No jokes, please...

I don't think I've ever been a big fan of April Fool's jokes, mostly because I find most of them decidedly unfunny. Or maybe it's because I'm a gullible sumofthebits, though to hear some people carry on, my picture ought to appear in the dictionary next to the entry for "skeptic."

Anyway, the work load has picked up for the time being and that's no joke. I had entertained visions of spending a half day in Durango this weekend (you know cabin fever must have taken hold when the thought of traveling 60 miles each way in order to wander around a Wal-Mart to do grocery shopping seems attractive), but now, I'm not sure I'll be able to. (Looking back at that sentence and visualizing myself at Wal-Mart, it's clear to me that going to Durango is so not a priority.)

I had discussed doing something at the kids' place this evening, so we'll probably do that (whatever "that" ends up being), but then I'm going to be booked pretty solid until Monday. My bank account will thank me later on.

In about another week, I shall have been in Pagosa for two months straight. I'm beginning to get used to the regularity, and wonder - from time to time - just how I might approach life in a "controlled absence" mode (i.e., I get to choose when I'm gone, for how long, and - most important - I get to do so far enough in advance to matter, all without overly upsetting the seeming scores of people who rely upon me for a chunk of their incoming cash flow).

Cheers...

Glide path...

I'm in the store for the last hour of the day, on the theory that a change of pace is good, especially for someone who's going to be working single-mindedly all weekend on toxicology.

When I ran the virus scanner on my desktop the other day, I became acutely aware that the software hadn't actually run in months (for whatever reason, but the last scan took place in early 2004). And I don't think any of the machines behind my router run their own firewalls (except the Linux machines, which run the default rule set for ipchains). This raises an interesting question: Have I just been incredibly lucky, or have I allowed some kind of "safe computing" environment to evolve in my office?

I think it's probably a combination. Part of it, certainly, is the fact that I have a "passive" defense in depth, starting with whatever measures are taken by the people I typically deal with, reinforced by my email provider, Fastmail.fm, which scans incoming mail and attachments for viruses, etc. I also have the luxury of moving any suspicious files that do get through to a Linux box for further analysis (though I do not always make use of such capability, as will be seen below).

So in the end, I must ask myself the question: is it worth while investing money to subscribe to one of the comprehensive commercial virus/firewall/whatever packages for my desktop, or is there something out there - preferably open source - that will do a workmanlike job of virus checking at the level I perceive I need?

A Google search turned up ClamWin, which by all indications has the horsepower to do the job. Indeed, about 20 minutes of work with the app showed that it's a very straightforward, no-frills application that not only runs well, but can be run from a thumb drive, which gives me ideas for offering virus-scanning as a service at the store. (In fact, earlier, I ran the app from a JumpDrive on one of the store machines, and uncovered one infected file in a driver subdirectory.)

Scanning gagarin showed up two infected files, both of which I knew about (one was a Linux virus file, which I was going to get around to examining, someday; the other was something I strongly suspected was a virus based on its provenance, i.e., an attachment from an unknown correspondent, but which might actually be a useful file if the correspondent turned out to be legitimate; I guess now I know).

So, for the time being, I think I'll see how things go using ClamWin as the virus checker on my desktop.

Cheers...