Confusion works both ways.

Hehe. Got a call about our system, no-brainer problem, amusingly client reported it as a problem in another system. Usually they call us for problems in that system, and have to be redirected; this time, the guy who maintains that system had to redirect them.

As I told our people, if they weren't getting returns from that system, we'd hear back from them, because bringing up our db server won't fix it. (Who shut that down? There was no sign of a crash.... But hey, at least "the system is turned off" is an easy problem to fix.)

Virus foo, cookies.

Yay. More .eml files on the "disinfected" server. Which may still not be infected, it may just be getting assaulted by another machine somewhere else onna network. System admin is not in today, so I replied to the message that went out to the support and products groups asking what to do.

Really, anyone who can program on a given platform should have enough knowledge to run virus cleanups for it! Especially one that, at this stage of the game, amounts to "run this specialized detection and cleaning tool, then make sure the antivirus program is up to prevent future problems".

Whee. Meanwhile, someone brought in Halloween Oreos (orange creme filling!) to share with the office. Very cool. Very nummy.

Yes, I'm easily amused.

Some people are jerks.

Not that I think most of you would run this, but don't! There's a new virus out there masquerading as a "should we go to war?" message. The Symantec (makers of Norton antivirus) writeup is at:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.vote.a@mm.html

Virus magic!

I'm really impressed. According to this article, there is now a virus that can delete "all the files on the computer's hard drive" but which "also defaces any Web pages that are hosted by an infected computer" with a text message....

Wow. What pages? I thought it deleted them all....

Scrollbar warts.

I love the Microsoft developer's studio. Really I do. It has "scrollbar warts" as I call them. And they have shown up again.

The developer's studio occasionally sprouts scrollbars, or "parts" of scrollbars, where they shouldn't be. The best of these 'warts' begin to scroll your text whenever you even move the mouse over them. At the moment, I have the right-hand two thirds of an "up arrow" image from a scrollbar, 3/4 inch wide and four inches high, on a 5" high window, sitting docked at the left-hand side. It depresses on mouse-over, but nothing moves, so whatever it's affecting doesn't scroll.

Earlier, I had a complete scrollbar, very thin and half-height, at the lower left of the same window, and it WAS scrolling my programming space whenever I moved the mouse over it.

This is a release version of a product Microsoft makes for programmers to use.

I am deeply grateful to them for this service. Between this and the occasional crash, I am able to feel much better about the quality of even my alpha-test programs....

I feel so useful!

What, does it only take getting organized to sort it out? I've set up a schedule of when I will be staffing on Ashes, and how many hours are devoted. It's a lot; I'm hoping to cut back on it later. But I have gotten so much more done tonight.

In the same amount of time that didn't work, before. Making a commitment to myself means a lot. This week I'm breaking it a little - Tuesdays are a no-staff day for the moment, but I may need to reverse that after talking to one of my admins. It doesn't matter, overmuch.

I'm getting stuff DONE.