June 4, 2004

Hmm... two days of blogging got zapped during a failed sync. It appears a conflict exists unless I unload PestPatrol.

You missed the part about the well-dressed fat guy who barfed on the E train.

PestPatrol still hangs at 16% when I try to load it for scanning: the updater and cookie monitor work separately, so those may still be maintained. They had me download the file again, but that hangs as well (yes, I uninstalled first).

What else? Wow suddenly I have a curious pain. It is in my back where the hipbone is and echoed in the middle abdomen. Ah. It stopped.

Okay I've been writing this while on my lunch break. I would have been back before half an hour was up but naturally we were stuck at Lexington Avenue while cops looked for someone or something on the tracks. What's up with that?! [more]

DD 7:31am EST on Friday, Jun 4, 2004

What is with all these friggin' spywares?!

It happened again last night. Okay I was looking for some midi files. It seems again it struck on the hour. I had just finished scanning a flower and launched my browser, when suddenly my desktop was inundated with popups. Pestpatrol kicked in and alerted me to several pests and a trojan file, which were deleted. Once I managed to get Popup Killer launched, the desktop and taskbar could at last be seen. There were several exe files which I deleted and purged from the recycle bin.

The next thing I did was check c:\Windows\System for any new arrivals. Sure enough, there they were. I deleted all but two: Atl.dll.OLD because it could be something necessary which was renamed, and Bridge.dll which I knew was no good but wouldn't delete.

It was time to bring out the big guns.

PestPatrol identified 422 files and registry entries. Isn't that incredible? And - isn't this illegal?

I told it to delete everything on the list. It took 13 hours. I slept four hours after me and Seven hung out by phone for our designated evening.

For some reason PestPatrol is now crippled and won't load its control center past 16%.

Ouch.

DD 7:30am EST on Friday, Jun 4, 2004

May 31, 2004

Sometime either late Saturday or early Sunday, a car was smashed by a falling tree from across the street. Walking to the supermarket yesterday morning I came upon the evidence about two blocks from my home: on the west side of the street an uprooted stump and a parking spot with slices of trunk and gnarls of leafy branches roped off with police tape. On the east side was someone's former sportscar with a heavy portion of upper trunk across its former roof. Either someone drove into that tree, or Mother Nature struck back.

I wish they'd cover this stuff on the news...

There was record number of seven people at work for the holiday in the office today. I was late by a few minutes due to a futile search for a decent breakfast wrap. You mean tourists don't eat them but they eat quiche? I should have gone to my usual place but noooo - I had to try all the elitest crap places: Europa, Pax... awful, high-priced dumps. I settled on a bagel place at the corner which tourists inundate on holidays. I managed to scoot ahead of a typical tourists-from-hell couple as they appraised the menu boards as though they were seated in a restaurant. "Do you see the flavors list, dear?" That's a twenty minute dilemma right there. I cut down their time by advising them that the "pink" bagel was tomato. The place has gone downhill; their egg salad wasn't all that fresh.

DD 2:34pm EST on Monday, May 31, 2004

The once-revered private buslines in Queens are being taken over by the city come the end of June. I say "once-revered" because for quite some time now they haven't given a damn. You've got the many times one stopped at a red light and unloaded about a dozen school kids,then on the green passed a stop of people (including me) while half empty.

Now in addition to this sellout behavior, the buses have fallen into disrepair. They've begun to wobble badly, especially those uneconomical boxy ones. I prefer walking to work over chancing those deep swerves into stops and the two serioso turns it has to make. Most of them drive tilted like the kneeling mechanism didn't fully retract. I'm on one right now to go to the parents and it's scaring the shit out of me. If you are reading this, it means I've survived and will opt to walk a mile to the subway until these have either been repaired or replaced by the city. We're talking a stop one and a half blocks away.

Oh swell! We've picked up someone in a wheelchair. This will certainly get on the front page.

DD 7:32am EST on Monday, May 31, 2004