Yeah, like that'll ever happen...

Disaster Services director and Health & Safety chief instructor were wheeling the Giant TV out of this half of the building. (It'd been in here for a class last night.) Someone else comments that we ought to bring in a player and have DVD night. Disaster director spots me, grins, and says "Yeah! We could all watch movies! Jessica could come! What would you like to see - Taxi Driver, Donnie Brasco, Goodfellas, Godfather Part II?"

Leaving aside the fact that the director has a tendency to wear black shirts with white ties under grey pinstripe suit jackets, I smiled at him and said "City on Fire. Chinese gangsters, but still gangsters. I think you'd like it." (I couldn't think of Hard Boiled or another gangster flick fast enough.)

God help me if anyone ever takes me up on that.

Today's pulp survival tip is #68: Liquid meant for drinking is not supposed to give off smoke.

Jeebus.

Our Board of Directors is composed of people who are very good in their respective fields, but none of them, to my knowledge, are in the field of computers. One of them has recently had a lot of trouble with her computer, and got a phone call from someone asking her if she knew her computer was sending out virus-infected emails. She promptly phoned me at work - or, rather, phoned someone at work and asked her if I could help, and then got herself transferred to me - to see if I could walk her through cleaning up. I tried, but she couldn't make it happen, even after I faxed her the instructions. Fine, thought I, Klez (which she thought she had) must have devoured her anti-virus files. So her son brought the computer in today for an in-person purge.

Well, Klez didn't devour the files. The Board member just couldn't type out the path McAfee needed her to type out in order to get to her DOS prompt scanning software. I know this because I sat down and did what it said in the instructions, and it worked perfectly on the first try. Turned out she had no less than twenty-six infected or infectious files, including Klez, an email worm whose name I failed to get (it was one of the Exploit-related ones), and a Trojan horse that went off every time she started Internet Explorer. She'd had the a/v software installed five months ago and hadn't updated it since, but apparently whatever install had been done hadn't been sufficient to stop Klez- even though it detected Klez and removed it just fine once I ran the scan properly. Mind, I'm not sure she knew how to use it properly, as she seemed to think McAfee could 'send' her something to clean off her hard drive - even though she got illegal operation errors when starting her Internet software. Also, she had a great many Temporary Internet Files of another nature...

Word of advice to her early-twenties-ish son: if you KNOW your mom's computer is going to be taken somewhere for a scan, if you are TAKING THE COMPUTER THERE YOURSELF, then please, for the love of Buddha, fire it up before you take it in and delete some of those jpegs and cookies, okay? I mean, geez, what if I'd had someone standing over my shoulder (as they so often do around here, because no one believes me when I say that personal space is an important thing when working a computer) when the scanner started listing off that stuff?

And yes, I know it was him. The cookies were listed under his name, not 'hp preferred customer', the other login.