am hoping that regular washing will do the trick but they are all over the leaves. I need dad to send me some of his spare ladybugs from back home.

Tonight we are going to see Riverdance at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. This is the third in our series of tickets for the NJPAC this season. It works out well that the tickets are for Thursdays as that means that we always leave Oreo home alone after he has had an entire day with me already. He is much more relaxed about being left in that case.

Dominica got home and wasn’t in the mood for anything except McDonald’s.  So I walked down Broad and got dinner from the McDonald’s just two blocks away.  We watched a few episodes of Average Betty while we ate.

After dinner I had to get ready to go as quickly as possible.  Then it was time to walk down to NJPAC to see the show.

Riverdance was really good.  I have seen Lord of the Dance in Toronto, I think, long ago and have seen Riverdance on television or DVD or something at some point over the years but have never seen it in person.  It was very good.  Dominica coworder Al and his wife joined us at the show and had tickets for the row right behind us.  All of the seats by them were empty so we moved back by them after intermission.

After we got home from Riverdance it was time for Min to get to bed.  I did a little work, a little over an hour, and then was ready to head off to bed myself.