It has rained so much in the past month that we’re enjoying Houston-like conditions: high humidity, highs in the mid- to upper 80s and the lows are around 70, and swarms of bugs and mosquitoes everywhere. This is nuts! Are we really in Dallas? Where’s the 110 degree summers?
Jennifer fertilized the yard this afternoon, and I didn’t bother watering afterward because I’m sure we’ll get rain within the next 24 hours.
I downloaded and ran Symantec’s Netsky removal tool and found that Netsky had left droppings all over my system. After about 30 minutes, it found and deleted a few hundred files, almost all of which were creatively named EXE files waiting to re-infect my system should I accidentally click on them. (Well, technically, the McAfee on-access scanner deleted the file just as the removal tool “touched” them. McAfee’s tool found hundreds of droppings, but it missed three .tmp files that Symantec’s tool actually deleted.)
Now my computer is returned to its normally demented state: 
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My son was baptized today at First United Methodist Church of Dallas, our home church. It was surreal to know that this is my own kid, not someone else’s kid. My wife and I were at the front of the sanctuary, and we were the ones answering the questions this time! The questions were simple, but the gravitas was mind boggling.
About 21 family members, including us, were present. Our minister did his annual “state of the church” sermon today, describing how things are going with the church and emphasizing the importance of membership. I am glad our family got to hear that sermon.
I have regularly worked with Windows computers since 1990 when my family was given an IBM PC Model 5150. I had never gotten a virus, ever, until last night.
I got this email with a ZIP file. I knew it was a virus, but I opened the ZIP file anyway. (Simply opening the ZIP file typically will not give you a virus; you have to open a file in the ZIP to get it.) Inside the ZIP was one file that appeared to be named something.txt. Before I double-clicked on it I should have immediately noticed all the space after the .txt in the filename. It turns out that the file was named something.txt___________________________.pif (where _ is a space). There were so many spaces that you can’t see the .pif on the end unless you went to Details view.
By doing that I got the W32/Netsky.p@MM and W32/Netsky.ad@MM virus.
I didn’t realize I had a virus until my wife checked her email. She got a message from a friend with a virus payload. Knowing how those viruses work, I immediately checked the headers and did a nslookup on the originating IP (as reported by our ISP’s SMTP server). It was a SWBell.net DSL IP address! I logged in my router and found that it’s my DSL address!
My Windows XP box is fully patched with all latest Windows Updates and Office Updates. The one thing I was lacking was the virus software. I had to redo my computer due to a hardware failure about two weeks ago, and I neglected to reinstall my virus scanner. It’s on now, and it caught the virus very quickly.
I hate the way virus scanners slow down your system, but now I definitely see why they are a necessary evil.
Despite Christopher Hitchens’s anti-Reagan leftie views, he got something 100% correct:
If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
Read more at http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/.
And check out http://www.michaelmoorehatesamerica.com/.