Category: random

I’ve had a few nice, weekly surprises this week that I’ll share.

I’m surprised that the election finished as early as it did and that Kerry decided to concede rather than fight. I’m glad that he took it like a big man and conceded, but if the tables were turned, would Bush have conceded? My gut says Bush would have fought until the final count, just like what Gore did four years ago. But, either way, the popular vote and electoral vote was granted the W.

I’m surprised at how extremely well a software called HijackThis works. Last night I received an unexpected phone call from a really good friend who needed help with her computer. She accidentally, because she didn’t know, executed a program which turned out to be a trojan horse, and funny thing is that it was sent to her by e-mail and from the university to which she pays money for her education. I spent about 4-5 hours on the phone helping her immunize the viruses and send that trojan back into remission. I am not totally certain that it’s 100% gone, but I do know that we got her PC back to a condition which appeared as stable as before she was attacked.

I owe most of this success to AVG antivirus and HijackThis. HijackThis is a program which scans your computer in some special places that programs like spybot and adaware probably don’t. After scanning her computer and deleting files that were acting malicious, she had no more immediate problems. In fact, she has yet to tell me that anything else is wrong! So, go download HijackThis and run it today!

I’m surprised how much fun it can be to use a webcam and microphone with a friend online! We both have the same webcam and I bought a cheap microphone to use to talk to him over the Internet. It has been years since I’ve tried doing this, but amazingly, it’s a ton of fun! As much fun as it was, I’m also surprised that the delay in transmission between the two of us on our microphones really hasn’t changed since high speed Internet was implemented in most universities. That’s too bad because the quality is almost virtually the same as any phone you use. Many years ago there was a cool, free website called dialpad, which I believe now they charge to use their services, that would let you make phone calls over the Internet to any phone in the US. Way ahead of its time and it was increasingly popular among college students for many years.

That’s all for the surprises this week. I hope I receive just a few more good surprises because I love positive surprises!