Happy New Year! I know it's cliche, but here's to 2010. It's been here for a few days already, but I hope it's all a blast!
The trip to Minneapolis was rather uneventful, fortunately. The roads weren't too bad and we got to the Cities during off-peak traffic, although the streets were so covered with ice that the cars parked on the side of the road were sticking out into the driving lanes. New Year's was a change of pace from my normal festivities, but fun nonetheless. It was weird having so many people in a small house, including a good number of people that I didn't know (the hosts were all friends of mine, but they each invited people from their respective classes/groups/etc). New Year's reinforced the "once a CA, always a CA" saying, since at the end of the night, a friend/old co-worker and I went through the house making sure things were being cleaned up, beds were being made, and everyone else was getting ready to head out. We even established who was on primary and secondary. :-P
I stayed in Minneapolis for a few days after that basically laying low and spending time with college friends. New Year's Day was a lot of football and then a bunch of us played this party game: "A to Z". It kind of reminded me of team Scattegories and it was quite fun. On the last night, I tried out Axises and Allies with three other people. I was the United States (which has the best starting position since you're not at the border of the enemy right away), and while my teammate and I ended up losing, it was nice to finally play a game rather than seeing it played secondhand.
My co-worker picked up me Monday morning to go back to Missouri, and that was also a long, yet fortunately boring drive. Kristina (the co-worker) had the van packed to the brim with her Christmas gifts, including half an Armour and a big bin of holiday decorations - I'm just glad I was able to get my stuff in! Now that I'm back to the Academy, I have unpacking, cleaning, and various job stuff to work on (at least I have food in my apartment again).
Unfortunately, yesterday and today weren't very pleasant. Yesterday morning, I decided to join Kristina to pick up some other co-workers who flew into Kansas City. The plan was to pick them up, go to St Joes, and then go to the Target to get my Christmas gift to myself (new TV). When we got to the Target and I figured out which brand I'd want, I found out they were out of that model. Hopefully I can get to the store again before the kids come back.
Last night at around 7:30pm, my computer started to really flip out, thanks to Desktop Defense 2010 and Malware Defense... yep, my computer got viruses. Well, crap. I had to mess around with my computer for a while and the Desktop Defense 2010 was really starting to piss me off. Fortunately, I had my school laptop to surf the Internet to find solutions. Around more searching, I was able to get rid of Desktop Defense and then an iexplore.exe hack
...
I'm writing this on Thursday now because when I was writing the part about computer viruses, my Firefox crashed and the night turned into more hunting, a 2-1/2 hour phone conversation with Norton (with a lot of waiting time), and more frustration. It was kind of funny at the very beginning because I was trying to hunt down viruses while watching Office Space. Then, it wasn't funny when I finally decided to purchase a Norton bundle that included a full virus sweep and destruction AND THEN the technician couldn't connect to my computer through any of the few ways we tried. During the very long call, I decided not to say "yeah, I know how to reboot into Safe Mode" and follow each rudimentary step, but at the same time, I have a feeling I wasn't the worst customer to work with. It turns out that there was a major viral attack so all the technicians were swamped. (The guy I talked with apologized a lot at the beginning and gave that explanation and I was in the "alright, you're doing your job. let's do this" mindset rather than being pissed off.)
So, I probably spent 8-10 hours trying to get my computer back to normal, and after countless restarts and numbing frustration, I was able to start up all my anti-virus programs (Norton, Malwarebytes, and Spybot) normally last night! In fact, when I woke up this morning and checked the computer, all the system scans were clean! Nice way to start the day.
Oh, and a bit of advice I randomly picked up during the virus hunt: some viruses are designed to stop anti-virus software from running. The virus doesn't, however, recognize "Virus Killer.exe" as a threat and will run it normal (which is just a renamed copy of the anti-virus .exe file). So yeah, copy-paste the file, rename the copy, and the virus isn't the wiser... until it is snatched up and dies! MWA HAHAHAHA!
*ahem*
The past few days have been scheduled for staff training, but it's been rather light, fortunately. There was an all-employee meeting and SD staff meeting on Wednesday, an Academy staff meeting today, and then a scheduling session tonight. Now that my computer isn't consuming all my spare time, I can take that time to get some work done before the students get back. There are a number of things that I need to work on, so my work is definitely cut out for me. (If nothing else, I don't need to go outside tomorrow for any reason... which will be nice seeing as it's freezing out there.)
Well, I should wrap this up. When I was in the Cities, it was nice to hear college friends say that they have been reading my blog. That actually will give me motivation to blog more often, so... that's fun. I'm going to publish this now. See you later!
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