April 15, 2004
Dear Everyone:
This is going to be a short Letter as I have had a l-o-n-g day.
It started with going to “Livermore”, where my
former cubicle still has a lot of my stuff in it.
The silk tree that I had in my
The reason for working in “Livermore” today was so I could take my car in for some maintenance and service. A few weeks ago, I discovered that the air conditioner was no longer chilling the air. This happened on a relatively mild day, so I was able to switch to bringing cooler, outside air in. But one warm afternoon, driving home from “Pleasant Hill”, was enough to convince me of the absolute necessity of getting the air conditioner fixed in the very near future.
This was the first day that I was able to schedule it. So I worked in “Livermore” today. Not a problem. Nice people. Good burger place a seven-minute walk away. And plenty of folks who could pick me up at the dealer in the morning and take me back in the afternoon to pick up my car.
Well, actually, there aren’t that many people left in “Livermore”. Three analysts and a supervisor to be exact. After the last ROM (Resource Optimization Management), everyone else was either working elsewhere or out of a job. Getting to the office after dropping my car off was easy: I was just in time for the courtesy shuttle.
Around
And oh, by the way, the car won’t be ready until
In the meantime, I had 54 new Document Management System users to add to a database, so I had plenty to keep me busy. But it is tiring.
In other news…
We finally got a line on what was wrong with “Jeannie’s” new laptop PC. Every time she tried to get on the Internet, the system would report a “problem” and shut down. We thought the problem might be with the Internet Service Provider (ISP), since it always happened when she went out on the Net.
But when she contacted the laptop manufacturer and started to explain the problem, they almost immediately told her she had a version of the “Blaster Worm”. Now, I wasn’t worried about her downloading any attachments in email, because I don’t think she knows how to do it. So how did the virus get into the machine?
Apparently, it was factory-installed. That’s right, the laptop was infected before it ever left the manufacturer. As were thousands of others. This manufacturer is a large company. In fact, “International” is part of its name; and it’s blithely sending out thousands of infected machines (also part of its name)? How responsible is that? I won’t mention any names, but the initials are… never mind. I don’t want to get sued.
But, if you’re considering buying a personal computer, whether a laptop or otherwise, and you’re thinking of buying it from an International company in the Business of manufacturing these kinds of Machines; and it usually goes by its initials, make sure you ask them if the machine comes pre-loaded with viruses.
On the plus side, once I had the site to go to and downloaded the free file that purges the viruses, we got “Jeannie’s” machine cleaned up in no time. Now if I can just get her to use it for work and not just eBay…
Love, as always,
Pete
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