If you’re lucky enough to own an LCD that rotates, an excellent freeware utility that works with this is iRotate.

My 20″ ViewSonic LCD, which is fantastic, came with its own rotation software. But the latest version of it ended up causing computer to crash. I switched to iRotate, which is smaller, doesn’t have any kind of splash screen, and hasn’t caused a crash yet.

Today, I got a bit of work out of Inferno and emailed an invoice as an attachment. Rather than worry about having the recipient install a couple of non-standard fonts that I use in my invoices, I decided to hunt around for a freeware PDF creator utility. I wasn’t sure if there was such a beast (I’d heard of commercial utilities before) but a Google search promptly turned up CutePDF Writer which I’d heartily recommend to anybody.

As a side note, since PDFs are portable this makes Microsoft Office pretty much obsolete – since you can just use whatever package you want (such as the freeware Open Office) and just send somebody the PDF version to print out. Of course, if you need to actually edit the document in two different places (like home and work), and you don’t have the ability to install OpenOffice at work, then you’d still be stuck. But it does at least make the migration away from Microsoft Office easier in a lot of cases.

Michelle’s just come out of her hysterectomy surgery, and her doctor said that everything went well. I don’t have any of the actual details yet (this was all relayed to be 2nd hand by her mother Sue), but will hopefully hear all about it when I visit her after work today.

I only hope that they’ve taken the trachea tube out this time – unlike last time when she woke up with it in. I told her to *expect* it to be in so that it wouldn’t be as much of an frightening experience this time around should it repeat itself, but, really, it is something that should be taken care of before she wakes up.

Now I’ll be without her for two days and nights before she gets to come home. It’s the reverse of when I went on my business trip – harder for me to deal with her being gone. But, of course, it’s even more difficult for her this time. I’m sure she’ll be very happy to come home again in a couple of days. Then we’ll see just how many movies I can convince her to watch as she recovers. Plus there’s the little matter of some handcuffs that I still need to get to make sure she doesn’t start cleaning house…

The last week of work before the holidays, I came down with a mild, everyday cold. When I came back to work I thought it was all over. I even bragged about how it had been a long time since I’d had such an “enjoyable” cold. (Normally, I end up with some kind of more aggressive infection, the flu, or something.)

That night I was up all night throwing up and had to take the next day off work.

I still have no idea what it was I picked up, but I suspect some stomach flu variant. I’ve never had it affect me in quite the way that it did. Even afterwards, I couldn’t eat much of anything without feeling bloated and a bit queasy. Beer was out!

Only today do I think things have got mostly back to normal – since I ate a full meal last night, and had a beer, without any difficulty. I’m also not feeling as tired from regular physical activity.

It will teach me not to brag about “easy” colds again…

The new workstation that I bought for myself was supposed to have been so that my old workstation would replace my server. I still haven’t got things to the point where this would happen.

This past weekend I got to the point where I was going to migrate the server (Virgil) over to the new case / motherboard. I had everything in order until I realized I had no video card – the old server has one built in.

I got Michelle to drive me to the computer store where I asked for the “cheapest video card” they had. $20. (I’ve since found the same one online for $5 so I’m not sure how good a price that was.) Seemingly, it was a 4M AGP card.

When I went to plug it into my old workstation’s AGP slot (in which I’d had a much better AGP card in use previously) it was to discover that the card was “backwards” and would not fit. If the card were to be reversed it would (physically) fit into the AGP slot but, of course, that wouldn’t be at all practical. (Plus, I even took the backplate off just to see if it would actually work – while it fit, the computer wouldn’t boot with it installed that way.)

Very odd. Just my kind of luck though. So, things are back just the way before, and everything will have to wait until this coming weekend for another upgrade attempt. (As well as a trip to the computer store to return the impossibly manufactured item I got from them.)

Some time ago, my new computer got infected by a virus thanks to a mistake by my wonderful wife. I thought I’d taken care of all of the side effects.

Apparently, however, I hadn’t. I discovered that I wasn’t able to access Media Player’s help, or reinstall the product. (This is all because I found that I couldn’t play a video clip.)

In the process of troubleshooting, I found some more system files that I couldn’t access because nobody had rights to them and the owner wasn’t known. (This is what happened to some DLLs previously.) In order to correct things once and for all, I took ownership of every single file in the Windows directory, then replaced all existing rights to be those inherited from the root directory.

I haven’t had any problems since. Hopefully, this fixed things once and for all.

First of all, feel free to post comments again. (I just realized that I never posted an update to my previous entry about how they don’t work.) Comments are now being “de-spammed” by Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. Both Michelle and I have still received some, but it’s fun to actually de-spam these people, telling the plug-in to “Go forth and do my will.”

I also haven’t mentioned my new computer purchase. Due to the impending demise of Virgil, our Internet server, which, gratefully, is taking its time to actually die completely, I went ahead and purchased a new computer for my workstation – a P4 3.4 w/2G of memory. My old workstation – a P4 1.4 w/640M – will end up replacing the current server.

I finally finished migrating everything from the old workstation to the new one just this past weekend, so am now free to move my attention over to the server. I have to say that the new workstation is noticeably faster than the old one. What a difference.

You can see her after her makeover by clicking here…

(She knew she had this coming! )

I came home last night to find out that she’d opened an email from a “secret admirer”. This ended up infecting our workstation with the W32/Mugly.b worm – which is a mass mailing SDBot variant.

Apparently, it was released in the wild just yesterday, and our virus scanning software, avast!, had not yet updated itself with definitions that included it.

There are some further things that failed that shouldn’t have. ASSP should have blocked the attachment, and our email server’s own virus scan software, ClamAV, would have had a go at it also before it finally came through to our workstation. (But its own definition files might have been too slow too.)

Assuming that your virus software will always protect you against whatever you do with strange incoming email is never the best policy.

Currently, nobody can post a comment here. I’m in the middle of testing some new anti-spam methods and, at this moment, things aren’t working properly. In fact, it’s now past 1:00am as I type this. I’ve had a bit of spam, but Michelle’s getting more in her blog and I’ve been trying to fix things for her. (I thought I’d make a guinea pig out of myself first.)

I sleep here one more night, then get on a plane back home tomorrow morning. I can hardly wait to get back to Michelle and do all of the things to her …. oops, I mean with her … that I’ve been missing more and more during my time away.