h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"poke"
Actually, I agree with you...Not funny. Mildly amusing, but not funny. I am very bored. Can't wait to go home! I have a day off tomorrow...

Here: have a fish. You can slap someone with it to vent off your frustration and resenment at actually having to do some real work to earn your living.

I see that we're enjoying the extended emoticons. Something fishy about that last one... *badum*. Sorry, it had to be said.

oog.

I am very bored.....bored bored bored. They don't have an emoticon for bored. How you doing? I'm getting broadband on Monday!!! yay!
Happy day.

Hey you.

Sorry I didn't respond... this place needs a tracking thing where it lets you know when someone has responded to one of your threads.

Hope today is better for you

Hello again, my faithful Bur-shwa-zi! I, George Bakey, have personally taken time to respond to your first journal entry. Given some grammatical errors and a general appearance of rambling, I have determined that you must be a member of one of this nation's esteemed minority caste. I encourage you to be all you can be, and remind you that all of us at the Bakey Administration are available should you need help getting started in this confusing, western society. I'm sure you've had enough of my eloquence, so I’ll leave you with the following:
Goodbye, toodle-doo, cheerio, y'all come back now, totsiens, au revoir, itte rasshai, salaam...

Good moaning.... It is incredibly early. This is waht you have to do in this day and age to get a few hours spare time in the afternoon for the purposes of broadband installation. Fun fun! Actually, it was really nice driving around before sunrise. Very misty and pretty, and cold... Very English.

I trust that you had a good weekend? I was traipsing around in a bog yesterday....I nearly fell in when my sister turned around and did the best Gollum impression ever "Don't fffollow the lightsssssss!"

Good morning Bakey, I trust you are in good health today? I'm sure that Wrayth will greatly appreciate the time you took to make a personal response to his first journal entry. I shan't, however, thank you on his behalf, but I would like to say "Hi" , and "Nice to meet you", and "Isn't the weather unsual for this time of year?"

Gday George. I am indeed a member of a minority caste... incredibly minor, in fact... so minor, that I'm not even there.
*badum*

Many thanks for the response to the journal entry. There'll probably be more when I have more to say.

Uh, yeah.

G'morning Mi'Lady Apathyerror. Much luck be upon you for your installation later. Let me know how it goes, and don't forget to grab a messenger of some kind

Don't you worry my dear poet. A messenger will be put to use!!!
Have a good day, will chat to you tonight!

Other than the teething troubles, how'd it go??

Tragic. Microsoft in all it's infinite stupidity seemed to have left a DCOM RPC vunerability in my operating system.....The wonderful and highly robust windows XP home. Basically, the very second I connected to the interent to complete my registration with NTL, my computer downloaded a virus known as W32.Welchia.Worm or Lovesan. Happy joy.

Now I have to wait a couple of days for NTL to send me the patch via snail mail. What really annnoys me is that NTL knew full well that this virus was running rampant when they sold it to me. They also knew that my computer is running XP. Did they think to ask me if I had the patch? No....Could they have (had they asked) sent the patch disk along with my modem when I had it installed thus saving me alot of hassle and delay? Yes.

I am so very angry. SOOOOOOOooooooo angry, and very tired because it took a few hours to get through to customer technical support last night.....I got an answer at around 11:30, bearing in mind that I got up at 05h00 yesterday morning to get to work early to be home in time for the installation.....Anyway, I got through eventually only to be told that they couldn't offer me technical support at all because I didn't have the patch required to stop and remove the worm. *this is me pulling my hair out*

Oh brilliant. Got to love competent techies, eh what. *sigh*

My recommendation... get a smaller second machine, install linux, and use it as a front end... instant firewall and virus gate. then all you need is a halfway decent antivirus on your main machine, and you're pretty safe

Learning linux is a pain, though

Hope you threw all your toys out at them...

I will throw all my toys out tonight. I assure you. Or maybe tomorrow. Sometime soon anyway. I amy have to do without the Linux thing though....But I have always wanted to learn it....Point is, I have no second pc.

No worries, the linux can wait... but your best bet is ensure that you have a new and regularly updated antivirus... and that as soon as you are up and running, you rush to the Microsoft site and patch yourself as muhc as possible

you do have a legal copy of windows, don't you?

My dearest, as open as I may be to various things of a slightly criminal nature, I am not as open as all that....
Actually, if my pc hadn't come with windows installed already, I would probably be standing knee deep in nasty goop right now. heh. I'll probably give tech support another call tonight to sort out some more stuff. eugh.

Various things of a slightly criminal nature huh....
ok, won't go there. Let me know how it turns out...

Well, I manually removed the virus. My only issue: my being not to clued up on the grunty stuff of windows, caused a minor problem when I trawled my entire system and deleted all the instances (that is,all I found manually, "find" wouldn't work because my Remote Procedure Call service was all messed up)of a certain file (mvchost.exe) which is meant to be closely related to the worm. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the fact that the mvchost.exe file is a genuine system file required by the Remote Procedure Call in order for that service to run. As you can imagine, my machine had a few limbs hanging off on strings and was groaning slightly when I restarted it. I ended up having to access my services via task manager>new task, and then I had to search for another instance of mvchost.exe using command prompt to both find (found it in system32\dllcache) it and copy it over to my system32 file. Luckily this seemed to work and my computer has been reborn! I have to admit to the fact that I didn't do all the repair work without a little help from a techy friend.

It was a traumatic experience, I thought my machine was in for hours of risky surgery that may have cause severe amnesia (the loss of all my data/software). I'm glad it's all over now.

I am impressed. That's some l33t work...
You need to get your machine on a good course of antibiotics (anti-virus software. Have a look at Zone Alarm as well)and tell it to quit smoking and be more careful in the future (MS patches)

So what's up on the connection front? Are you now up and running?