So.

A senior official of the Taliban calls for (states will happen) jihad against the United States. Other leaders hastily point out that he cannot call jihad, the clerics must.

Anyone wonder what he'll do if they don't?

Full article.

Someone shake me awake, and tell me it was all a nightmare. Someone buy me a time machine, and send me back to the days of my childhood.

Morning.

It's pretty out today. The sky is mottled in shades of grey, from dark to pale-almost-white; the trees beneath loom in dark purples and greens (and the occasional ruffle of orange, but most of what I can see from my window isn't turning yet). I love this sort of muted daylight; even the cars on the street outside are beautiful.

My radio has decided to be staticky, again. I'll have to move it around (it's either that or me, and I like to sit where I can do my job). Y. has his dog in again but is keeping him from wandering as much, so that's okay.

I was assigned a bug this morning, not because it's rightfully mine, but because there was no team listed for the product in question at that site. Umm. If there isn't, the site notes are wrong; assign it to the project manager, not the next team you can find. They even listed it as being on my product, despite the fact that every reference in the client's report was to another product. They've tossed it off to the project manager now. Whee.

Right. To do today: finish the roadway code; update the notes on NNS (next new site), maybe work on the profiles code.

Virus insanity....

DO NOT RUN ANY EXECUTABLES OF OFF [machine] UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DO NOT TOUCH [machine] AT ALL!

Ummm. Okay. Why not just take it off the network, and tell us it's offline due to virus issues? Even if you need the network for some reason, you could unshare the drives or hide them, if your only concern is someone running something....

Oh, well, hopefully everyone will check their email before doing anything on [machine]....

Viruses.

I'm still at work, waiting for one more scan of the server to complete. Yes, yes, someone in my company got the Nimda virus.

Yes, they gave it to lots of people, because they managed to infect one of the software distribution servers which is, yes, what the "do not access" message was about earlier.

Yes, Nimda writes to every shared drive it can find. Yes, the domain controller in our office needed a shared drive for one of its programs to be accessible. Yes, its disk was covered in .eml files. Yes, my boss was out of town, so I ended up handling the mess (the server is his - but I'm the best in the office at virus stuff, probably not even excluding him - I guessed the monster correctly even while he didn't believe it).

Good news: the server was not infected. It had a lot of junk files written to it, but since no one was using it, they were not run, and it did not manage to get into the Windows folders and set it up to run.

Bad news: the server has a 10-gig hard drive. And it was. Completely. Full.

I have been stripping (after unsharing the drive!) infected files by hand. Norton can detect them, but it doesn't seem to want to deal with getting rid of them. I, on the other hand, am quite happy to hit delete repeatedly (after checking with my boss - he doesn't even use Outlook - so the *.eml and *.nws files can go en masse, yay!).

I'm still at work. I should have eaten dinner half an hour ago, and I'm still at work. I should have left over an hour ago, and I'm still at work.

On the other hand, I really know I'm getting stuff done....

My own desktop and laptop were clean, never infected; several of our less tech-savvy folks, and their laptops, were out of the office today and thus Not My Problem. Lab? Clean. Backup DC? Clean. My employees' machines? Apparently clean, though I still need to scan one.

Need to check on a few more "person wasn't here" machines, but it's looking like I may get to go soon.

This is the sort of thing I hate to leave to greet someone in the morning, because sure as anything, they'll give it back to anyone they can.

Stick your foot in a little farther....

...and here's some sauce to go on it.

MSN's Slate chatterbox section shows a couple articles titled "Retract This, Please" of regrettable/obnoxious things that have been said (not including explicit lies, so much as lousy rhetoric) about last week's disasters. Where retractions have been offered, those are included.

Of particular amusement value for me, the "escalating retractions" on Falwell's commentary. Also, let it be noted, they themselves were not immune: the second link includes an entry about something they published. Good for them, owning up to that.

These links will open in new windows:

Retract This, Please, Part 1

Retract This, Please, Part 2

(Either of the links is probably good enough: as long as the links are good anyway, the left-hand column appears to let you move between articles.)

Tonight.

Whee! Fix problems at work due to virus, come home and make sure home system is updated against all possible whatnots (such fun), hang out and chat with people. Scott's not feeling well (minor - he has a cough and suchlike), poor guy.

I've been grouchy. So it's just been - come online, read things, read more things, read lots of things, shuffle data around, hang out.

Maybe I'll play a game of Bejewled before I go to bed.