One week left, to the day, before we move into our first house. Andrée and I just spend the week-end packing and making boxes. We’re both very excited with the thought of moving soon. The appartment has just gotten too small over time, especially after Évelyne’s arrival. I probably won’t be able to post much in the next week or two.
I know, I know, I have not posted in a while. Life is quite busy these days. Évelyne is now 6 1/2 months old. She started crawling this week-end and is saying her first syllables. We are slowly packing up everything for the move that will happen in early June. For updated pictures of Évelyne, check out our photo album.
On the work front, the office almost seems like a combat zone with all of the construction work currently happening to move all employees together on one part of the floor. I am also going to be travelling to Brazil in the next few weeks.
I’m still writing regularly for uneporte.net. My latest published review was for the cartoon Tintin. Next up will be Apollo 13 in the next few days.
In short, everything is doing well, things are just very busy on all sides.
The technology section of the Radio-Canada.ca web site has a nice little article on UnePorte.net, the french DVD review web site that I write for. It’s not that long but does talk about the depth of our reviews and the fact that the staff is all volunteers who dedicate a lot of time to get good reviews out there.
Speaking of DVD reviews, my latest one has been posted this morning for The Grid, a TV mini-series about a group of investigation agency agents working together to prevent a new wave of terrorism.
I spent Thursday night remotely working on a computer belonging to a friend of my wife’s, riddled with spyware, trojans and viruses. The first problem seen was that Internet Explorer would not work at all. When starting it, it would simply display a page saying that the page request could not be found. Classic behaviour of spyware.
My first step was to send her a copy of Mozilla Firefox, my favorite reliable browser from the Mozilla foundation. With this, I was then able to access the internet again. I then went on to download Ad-Aware SE, a good spyware killer. I started running a scan using it. A few second after starting the scan, a dialog showed up, saying that the computer would be shutting in 60 seconds, as requested through an RPC call from a service on the system. I was not sure what to do at first and the machine rebooted.
After some research on the web (and two or three reboots trying different things out), I found that the shutdown command probably came from the pest I was trying to remove, which might be the MS Blaster worm or other known worms. I also found that it was possible to stop the shutdown of the computer during the countdown by running the command:
shutdown.exe -a
You can run this command from the Start | Run menu or by creating a simple batch file. Once the shutdown was aborted, I was able to run Ad-Aware and remove most of the problems. I then ran a scan with Spybot Search & Destroy and got rid of the rest of the problems. Finally, a good scan from AVG Anti-Virus caught some last remaining problems and the machine was clean and ready to go.
I learned something with this darn shutdown command that I won’t forget.
Victorinox, makers of the Swiss Army pocket knifes, have started making a new knife that will certainly appeal to the technologically inclined. It’s a knife that contains a USB key as one of its attachments. The memory can be 64 MB, 128 MB or even 256 MB. The shell of the knife will keep the key solidly in place. I’ve thought USB keys were quite nice for a while but this one wins in terms of coolness.
I have recently acquired a Sony RM-VL700 universal remote control. We had tried buying the smaller model from Sony recently to replace our VCR control that was starting to have problems with some of the buttons, and to be able to get rid of some of our controls, but it never recognized my DVD player and had trouble with some of my VCR’s buttons.
Now, getting the RM-VL700 was a wonder. Not only does this remote come pre-programmed with hundreds of devices, it can also learn signals! You just select a button, point another remote at it and press the button you want it to learn, and presto!, it now knows this button.
Well, I just spent the last week on the West Coast in the city of Seattle, giving a class at a customer site. Seattle was a nice city, although a bit smaller than I was expecting. I visited the sights on Sunday, got on top of the Space Needle and looked around the town. My next trip is to Ottawa. Until then, some vacation time and painting the baby room.
I did not post for a few weeks since I was away on a two-week business trip to France, giving some courses at customer sites. I’m now back in town.
My latest DVD review for the movie S.W.A.T. is now on-line on uneporte.net. Check it out.
I also just got myself a copy of Dave Matthews Band - The Central Park Concert on DVD. It’s a really great DVD that they’ve produced. The editing is much better than on their previous title.
