Author: Aren Cambre

Aftermath of Netsky

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: .

Baptism

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.

First Ever Computer Virus

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.

Michael Moore is a bonehead

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/.

Crappy Trees

My property is filled with crappy trees.

My back and side yards have 9 sugar hackberry trees, two of which are large. Sugar hackberry trees are horrible urban landscape trees. They have brittle wood that breaks in wind and ice storms, their leaves get galls from a parasite, they are frequent hosts to mistletoe, and they just look bad. These trees would be fine on borders of expansive properties, but they are wholly inappropriate for urban lots.

One of our large hackberries split down the middle during the last storm, so we have to get it removed. Another large hackberry is choked off by vines, and it naturally leans as if it is poised to fall on the house. That one needs to go, too. Since we are spending major bucks on those two trees, we might as well get rid of the remaining, smaller hackberries before they get out of hand. Due to all the electrical wires in the back yard, I have to hire professionals to take care of all these trees.

The previous homeowners planted a silver maple in the front yard near the house. This tree species is about as bad as sugar hackberry trees. They are weak-wooded, and their roots are bad on sidewalks and foundations. This tree would have been fine in the back corner of a lot or on an open field, but 8 feet from the front porch is a horrible place. If that’s not bad enough, the tree was placed so that it blocks much of the view from the front door, and it does not shade the house in a meaningful way.

Hackberry and silver maple trees are so bad, they are among the nine unprotected tree species in the Dallas tree ordinance.

There is an overgrown Carolina laurel cherry shrub in our front landscape. It is about 15-20 feet high. This shrub shades most of the front landscape, making it impossible to grow quality landscape plants. Furthermore, it has a horrible problem pushing up root suckers. No matter how much you pull out these suckers, they come back. You have to rip out whole roots to stop the root suckers.

After the hackberries, maple, and laurel cherry are gone, I will be left with a mature American Elm, a mediocre redbud (it’s bloom is unimpressive, and it looks trashy the rest of the year), a great juniper (currently being choked out by hackberrys), and a craggy pecan.