Blogs about paranoia:
Nom Nom Nom.
I learned something interesting on Friday. According to my bank, if a bank card is left in an ATM for too long after a transaction, then the ATM will suck the bank card back inside and shred it. I'm intrigued by this "secret" feature that only happens when no one's watching. I will test this next time I have an extra ATM card to dispose of.
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Pissed at XP.
I had a very frustrating weekend. As I was about to wrap up the taxes on Saturday night, my Windows XP desktop machine started giving me crap. First it, after being awoken, it informed me that there had been a registry problem, but it had recovered and everything was fine. Then it refused to open new applications - one of those "An error occurred. Would you like to report it to Microsoft?" situations. So I figured I'd better reboot the silly thing. Sadly, rebooting was the last straw for poor Lulu.
After rebooting, all I got was a black screen. There was no error message, and I hadn't installed anything recently. How am I supposed to troubleshoot nothing? No amount of work would allow me to boot from the hard drive - even Last Known Good configuration. I pulled out my XP CD and booted from there. I couldn't get into Safe Mode, or Command Prompt, but I could get into the Recovery Console. I tried a couple rounds of fixes in Recovery Mode, including this Repairing Recipe from a Squad Geek. Alas, nothing helped.
Do you know how long it takes to boot the Recovery Console from the CD? That was my whole Saturday night. I was so mad I broke a piece of furniture. Seriously. It was flimsy furniture; it crumbled beneath my wrath.
On Sunday, we copied my hard drive to the husband's external USB drive. Yay - external USB drive saves the day again! Then I was able to reinstall WinXP on my drive from scratch. Monday night it was the apps, as was Tuesday. Now on Wednesday, and I think I've got things under control again.
As an aside, I keep a pretty tidy system, and I'd backed my critical data just 6 weeks ago. But I still didn't want to lose the newest data. I haven't a clue what caused the crash, but a co-worker suggested it might have been one of the myriad of updates that my computer downloads all the time. I really do feel that auto-updating is the right policy, but the news of Apple pushing Safari as an iTunes update news does make me suspicious.
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Most Impressive.
I got a very curious email today. In fact, it was 2 copies of the exact same email. These emails notified me that my $1700 order at NewEgg.com had shipped and provided a FedEx tracking number. Attached was a .zip file, with an .exe inside. Ah ha! Spam, with a side helping of trojan horse.
Being the paranoid sort, I cottoned on to the canned meat identity of this email pretty quickly. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the sophistication of this attempt. The email was full of authentic-looking details, such as package-tracking information, an offer to win a prize for filling out a survey, and a re-stocking fee notice. On first inspection, there are no typos, spelling or grammar errors. And the carrot! Details of $1700 worth of NewEgg goods, possibly coming for me, if I would but open the attachment! Social engineering at it's finest. Suffice to say, I managed to resist. Consider yourselves warned.
PS - I've shopped at NewEgg. It was a great experience and I do reccomend them.
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I Heart Dell.
I got a new monitor to replace my archaic 17" tube. Now I've got a Dell 20.1 Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor. It's unbelievably awesome. I can't imagine how I ever got by with a wimpy 1024 pixels of width when I now have 1680 glorious pixels. Now in Photoshop, I can see all my tools, and the image I'm editing. When coding, I can see whole lines of code at once. It's got mulitple inputs (including S-Video and DVI) and it's a 4 port powered hub. I can finally charge my iPod when the computer is off! And, it matches my very sexy Antec Aria case. So awesome.