News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

December 29, 2009

We had Dale for Christmas

Filed under: Family Updates — Daryl @ 1:36 pm

My brother Dale come out to Arizona from Buffalo to spend Christmas with his Arizona relatives. It was great having him here for a few days.

He came out a couple of months ago for the first time in about 40 years, and that was really special. But it was a short visit with lots of relatives around to share his time and non-stop “getting acquainted”. This visit was more relaxed, and we even got to take a 5-mile geocaching hike on South Mountain (Dale, Donna and I). We found about 6-7 caches and had a good, tiring hike.

We went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday, ate dinner with Mom, and just generally enjoyed each other’s company.

I put him on a plane this morning, and it’s back to Buffalo with a high predicted today of 17F. (Phoenix is in the 60s.) I hope we’ll get to see each again soon, either here in Arizona or back in New York (in the summer, of course!).

December 22, 2009

MBR Virus

Filed under: Computers, Tech & Science — Daryl @ 6:50 pm

I was fixing a computer a few days ago that was driving me crazy. When I began, it was full of malware; trojans, fake virus scanners and browser hijackers. I ran the usual scanner/cleaners and it seemed to be clean, but as soon as I started browsing it hijacked me to some malicious Russian website. Of course, that immediately downloaded new trojans, and I was back where I started.

I cleaned it again, using all the high-powered scanners I could find. Clean… until I started browsing again, and poof! I was in Russia.

I struggled with it for several hours, using esoteric process monitors, registry cleaners, etc., but I couldn’t find anything. Then I happened to stumble on a web forum where someone described the same problem, and had an explanation and solution.

It turned out to be a Master Boot Record (MBR) infection. That’s normally outside the operating system control, and not anyplace most scanners will check. MBR viruses used to be common with DOS and early Windows, but you don’t see them much anymore because Windows does a pretty good job of protecting the data there. However, it can happen and may be on the increase, as it can escape most scanners.

It’s easy to fix, once you know where it is (boot to the Recovery console and run fixmbr). Next time I’ll know what to look for!

December 14, 2009

Pride of Tolerance

Filed under: Opinion — Daryl @ 8:13 pm

I do have opinions about tolerating people’s differences, but that’s not what this post is about.

I’m talking about building up a tolerance to substances or environmental factors. For example, some people can tolerate much spicier food than others, or drink more alcohol without feeling drunk, or drink lots of strong coffee.

It’s not surprising that people vary in these characteristics, but it is interesting that many are proud of tbeir own tolerance. For example, we’ve all heard some guy smugly talking about “drinking somone under the table”. What they are saying is, “I drink so much, so often, that alcohol doesn’t affect me much anymore”. That sounds like something to be ashamed of, not proud.

Or pouring lots of Tabasco on your food. Nothing wrong with spicing up your food, but I think as you develop tolerance to the spice you lose appreciation for the underlying flavors. I’m proud that it only takes a little spice to satisfactorally enhance my food.

Coffee is another example. Interestingly, brain activity scans show that without coffee, habitual coffee drinkers’ brains show much less activity than “normal” people’s brains. With coffee, their brains look like a normal brain does without coffee. So being able to tolerate strong coffee basically means that you need it to be normal.

Of course, there are some things it is certainly worthwhile developing tolerance for. If you live in a cold or hot climate, it’s useful to develop tolerance to cold or heat. But intentionally building up a tolerance with no personal benefit and potential harm doesn’t make sense.

December 8, 2009

Thunderbird 3.0

Filed under: Computers, Tech & Science — Daryl @ 10:01 pm

Mozilla has released a new version of the Thunderbird email client.

It’s got some nice new features; tabbed emails is the main one that stands out at first.

I’ve just installed it, which was painless, and so far it looks very good.

Unfortunately my calendar plug-in isn’t compatible (yet), but it was synced with Google Calendar and my Droid, so nothing was lost.

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