Moving right along

I've added a link to this blog from Linked In; that is, the latest blog posts (given that I update it sometime) should show up in the home page of anyone linked to me, and who uses the BlogLink applet.

We'll see.

Anyway, I have been WTF-ally busy these last few days, and so there's been scarce time for blogginess. Tomorrow, for those keeping score at home, I'll go to WRN, then to a service call, then catch lunch with A2B3, and follow it up with a WRN after-hours at Sandler Training. Yeah, social butterfly, me. In the quiet moments, I still have a half-dozen toner quotes to get finished, a few follow-up calls, and that wireless-allergic laptop.

I think the laptop will take a number and wait its turn. The client is in no hurry, and neither am I.

A nasty bit of work

A client claimed an infection of AntiVirus2009, so I took the PC back to the lair to remove the malware. Turns out it was worse than that. They had TDSSserv.sys, a very nasty little rootkit that prohibits booting into safe mode and contacting a selection of legitimate security sites.

What to do? Have all your tools on portable media - no Internet necessary. I loaded gmer and SDfix on the machine and they cut out the tumors. All better now. Of course, to get to that point took four hours of trying other remedies first. I do this so you don't have to.

I also have a laptop from another client. This little beast apparently won't hook up with wireless networks outside the home. When we booted it at their house, the keyboard and touch pad buttons were unresponsive. I think that wireless may be the least of the machines problems.

Weekly Scribe

Or, weakly; take your pick.

So what did I do this week? Allow me to indulge myself:
* I attended a Cub Scouts meeting - we're setting them up with cartridge recycling as a fund raiser.
* It was youth air rifle class day Wednesday at Tri County.
* Thursday was really busy. WRN in the morning, followed by the A2B3 lunch at Eastern Accents, followed by a reception at Washtenaw Woodwrights, then to Stonebridge for the Saline Business Enterprise Awards. A2B3 is a group I learned of through LinkedIn. They gather every Thursday and just have lunch. Its an eclectic group that just chats about whatever is on their minds. Kind of cool. The reception went very well; meaning that I enjoyed seeing their business and learning about it. And the awards are always a good time.
* Friday, we had our irrigation system winterized, I met an associate for lunch, and then we saw a friend over at the 4 Points for her birthday beer-a-rama. The conversation, as it will do, turned to politics, as drunks are wont to do. My two cents: We all have opinions but, as it is with religion, we don't have enough details. We hear and see what others tell us, and we cannot see all ends. Its best not to get too worked up over it. What will happen, will happen, with or without my getting all frothy over it.

Of course, in the meantime, we sold ink and toner, and I exhaled the warm breath of life into the PCs of others. We hired another part-time employee at the store; now we have two. Our empire expands slowly but surely.

There are five networking events this coming week, and some computer work. It all plods along, a heaping helping of same ol, same ol. Which isn't a complaint.

How Many is Enough?

I've got accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo. How many is too many?

Further, what are the relative strength/weakness of each? LinkedIn is better for business, Facebook is more social, and Plaxo is, well, I'm not sure. I'm seeing the twitters on Plaxo, so I think its more social. That begs a question: Can I link (RSS, or whatever) this blog to Plaxo? Or any other platform?

I mentioned that LinkedIn is more business-oriented, and I think it is. You keep occupational data on it, and make connections to others in your field or company, but what then? I haven't found anyone yet who can answer that, and I've asked a few. I'm linked, in one way or another, to over two million people. What do I do with them? Would they send me a quarter each?

It takes a lot of time to keep it all up to date, and I'm not sure they offer sufficient return to keep investing. It would be nice to know what others think.... since no one comments here (besides Keith) I suppose I'll have to ask on another channel. Maybe I need a MySpace page....

More tales of the stupid

Latest hack involves an email that pretends to be from Microsoft, and contains an executable that the recipient is directed to run as an update.

I can't believe that in this day of automated updates of just about everything, people fall for this. The executable contains Backdoor: Win32/Haxdoor. It will open ports on the infected machine that allow remote code execution. The effect is that the damaged PC becomes a Zombie, running whatever code is sent to it, and eventually becoming useless.

Be skeptical of everything on the internets, children. Even The Brothers Grimm couldn't see all the nasties that abound there.

Like the cool kids do

So, ya know, I'm like, hanging, over at Panera, drinking a smoothie, and posting to my blog.
ZOMG!

Spent the morning at Morning Edition, hosted at Weber's by the Ann Arbor Chamber. A fine time again. Then off to visit customers in the Jackson Road/Scio area, and try to drum up some cartridge business. C'mon people - get with the program.

This midday is the HBA's associates meeting, during which I will try to get business owners to notice that I'm trying to save them some money here. Lastly, I need to pick up a laptop (another victim of Antivirus2008) and get that on the road to recovery.

Thursday is a mess - I'm out of pocket all day: Washtenaw referral network, Saline Leadership, a Saline Chamber after-hours at Flatout Bread, then a membership meeting at Tri County. Swamped, I tell you.

But at least now, right this minute, I have a moment of relative quiet and a smoothie. Mmm, good smoothie...

Another Rogue

My old pal Antivirus2009 was out and about today, and he brought a pal: Say hello to 'SafePCTools'. Seriously. 'Safe PC Tools'?? C'mon, what happened to 'ReallyNotAVirusInDisguise2007'? Lovely names that the ne'er-do-wells come up with.

But the naive continue to fall prey to them. Remember, Windows will never, ever, spontaneously pop up a window that warns of an infection, and then Not Suggest a Microsoft Product.

So, a little inkiness, a little wireless networking, the same ol. But a busy sort of same ol, so no complaints here.

Keeping on keepin on

Tuesday saw us having a new desktop to work on, and so on. Just a performance issue (with the PC, not me). I guess thats what happens when one's teenage daughter has never seen a freebie not worth downloading. Just sayin.

I had a Toshiba laptop to trouble shoot the other day. There was no power - meaning, that even plugged in, it wasn't booting up. I changed the DC jack (was corroded, it was), and still no joy. Tried a new battery [Plug] over at Batteries Plus on Packard [/Plug] and still no joy. The disassembly went well, and all the components looked ok, and the power was correct down to the mobo. I guess, when they die, you just have to let them go.

This evening was the big NRA banquet over at Tri County. Always a good time: [Gimli] Prime rib, fresh cool ale[/Gimli]. It benefits a good cause, and we've benefited from it a lot over the past few years.

My Turn

Looks like the ol blog has moved to bi-weekly.

So be it. I've been busy as hell trying to keep all this running. So, what has been happening, you ask?

Well, I've had some HTTP work - usual stuff... viruses, optimization, and we're busy with CW. But. I could be doing the world a lot of good by spreading the CW word around a lot more. So thats what I'll do. I'm going to be a man on a mission. I want to proselytize the world on the CW (and HTTP) models and make the masses come a-calling. Let us be inundated with orders, like an onrush of inky tidal wave.

The night is hot and black as ink; oh g-d I need a drink....

We Get Letters

Yeah! I got an email from 'IRS' that states that the government owes me $650.50. I just need to click on the embedded link that redirects to a server on yahoo.jp. I'm sure the IRS has a very good reason for using a free email account in Japan.

Early to rise

Well, its not that early, but still. With the weather being so crisp of a morning, who wants to get out of bed at all?

This week, more of the same. I have a laptop now to fix, it has a broken DC power jack. A fairly common complaint since it is a fragile piece, and we abuse our laptops, don't we? We take them for granted, and them we are all bummed out when they are broken. Which is OK, just bring them to me to fix.

I had an appointment Monday to deliver a full system I had put together. PC, monitor, color deskjet; running XP home. It was reasonably priced, and included data migration and set up. And then the client backed out. He uses his computer just for email and word processing. The fact that it is a 12 yr old Pentium 2 fossil running Win98 on 128MB RAM, with a dial up internet connection mind you, didn't seem terribly inconvenient after all, when faced with a new-fangled XP system. The old one already has Office 2000 installed (from a relative, not even a legit copy) and has his dialup client (and he can't find the install disks), so using a new one would require.... loading applications. Apparently too much trouble for a retired guy to manage. The fact that I would have done so for free didn't budge him.

The real deal breaker for me was when he asked if he could put the memory card from his camera into the new PC to send photos to people on email. Nevermind that sending a 1.5GB photo over dialup from that old POS would take 37 hours, I said, no, an additional external card reader would be needed. Well, that disappointed him no end. It was unacceptable, you see. I asked him how he does it now, and he answered that he doesn't.

Its like one of those old corny jokes. Except that I'm not laughing.

He said he would call when he got his data connection upgraded (already has cable TV, and a cell phone, so was using sole POTS line for the dial up. Go figure.) If I can sell the system in the meantime, I'll be gladly rid of it.

On the CW biz, we just closed September, and I'm pretty proud. The sales were more than double that of July, nearly double that of August, and within the price of a steak to the best month in the store's history. I intend to shatter that this month.
How cool is that?