Joey's Diary

This afternoon was extremely busy for me, perhaps the busiest afternoon I've ever had in this corporation.

There're always many stuff I need to handle in the same time these days. Among these things, half are to do with the corporation that I work for currently, another half are something about my future, which means another corporation would-be.

Look back less two months ago, I didn't even imagine that I could be able to do this, not even mention handle it. But now, I feel like I have completely convince myself that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and yet a dream job for a life time. Though there're still some easy roads to pick, I've made up my mind that there's absolutely no turn around for me any more.

Now, what I did this afternoon was prepared the initial presentation of this raw business plan. The reason I call it 'raw' is because this business plan is obviously incomplete, non-data supported or what so ever. Unfortunately at the meantime my manager came over and droped me a project. What a mess ... I was like completely freak out cause I was supposed to finish the business plan's first draft (well, it was extremely simple though) by 5:00PM cause after that I would call a VIP to ask him to arrange a time for my presentation. Needless to say, I was deadly busy the whole afternoon. Fortunately I'd done the first draft, and managed to finish the project by 5:10PM. Viva!

The calling with that VIP was nervous and yet exciting. He told me that he won't be available the whole Friday, and suggested to defer the presentation to next week. That was a good news cause I was thinking about the PowerPoint stuff -- I haven't even started to make the PowerPoint file, it's without question that the presentation would be more impressive if a PowerPoint file was attached, I mean just a guy stand there and keep talking would be kind of stupid or something

Now that the very first draft of business plan was done, my next job is to enrich it to bring it to life. The current job now seems some kind of roadblock to me, I mean I'll sure to do it well just like what I did before, but the project that I involved is a big one and it's already taken a lot of my energy, and will taking most of my energy and time for months. It's difficult to focus on two big things without easily getting tired. But does it look like I have another choice?

These are the days ......

This is a real story that I experienced these couple of days, enjoy

The Windows XP system that I've been using for like three months went down yesterday.

Here's how things went: from the day before yesterday on, the Avast! anti-virus software that I installed reported that there were torjans embeded in my QQ software (QQ is a major player in China's instant message market, and yet the biggest one so far) frequently. Well I've gotta tell I didnt't feel like using the original version of QQ -- just so sick of the ad. rush from this original version -- instead I prefered a famous modified version called CoralQQ, a version complately got rid of ad. CoralQQ worked just fine until this torjans issue broken out, I mean Avast! was never aware of the existence of those torjans before the day before yesterday, and what I did that day was just update the virus datebase of Avast! and BitDefender regularly, maybe these torjans were finally caught by those genius engineers of Avast?

Since Avast! could just warned me the existence of these torjans, it did nothing other than suggest me to delete them or just block them from being executed. There was no a option called 'remove torjan and then keep on working' or something I had no choice, the torjans that caught by Avast! seemed completely immune to BitDefender -- BitDefener had absolutely no response for these torjans (if any) -- I just deleted the files that being infected, and went to the official site to redownload the install package. When I tried again, Avast! confirmed that the package I just downloaded had already been infected by those same torjans! Maybe it was the software developer's PC that had been infected by these torjans at the first place?

Anyway, there and then I needed another plan. I quickly recalled that those domestic anti-virus kits may have better solution on these domestic torjans (QQ is basically a pure Chinese-used software, so I'm pretty sure those torjans were written by Chinese too). In just a couple of minutes, I downloaded a very famous Chinese anti-virus kits called 'Kingsoft Duba' to help me out. it turned out that, it was the beginning of Windows XP crush disaster, just hours before the total meltdown.

In the first execution of this anti-virus kits, it crushed immediately after I double-clicked its desktop icon. You can expect my response, I was like 'what the f***?!'. In order to play safe, I rebooted Windows XP right away and prayed that Duba could do a better job this time, say not crush while it was running? What I didn't know was, this was how the disaster approached -- Windows XP just freezed right after I entered the login password and didn't respond to any of my operating. I was forced to reboot Windows by using the hard way -- cutted off the power supply of my laptop -- it turned out that it didn't work out either. Everytime after I done entering password, Windows just freezed there with no sign of any activity! It was funny that though my Windows XP was pretty much dead at that moment, my wallpaper was still replaced by a Duba-theme one, and there were some characters painted on this wallpaper that went: your computer is now under Duba's protection.

Now, after several times of failure of booting, this Windows XP was officially dead to me. It was time to reinstall the operating system, which was said to be the soul of a computer.

To be continued ...

It's completely unexcepted and unbelievable, but there's a DELL manager who actual read my blog and fingured out that I experienced a tough situation facing DELL's tech-support engineer. This manager's name is Jerry, and he gave me a mail early this morning to tell me that he apologized for this unhappy experience and asked me whether if I could provide him my contact telephone number. Well, I've gotta say I feel kind of gratified cause my complaint finally cause some attention, though I never thought there would be guy from DELL read the article. Anyway, after I replied him this afternoon, there was another mail coming, this time it was from another DELL tech-support engineer. He asked my contact telephone number (again ) and service tag. I replied him with my information attached in minutes, pretty fast ahn LOL

Then several minutes passed, a phone call came in, it was Jerry, the DELL manager. We had some conversation and he told me that he'll ask tech-support engineer contact me in a hour, and he told me that he'd been checking my blog for some time (wow!) and found my blog was 'interesting and impressing' Things look quite well now. about fifteen minutes after this phonecall, another phonecall came in, it was that tech-support engineer called Victor who gave me mail this afternoon. He inquired me some technical questions and asked how I feel about the tech-support I'd got last time. In the end, he told me that I don't need to worry, a engineer will come over to my company to check my laptop and burner. Sweet, that's what people call quality service.

Hopefully this boring DVD burner problem can be solved quickly, anyway I'm quite looking forward to using of it -- my harddisk is already full of TV shows. Someone is right, the capability of your harddisk is always 1GB less than you except it

These days I can feel heavily change of my attitude on software. Okey here's a long story and if you don't mind, I would like to tell you it chapter by chapter, about the guy who (which is me ) switches from pirate to authenticity software.

To be honest I didn't use much non-pirate software before. I did buy some non-pirate pc games but that's all I got. The lastest non-pirate that I brought was Mircosoft WindowsXP that delivered along with my DELL laptop. Well to be honest i didn't wanna buy it, it was DELL who pushed me to purchase it. I don't like to use this as a axcuse but honestly speaking what I did was very common in China. The fast fact here in China is quite simple: most Chinese probably don't even buy at least one non-pirate software which would cost them a lot of money in their life so far, no matter how American congress' mad at them.

But things really change. I find myself getting more and more seriously about the software copyright, could be a part of my westernizing process? Anyway it should definitely be counted as a good stuff. We all told that we should always look at the bright side right

Things began with anti-software selection. As you know since I've got a brand new laptop just couples of days gao and all of my date and document will be store in it while I will also use it as my entertainment platform, it becomes a critical requirement to select a suitable anti-virus kit to protect my laptop from unnecessary attacks. I didn't use anti-virus kits much in the past couples of years and guess what, I still survive -- I paid attention to what I download from Internet and install on computer -- but I don't wanna try my luck once again on this laptop, I'm not a frat boy anymore, now I'm a serious businessman

Now the deal is down to which anti-virus kit I should pick. As you could imagine, you should not be surprised to find that you could be ablet to find the pirate version of all kinds of anti-virus kit appear in the world on Chinese Internet download sites or roadside store. But this time I think much further.

Think about it, what's the purpose of installing a anti-virus kit in our computer? To protect our computer from attack of virus and malicious software of course. Actually what we truely wanna protect in our computer is nothing else but the data, yes, it's the data that matters and makes difference. Then imagine if we use a pirate anti-virus kit to protect our data, what would happen? The pirate software is completely untrustable that's no doubt. And using a untrustable software to protect your data? What do you stupid? I must sat this is a very obvious truth, unfortunately most Chinese just don't even realize it.



So now it's up to me to make a decision which anti-virus kit I wanna pick. I went to a local download site (note I didn't go there to download pirate software ) and found there was a kit called avast! looked pretty good. I went straight to its official website to learn more. I was happy to learn that it provided three-months of full-functionality for trial. Awesome! I downloaded the lastest version and install it immediately. So far it run smoothly and has already reported some virus infection which I had no idea it did exist in my computer! It feels so great to use a copyrighted software instead of dangerous pirate one!



Of couse avast! just provide three months of protection, there must be a solution after that. Avast! is really cool but it will costs about 40 USD to buy a license for just a year, ehnn a bit expensive for me But there's always another way, I was a little shocked to find the Simplified Chinese version of Norton Antivirus Kit(Chinese only) was sold at about 130RMB in Chinese market which is less than 17USD. That's total affordable! Viva!

Well, if you would like to know the reponse of my colleagues and friends, I would tell you most of them (if it's not all) think I'm going insane since I'm gonna use 100RMB something to buy just a software! Of course it's really freaking for them, and for me before as well. It's okey, I'm not gonna change my idea this time.

Now, here's the story of the once-bad guy who used to use pirate software. And the story itelf, I believe, is still to be continued ...