and I dearly wish I hadn’t frittered away my income on such things as rent and bills.

edit: taxes done, getting a refund from the feds, have to pay in for both MN and for CA.

Good times.

So I’m formatting again. I backed up all my important files, triple scanning those files with avira, kaspersky, webroot and malware just to be sure they’re safe, and then tried running all of those full system scans.

They came up clean, though security center is still down, and I still get an alert from webroot (the only decent one of the batch) that a program was trying to access a known spam IP address at times.

Turns out I didn’t have webroot’s setup configured correctly, because I got hit by another doozy on monday when I was away from the system. I had it cleaned off enough to make it until today, when I scanned the system again.

I scanned with all of those listed above, kaspersky last, and that was the last ditch effort to try and save everything. Turns out it was last ditch of another sort too: it crashed my DCOM service provider, generic host win32…which, it turns out, also crashed windows ability to recognize USB devices. haha! Good one, you damned commie russian program. In Soviet Russia, Computer Crashes YOU!

Anyhoos, so I’m formatting again. Should take less time now to reinstall everything because I’ve got all the programs, all the necessary codes, etc. I’ll have everything set up as it should from the get go, and things will be happy once more.

On the downside, this is getting old.

On the upside, if this is the worst that happens to me, I really cannot complain. Plus it’ll give me time to read/catch up on the diss while I babysit the installation process.

I have made lefse…truly today I am Scandinavian. My viking blood screams out for a taste!

As you can see there were some issues at the beginning, but then I learned how to flour the board properly, how much pressure to use when rolling, and it turned out in a fine lookin’ pile of lefse-y goodness. Probably used too much flour though. Something to remember in the future…

I’m going to be using the lefse grill for both tonight. Good times.

Well, tortillas anyway. I had some friends over and we had tacos, and there’s not enough time left in the evening to make lefse tonight. Tomorrow afternoon, hopefully.

almost got hijacked by another virus today, but it looks like it’s 100% off the system.

It made the mistake of f’ing with my antivirus, and while the antivirus stopped the more virulent permutations, it was somewhat stymied in stopping the malware itself. As in, no program would run, and safe mode would freeze up.

However, I got it up and running in the directory services repair mode, got the virus scanner running and cleaned out the malware to the extent that malware bytes could finish the job. Before that, no task manager, active desktop was f’ed up…etc. etc.

No reinstallation, and it seems to have worked perfectly. Nothing but good times here.

I learned from what happened the last time: when something like this hits the fan, disconnect the comp from the ‘net. Half of these viruses are programmed to connect and download even more garbage.

Who wins again, viruses? Sean does. Sean will always win, the good Lord willin’.

one remake at a time.

For the start of class tomorrow.

2 hours 15 minute long class. It’ll be interesting, first time I’ve taught a class that is that long. Evenings though, so that’ll be nice.

We’ll see.

to whoever sent me a best buy gift card…I’m at a loss as to whom it was because there wasn’t a message included with the envelope. So…thanks!

where too many white russians are required by fate.

So the virus didn’t go away. And after trying 6 or 7 things, my patience was shot. I was talking to my boss about it, and I said in an offhand way that if I had an external harddrive, I would just wipe the comp and start over.

I now have an external hard drive on loan.

So this afternoon was backing up the 85 or so gigs of important information on the computer, and it is currently formatting the drive. Formatting is fun.

In the war with the virus, it looks like I just won.

Scorched earth is a heck of a policy.

should fear me. I just got finished wiping a particularily nasty one off my system. It was annoying, but it was vanquished.

2009!