An especially tedious week at work thanks in part to a new idiot-detector virus called “sobig-f”. We’ve been getting them pour into the college at the rate of about 1 a second – that’s a lot. Apart from the usual problem of the anti-virus protection getting relased after the virus is in the wild [ anyone wishing to advise me about blocking executables should address their queries to /dev/null ] it caused all sorts of interesting side-effects including running out of disk space and a load average in the 30s, which in turn lead to several massive mail backlogs. At this point I want to make it clear that my irritation is not with the virus authors, but with PEOPLE – this virus doesn’t exploit any security vulnerabilities, just psychology. Every operating system should have two modes – “normal”…or..”idiot” mode that is enabled by default and doesn’t let you do a god-damn thing apart from word process (without macros of course) and read text-only emails. OS upgrades would be installed automatically. There is no control panel or other moron-friendly way to switch to advanced mode, so if you can’t get your head round reading instructions and editing config files you can’t get in.
As it’s a bank holiday weekend I took friday off to enrich the experience. My boss decided to do the same about five minutes later so I ended up going into work anyway to change the backup tapes…sigh…I also got roped into going up to easynet in brick lane to take the lid off a server and check what RAM it had inside it. For added excitement it was a rack-mount server and I wasn’t allowed to disconnect it. 🙂
There are loads more events far blogworthier that I should have put in this space like ending up leading a gay procession up to the Queens Arms in Lewisham, whilst trying to obscure my face from the South London Press’ photographer…and managing to piss off Alex at the same time… Or nearly getting my legs broken by a neanderthal cockwit of a bouncer [ named “moses” annoyingly enough ] at another of Greenwich’s buggered-up pubs last night. But, like with every other aspect of life, I really can’t be bothered. So here are some random thoughtlets:
- On the whole, people are scum
- Dr Kelly did not commit suicide
- Harry Palmer could wipe the floor with James Bond. Easy
- pity about billion-dollar brain tho’
- There’s more to the power cut in N.A. than “a normal power surge”….lots of theories on this one.
- I’m not cut out for all this and should move to an obscure hillside cottage and spend my life writing really bad, bitter poetry whilst drinking rough whisky
