A Canadian in Ireland

I'll be setting off just as soon as I post this.

Read more...

Once again I keep putting off my posts so I then have a huge update to cover everything that's happened. Best just get down to it.

1
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I think my trips to Co. Carlow may be cursed. First this, then last Saturday when I was in Leighlin Bridge my car got rear-ended.

Both cars were barely moving, so it was just a tap, but bad enough to break my tail-light and mark the bumper. The lady who hit me was very nice though. She admitted straight away that her foot slipped and then brought me to her mechanic so he could have a look. I felt kinda bad for her, she was driving a big '06 Toyota that seemed to take the brunt of the impact.

We agreed not to get the insurance involved, the mechanic will repair the damage at her expense as well as looking after another dent I picked up. Before you think I'm taking advantge, this will proabably cost her less than if we went through insurance and she lost her no-claims bonus. Plus I think she'll be getting some kind of "friends and family" discount, they seemed to know each other really well.
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2
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My course is going well. We're doing databases, which I enjoy, and the tutor is showing me some of the advanced features of Access - like the switchboard and macros.
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3
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The writer's group met Tuesday. A very good meeting - good turnout, excellent pieces, just a very enjoyable evening.

To top it off, at the suggestion of one of our writers a few of us went to the monologue night in The Nore Bar. I got coaxed into doing a couple of my pieces - which got a good response.

Here's one I did. It's a poem I wrote for this last meeting. The subject was an Irish proverb that came off the back of a sugar packet. We all drew one out of the bowl at our previous meeting and this was the one I got.

Marbh le tae agus marbh gan é
Some people are never satisfied

Standing in the checkout queue,
An internal debate fills the waiting.

Will I get a lotto ticket?

It was won last week, the jackpot is only €1.3 million.
I won't bother. Sure, it's hardly worth it.

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4
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Finally, the weather

Hungryghost enough! Mercy!! Uncle!!! I give!!!!

Either take the rain back or let Noah know he might be needed again soon. It's poured down nearly every day since our exchange. Which I never officially agreed to in the first place.

Even the ducks are finding it a bit damp for their liking.



Just one dry day so I can at least hang out the laundry.
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This is what happens when you don't update your security software. Mom's landlord asked me to have a look at his Pc as it was "running slow and probably has a virus" So up I go on Saturday afternoon with my bag of tricks.

While they did have Norton, Spybot S&D, and Ad-Aware installed, it was all well out of date. I tried to uninstall Norton so I could put on AVG but I kept getting an error about removing a registry key. Thinking this might be virus related I went to install Ewido only to find I didn't have the latest version and the updates I downloaded wouldn't install. So I started a scan with McAfee's Stinger while I went back home to get the latest version of Ewido.

The Stinger picked up one virus. I got Ewido installed and started a scan.

Ewido found several references to the CoolWebSearch hijack so I stopped the scan I was running after about 100 infections and ran CWShredder a few times to clean that up. Then another scan with Ewido. This time I let it run all the way through and it found 1275 infected objects

Cleaned all that up and then went to work on removing Norton. Seems the uninstaller was having trouble removing the toolbar from IE. First I tried disabling the toolbar, no go. Then I tracked down the key in the registry and tried to delete it manually. Here I got a message telling me I was denied permission.

So you can set permissions on registry items like on files. Very interesting. And when I checked there it was set to deny any changes to BHOs. It took me a bit of fiddling to get the permissions set right, but as soon as I fixed that Norton uninstalled without a hitch.

So Norton off, AVG free on, and another virus zapped. Then Ad-Aware - another 100 or so nasties.
By the time I got to Spybot S&D it was nearly 9pm and for some reason the scan was going slower than a wet week. Usually Spybot is one of the quicker scans, so I decided to call it a night and just left it running.

The next day when I got back I found the reason for the slow response. 1100 problems, including 1001 CWS infected DLLs. Spybot fixed everything except for one stubborn file that refused to delete even running a scan on startup. So I used the file delete tool in HijackThis.

One final scan with the latest updates of Ewido revealed that I hadn't completely fixed the registry problems from the previous day. CWS had left three BHO entries in the registry that refused to be cleaned. Back into the registry, more changing of permissions back to what they should be, and I was finally done.

For good measure I installed SP2, and cleaned up and defragged the hard disk.

Not a bad (2)days work if I do say so myself.

PS When I feel up to it I'll link to all the tools I used. in the meantime there's always Google.