I have a virus on my pc at work.
Ugh. I have a virus on my pc at work. This sucks... As I'm writing this, McAfee Virus Scan is going through and looking for the culprit. When I arrived this morning I had 1.6 megabytes of my 18 Gigabytes free. There were "muestra.eml" files all over the place that I deleted to be able to use the computer and start cleaning it. I guess this workplace is just seething with virii... great.
A couple thoughts about this.
First I'm so happy that I have 2 computers now. One for work and one for home. Since I started working, I've always had one laptop that I've lugged around with me to and from work. All my personal and work files mixed up and work was always with me, even at home. But now, I go to work, I do my development there and when I leave at night I go home to my perfectly setup personal laptop where I can do my own projects without having work stuff clutter up my mind and computer. This may be normal for many people, but for me it's an epiphany that I wish I discovered 5 years ago. It makes me more productive and when something like this happens, it doesn't affect my home computer. Like I always say: Who knows what I was thinking.
Secondly, I'm so happy that I've kept my subscription to McAfee Online. I had a friend who was working for them when they went public in 1999 and I subscribed back then as a show of support. Even though McAfee has some questionable business practices - they overmarket like crazy AND send me way too much email AND have a website that's constantly selling you things - but their VirusScan Online is great. It's always available and whenever I need it, I call it up when I'm in trouble and it's there. It's too bad it only works with MS IE. It's like an insurance premium that I pay every year and I always think "This year I'm going to cancel this." and for some reason I don't and later I'm thankful for it.
Thirdly, the reason I HAVE this virus is because I'm using Microsoft apps at work. I don't have enough memory to run my java spp server (160 Megs), IntelliJ IDEA (60+ megs) and Mozilla (20+ megs) so I cut out Mozilla and started using IE and Outlook Express because that's what everyone here uses and it would save me some memory. BIIIIG mistake. I'm not sure yet what virus I have, but surely it's because I'm using these apps again. On my home machine I use almost no MS apps except for Windows 2000 itself - and that has almost all it's services shut down. Win2K isn't bad, actually. I've installed CygWin Unix tools and VIM for Windows so it's as much like Unix as possible without actually being Unix. And this allows me to run the few Windows apps that I couldn't live without: Macromedia Fireworks for example and Ultraedit.
No news about the BlogAgent - I can't check to see if it's working because of the virus... we'll see what's up in a bit.
-Russ