MartyNeilan wrote:Turns out she fell asleep on the bus and missed her stop. They circled around at the end of the route, but by then her mother had started looking for her. So, when she came home to an empty house, she started walking around the neighborhood until someone took her in.
Gawd. Astounding that the bus driver didn't have a cell phone, or didn't think to use it. Also astounding such a young child wasn't chaperoned to the door under the circumstances. "Common sense" is a misnomer.
Yesterday we had a laptop go down around 11:00 AM (CDT). Symptoms were like nothing I had ever seen before; the machine was virtually incapacitated and all network connections were literally gone. I figured the harddrive may be getting corrupt and ready to die, so I took it back to out workroom. Within an hour, PC's began dropping like flies all around the company. The one common denominator was that our antivirus updates run during lunchtime. I got on hold with McAfee and began researching the problem online, with the original problem laptop in front of me. Still on hold, I had developed a fix by about 1:40PM and hung up the phone. I had a scripted version that we could easily deploy by 2:00. My supervisor and I grabbed a handful of USB "thumbdrives" and commandeered some developers to help us canvas the building and bring the PC's back to life. By 3:30 PM CDT everybody was up and running. Some hours later McAfee came out with a fix virtually identical to mine.
MartyNeilan wrote:Yesterday we had a laptop go down around 11:00 AM (CDT). Symptoms were like nothing I had ever seen before; the machine was virtually incapacitated and all network connections were literally gone. I figured the harddrive may be getting corrupt and ready to die, so I took it back to out workroom. Within an hour, PC's began dropping like flies all around the company. The one common denominator was that our antivirus updates run during lunchtime. I got on hold with McAfee and began researching the problem online, with the original problem laptop in front of me. Still on hold, I had developed a fix by about 1:40PM and hung up the phone. I had a scripted version that we could easily deploy by 2:00. My supervisor and I grabbed a handful of USB "thumbdrives" and commandeered some developers to help us canvas the building and bring the PC's back to life. By 3:30 PM CDT everybody was up and running. Some hours later McAfee came out with a fix virtually identical to mine.
A friend of mine (a former military tuba player who visits tubenet occasionally) works his butt off for "the largest employer in Memphis" as a contract employee. He goes home every day absolutely exhausted; If I leave him a phone message, he usually doesn't have the energy to respond until late on Saturday or Sunday. There's one other computer-guy contract employee like him troubleshooting over 7000 computers, and my friend believes the other guy is going to take a job at a local bank.
My friend reports to me that almost everyone he serves (regular hires of "the largest employer in Memphis") does nearly nothing or absolutely nothingevery single day - day-in and day-out.
I know nothing (I mean NOTHING) about computers, but my friend tells me that if his bosses and the rank-and-file knew as much as I know (to simply avoid screwing things up and making obviously bad decisions...and/or buying bad/ineffective/borderline-destructive software from "buddies" for kickbacks, and having it installed system-wide) his job would not be necessary.
Unfortunately, this was no simple user screw-up. This was all over the news last night - McAfee (formerly a trusted name in computer security) put out a daily virus signature update that tagged a critical system file as being malware and removed it, thereby rendering the PC useless. Worse, they were far more concerned yesterday about PR spin, instead of putting out a fix and making it accessible. Hundreds of thousands of computers around the world were affected, and all have to be individually repaired one at a time.
bloke wrote:My friend has (at all of the places he has ever worked) suggested that updates be done to a few representative "drone" computers before the updates are allowed to go throughout the system. No one has ever agreed to implement his suggestion.
Unfortunately, virus updates (unlike system updates that are usually released on "patch Tuesday") are done daily and the task is highly automated. Our email servers actually look for new virus files every hour. Our one bit of protection is that we have our PC's update during lunchtime (to avoid any potential "hiccup" during the switchover) and the servers in the late afternoon. FORTUNATELY, yesterday's McAfee glitch did not take out any server operating systems, otherwise it would have been truly catastrophic for many companies.
My supervisor at work suggested at 2:00 I post my fix online and make money off it. All I did was put a blurb on my FaceBook that I had a fix before mcAfee. Somebody came out with a fix around 11:00 PM and put links under McAfee's blogs, and asked for $5.00 via PayPal. I wonder how much money he made?
McAfee USED to be very good. I used them for many years... ever since their VirusScan would fit on a floppy (days long ago). But I stopped trusting them when then left VS-7 behind. IMHO VS-7 was their last good product. I was a moderator for their help forum for about 4 or 5 years until about 3 years ago and just couldn't support them anymore. I've been using Avast (the free version) for 3 years without any complaints.
Hopefully McAfee didn't delete the sys file but quarantined it.
Miraphone 5050 - Warburton BJ/RF mpc YEP-641S(recently sold), DE mpc (102 rim; I-cup; I-9 shank) Symphonic Band of the Palm Beaches: "Always play with a good tone, never louder than lovely, never softer than supported." - author unknown.
We used McAfee on our family computer for several years, mostly because it was free. Over the years, the computer slowed to a crawl. This didn't help with my dad kicking it every time he got on (he's an engineer and from what I hear, they have pretty fast computers, double that with his impatience isn't a good recipe for our computer). We decided to have a computer person check it out. He found 1800 viruses. Not 180 or 18, 1800! McAfee said we had nothing. They wiped everything and it's all good now though. Needless to say, we don't use McAfee...
Last night was "boys night out" with 4 bucks in the back yard. Just lumps where the antlers will be, but those were some big boys. This morning it was the girls and the kids. 3 does, 4 fawns. Skittish as heck.
Haven't seen the turkeys for a while.
Gray squirrels and brown squirrels were running amok.
In my first serious attempt at mountain biking in the last decade, I got lost in the woods for nearly two hours on a very technical trail. It was the best time I had in a while (although I did have to push back a lesson I was teaching later that evening.)
Someone moved one of my tubas without my permission between my lesson yesterday afternoon and noon today. I am extremely mad about that, especially because they picked it up by the main tuning slide (and on any other horn, that would have fallen, and the bell would have gotten crushed)
"We can avoid humanity's mistakes"
"Like the tuba!"
Tuba Guy wrote:Someone moved one of my tubas without my permission between my lesson yesterday afternoon and noon today. I am extremely mad about that, especially because they picked it up by the main tuning slide (and on any other horn, that would have fallen, and the bell would have gotten crushed)
You left your tuba, outside its case, whether strangers could mess with it for a whole day?
You're lucky it's still there at all.
Rick "who never takes his eyes off his instrument in a public setting" Denney
Wade, I've been catching up on your posts about last weekend, and am truly affected by your descriptions of your experience. While the experience was frightening, you'll remember it as being a point of great excitement and personal relevance as you look back on it.
Rick "still repairing damage from February's double-blizzard" Denney
