Went to fix a friend’s PC today. Problem: very slow and no windows will open. Surprise surprise, the problem is spyware!
Rishal had about sixty items of malware on his PC altogether. I wanted to reformat the whole thing and start again, but didn’t have anything to back up to, so took the ‘damage limitation’ approach of using Spybot \ Ad-aware \ Microsoft AntiSpyware \ CCleaner \ Add-remove programs to give everything a good clean, then installed XP SP2 and all the other updates.
The PC had gotten into this state despite having a fully paid up version of McAfee Security Centre sitting happily in the corner, complete with AntiVirus, Firewall, AntiSpyware (hah!) etc etc etc. This was no help at all when a program can bypass everything by getting the user to click OK on a random ActiveX control. The next time I’m over, I’ll slip on a copy of Firefox 
And now, I’m delighted to present a very special item: Jason in a Bin.
Fantastic, I think you’ll agree. Bagman to the rescue?
It may be a cynical electioneering ploy to distract us all from Iraq and the whole ‘detention without trial’ thing, but hey, a little manipulation is only to be expected during an election campaign 
Minimum wage to increase to £5.05, and then most likely £5.35 in October 2006. One of New Labour’s most popular policies, it’s especially satisfying after all the shit spouted by the Tories in 1999. “Millions of jobs lost” whine whine whine, and this from the ‘economically challenged’ party which has a special, imaginary friend called £35bn. “Just cause no one else can see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!”
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His comments may have been stupid and insensitive, but Ken Livingstone is right about the Daily Mail and its underhand agenda.
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…is not actually that exciting if you think about it. Sure, it’s better than rain, and if you’ve got a desperate need to attack someone a snowball is better than the alternatives But unless we get the day off school, I won’t get that excited.
I’m also not overly excited about Sudan 1, which had escaped my notice until today. There’s nothing like a good old food scare to make some headlines, but the risk to human health is always pretty small. Talking of food, I ate crap at McDonalds for the first time in months last weekend. Tasted great though!
In other news – our school is having a PROM (capitalised for no apparent reason) which doesn’t look too inspiring. The very word conjuers up horrible images from American teen movies, but I’m sure nothing that bad could happen in real life… could it?
Now down to the really important buisness, today’s triple-whammy-shout out goes to:
– Mr. Bauer, for providing photographic evidence of having marked Maths coursework on a beach in South Africa!
– Promise, because she said this website was “pretty good!!!”
and most of all Robert for the fanstastic hairstyle he appeared with after lunch. He hereby wins the 2005 award for best application of snow. Many congratulations.
And it’s a bit frustrating, because there’s loads of stuff I’d like to blog about but can’t. (Not for very interesting reasons I’m afraid.) What I can say is that I’m starting learning Microsoft’s 70-290 exam – Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment. Cool eh? Oh, and all that other work, GCSEs and such. That’s all going fine too.
Well – it did snow today, which should make Rishal happy. He’s been desperate for a bit of snow ever since Christmas. (That was today’s shout out, right there.)
Ummm… that’s it really. Sorry for the dull post – I’m off to write an article about young people and politics. And trying to decide which is more annoying. Bye!
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
