Arrowed!

Tonight, I finally got on to the top of the Hard high score table in the Union. I hope to be out of hospital by next week.

Update from the once-again Lord of the Dance

Throwing caution to the wind, this afternoon I decided to change my desktop resolution to 1280x1024 (barely readable) and allow Windows XP to use its own cutesy bubbly theme instead of the old one. We'll see how long it lasts. Sorry, that was a dull start to the entry, I'll try again.

I was rather ill yesterday morning - it might have been because of the cheese the previous evening at the ChemSoc cheese and wine (which I was fairly certain at the time was just mould that had been pushed together), or it could have been the way I tried coffee again at breakfast. I'm not sure what it is that my body rejects about everything - alcohol, caffeine, or even carbonated drinks in all but the minutest of doses. That limits my choices somewhat, and with the amount of milk that I drink, I should have the strongest bones in the University.

There's good news, though, and that is that the Junior Honours project won't be as difficult as we all thought. Two days ago we were given the specification asking us to build a humanoid life-size dancing android. At the meeting yesterday, we managed to get the customer's needs down to a little thing on wheels that moves about a bit. That's quite a good jump for one hour.

1280x1024 is already starting to hurt. I'm changing it back.

Sasserhunter

This afternoon, steveo_h managed to get rid of another network cable (temporarily, at least) by selling it to Laura, who I knew in the hall two years ago. Why she came back to the hall after finally escaping from it is something of a mystery, but still - we got her ResNet connection up and running.

Ten minutes later, her computer had been infected with the Sasser virus and all sorts of rather nasty spyware. That must be something of a record. So after dinner I was down there with downloaded removal instructions and all the software that I'd learned about in the past week (looking back, my spyware disaster was something of an advantage.) The whole process took hours - I hadn't realised just how nasty the virus is. It clogs up the whole system, slowing everything down, with the underlying panic that if you don't get in to Explorer soon and make the necessary changes, the countdown will start again.

On top of that, there were roughly sixty million unneccessary processes running. I think she'd been spyware-infected for some time and just hadn't realised it. In the end we came out victorious with just the minor problem of a DLL file missing, as it had been somehow modified by the virus and sent to quarantine by Norton. The only problem that remained was coming back and explaining to whinknee why I'd been in another girl's room for the entire evening.