There are days...and this is one of them.

Apparently, my experience with the virus I received earlier today (it was the "Here you go" virus) was rather mild compared with some other folks' experience. JSC got hit rather hard, but that's to be expected, as everyone around here is connected to everyone else, and everyone uses Outlook, which only streamlines the infection process, it seems.

Then again, a colleague who attends law school locally also got a screenful of virus-generated mail when he checked into his law school account, so it seems a lot of people have been hit. Also, it would appear a lot of people don't upgrade their virus-scanning software, since a defense against this particular bug has been known for some time (August, if memory serves).

Receiving the virus made me think about the last time my McAfee software went out on the web to get the latest, greatest patches, so I fired up the software and...it didn't like the look of one of the DLLs on my hard drive and proceeded to give up the ghost.

I rebooted the machine. Same story.

I cold booted the machine. No joy.

There are days when I feel my only purpose in life is to reboot my computer over and over again. Today was one such day, to the point where I feel that the virus that arrived in the mail was the least malevolent aspect of the day.

After my abortive attempt to get Eudora to run the other day (including a couple of tries at some of the fixes I got from the Qualcomm web site), I wrote the upgrade off as a bad deal and started to use Outlook Express. In the handover between mail clients, I missed an important e-mail, but was able to recover before any major damage was done. Once that danger was past, however, Outlook began to behave erratically in the middle of the afternoon, which is to say it stopped responding almost immediately after being launched.

Eudora dies a horrible death, McAfee refuses to function, and then Outlook decides to play games.

Some people have all the luck. And cold booting did nothing to solve the problem, either.

Whoo-eee!

About the only software that appeared to work without trying to drive me crazy was my browser - which unwittingly allowed me to share the NEAR Shoemaker landing - and the LJ Windows client. (By late afternoon, all it would have taken to make me crazy was a nine iron, but I digress...)

In any event, by the time I realized the time of day, it was too late to go anywhere, so I turned to the more mundane aspects of life, such as laundry. Washers and dryers are pretty straightforward pieces of equipment that do not require rebooting (and if I have anything to say about it, never will...at least not in any house I inhabit), so things went well, and I no longer have a critically low supply of clean linen in the house.

Too, after scouring the junk in the house, I've accumulated a coffee can full of pennies. Initially, I'd rejected the idea of going to one of the local yuppie-haven supermarkets and putting them through a machine that counts loose change and outputs a voucher exchangeable for cash (minus a hefty percentage), but after timing how long it took to roll $2 worth of pennies, I figure it would take me a couple of hours at least to finish the job, so maybe the house vigorish is worth it. We're talking a big coffee can, here, and it weighs a ton.

I think I'll run by the store on the way home after my shift (I seem to recall the place is open 24/7), cash in the coppers - which haven't had copper in them for almost 20 years, BTW - and maybe pick up a light load of groceries. Food has been getting in critically low supply, too, and I'm getting pretty sick of eating udon noodles for breakfast, anyway.

Cheers...

The imp's ire strikes back!

Hamlet wondered whether taking arms "against a sea of troubles" would have any effect. And so, after yesterday's frustrating session with my Windows laptop, I decided to pursue the young Dane's line of thought and see what I - in a most impish mood - could do to combat the sea of computer troubles that have plagued me of late.

One item that went unmentioned thus far in my posts was the rejection of an ActiveX file, RICHTX32.OCX, by an application I use a lot in my translation work. A few minutes ago, I downloaded a new copy of the file, copied it on top of the one in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM, and ... well ... all seems to be working well.

I am surprised it was that easy, but I'll take my victories - small as they are - as they come. Hopefully, nothing else on my machine that uses that ActiveX control will complain about the new file. If it does, well...too bad.

I unlimbered the application recovery disks that came with my system to see about recovering the McAfee software. I ran into a roadblock when I tried to install the software on top of the software on my machine. The install procedure kept asking for 'disk 1', where there were no disks to feed the machine, and so I finally decided - after two unsuccessful tries - to go ahead and uninstall the virus scanning software and then reinstall it.

Sweet success! Of course, I had to go hit the McAfee site and download the latest patches, and that seemed to take forever, but at least now the software works!

Outlook Express seems to be acting more or less stably right now, so I am not going to screw with it...mostly because I haven't a clue as to what may be making it crazy. The volume of my e-mail right now is not high, so if I have to, I'll make my peace with rebooting, if necessary, to get the mail through.

My Canon BJC-80 bubble jet printer is a sweet machine that fits in the accessory pocket of the laptop's case, but the down side of using the unit is that it goes through ink cartridges like grain through a goose, and at about $20 a pop, the ink soon exceeds the printer itself as the main expense associated with ownership.

Some time ago, I bought one of those ink refill kits that claim to be able to refill just about any kind of cartridge, and I've had reasonable success with it as far as Galina's Epson color printer was concerned, so I went out this morning and bought another such kit for the Canon. I found the kit hanging right next to a replacement cartridge, each priced about the same.

The cartridge, based on experience, would be good for about 30-50 pages, after which it would be time to buy another cartridge. The ink kit would refill a cartridge at least a couple of times (conservatively speaking, the box claims up to ten refills per cartridge). I decided to go down the less certain path, and bought the kit.

Unfortunately, among the copious instructions that came with the kit, there were no instructions for refilling the BCI-10 cartridge that my Canon uses, but a little fiddling soon showed me the keys to the kingdom. In short order, I recovered my printing capability, and just in time to print out a translation I've got to have done by tomorrow.

I am so happy.

(Who'd have ever thought such small things as this and the availability of hot water would make me deliriously happy? Ye gods. But then again, don't get me wrong: I am not complaining about being happy!)

I was too tired last night (this morning) to stop anywhere on the way home, so I set out this morning to cash in that coffee-can full of pennies I'd put in the back seat yesterday. For the record, the can contained 3,186 pennies that, after the house extracted its 8.9% skim, yielded me $29.03 to do with as I willed.

I proceeded to will the purchase of a load of groceries that ought to keep me from being calorifically challenged for several days (though I seem to have already put a healthy dent in the six-pack of Killian's that I bought...though I put the cap on that a couple of hours ago).

Mission support has now been cut to two interpreters per shift. The initial staffing level had been three interpreters, in anticipation of a lot of discussions associated with a large number of activities that were part of an ambitious flight plan, but the hectic part is past, and so only two of us are needed per shift. I am happy to report that I am among the two retained for the work for the next three nights.

Less than two hours left until I leave for work...and there's so much to do.

Cheers...