Sunday, February 22, 2004

I'm back (he said to a loud sigh of relief from his two regular readers -- or was that a groan?).

I've been having some difficulties with the network configuration on my laptop. Programs take a bit longer than they should to start up when the wireless card is active. If I unplug the wireless card, things work normally.

But the problem is not with the wireless card. I've been goofing around with various settings on the laptop firewall, and the router that's connected to the DSL modem. Then a couple of days ago, the network printer stopped talking to my laptop. Some more fooling around with the network connections, IP addresses, DNS servers, and other things. On Friday night, I got everything figured out so the laptop could talk to the printer. But that broke the Internet connection. It was getting way late, so I figured I would work on it on Saturday.

Saturday rolled around, and after the normal sleeping in, there was a bit of cleaning to do. Then it was over to Christine's house to help paint Liam's bedroom, which he will be sharing with Max, who is arriving sometime around June. Jared and I painted while Pam and Christine took the kids with them shopping. I think Jared and I got the best end of the deal. I painted the edges with the brush, and Jared handled the paint roller. The room wasn't very big, so we were able to get it done within two hours. A short cleanup of the paint splattered plastic, washed out the brushes, and threw away the paint roller. I've done a lot of painting, and I've never been able to get enough paint out of a paint roller to make is useable a second time. So I usually toss the roller, and clean up the roller holder. It was a latex paint, so it cleaned up with minimal effort.

Once we got home, I worked on the spring hinge on the door to the garage. This house is under three years old, and the spring inside one of the door hinges had broken. This is on the door from the house to the garage, which is supposed to shut automatically (it's a Fire code thing). Although there are two spring hinges on the door, both are needed for that weight of door.

The hinge is 4 inches, with a 5/8" rounded corner. I could find them at Home Depot and Lowes, but the screw arrangement was different on mine. So I did a bit of web searching, and found the company that built the hinge. After a bit of emailing (mostly to figure out the correct part number), they were kind enough to send me a "sample" set of two hinges -- at no charge. The hinges came last week, so that was the big project at home (after painting at the kid's house). The hinge was about 1/16 inch bigger than the original hinge, so a bit of razor blade work on the hinge cutout (John D would know the technical term, I'd bet), I got the new hinge installed flush to the door frame. A quick adjustment of the spring tension, and now the door shuts nicely all by itself.

By the time I got the hinge replaced, Pam had returned from the grocery store. I helped put things away, then Pam fixed a nice BBQ chicken salad, using the leftover chicken from a couple of nights ago. It was quite tasty, with the salad mix and tomatoes and a bit of bacon and shredded cheese, along with some toasted french bread.

After dinner, I spent a bit of time with the laptop and got the printer part working (as mentioned above). But since the Internet connection was not working, no post yesterday.

Today was busy with family stuff. Pam's father is at the short end of his leukemia fight, so the family got together at their house for a bit of visiting. Pam's sisters came in from out of town, and we all had a nice visit. Pam's father is mostly resting during the day. It's unclear how long he will last, so it was a good time for the family to get together. He was diagnosed with this about four years ago, when they gave him about 6 months then. There has been some good progress in drugs to fight leukemia, which helped him last this long. So the extra time was nice for all.

It's back to work tomorrow, with the added uncertainty of Pam's father's health. It won't be the usual routine for the next couple of days.

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Things will be a bit sparse around here this week. Pam's father passed away Monday, gently and quietly with family around. The whole week will be family-oriented, much visiting and support for Pam and her mother and sisters, and the planning minutia of funerals. The funeral is Friday.

Passings are always sad, but you deal with it and move on, listening to your memories, and supporting your family.

(later)

Just found out about the new MyDoom.F virus. I sent this to Dr. Jerry Pournelle's site; he has a few more readers than me...

The next MyDoom virus (release "F") is spreading. This one is more dangerous, as it will delete files. This is from the McAfee/Network Associates alert:

"A variant of the original Mydoom virus, W32/Mydoom.f@MM is a Medium Risk mass-mailing worm that can open up hacker backdoors on infected systems and launch denial-of-service
attacks that target www.microsoft.com and www.riaa.com domains.

"Note: Unlike previous versions of Mydoom, Mydoom.f can also delete image, movie, Excel and Word files on an infected machine."

On this version, the executable is hidden inside a ZIP file. If your mail filter is not able to 'look inside' zip files for executables, the mail will be delivered. (An important feature of a good spam/virus mail filter, IMHO.) The user will still have to open the executable inside the ZIP to become infected. (Details about MyDoom.F here: http://us.mcafee.com/root/campaign.asp?cid=9674 )

This one seems to be the latest escalation in viruses. It was just a mater of time before really damaging viruses (deleting files, etc) appeared.

Be careful out there.

... more later ...
Last Week	Next Week	mail	bookmark	The Digital Choke story