Obscure Mania

I went and got my PC infected on purpose. It was not hard at all, I clicked on a link in my spam mailbox and it went downhill from there, these things can be nasty!

How Did I Get Infected?

When I clicked a link it sent me to a website to watch a video and I was told I had to download something to view it, that’s the first clue. If you change your mind, it won’t let you cancel. It’s getting serious now and you should turn off the machine immediately because that’s the only way you’re getting away from that website.

So, I downloaded what it wanted and nothing happened, I still couldn’t watch the video. It was supposed to be good too! So I downloaded it again and again and still nothing. What did happen, a strange program popped up in my task manager as “a.exe”, I killed it, but I still had problems. Even if you kill every single process you think is a virus, it’s not enough and they’re only going to come back alive anyway.

If I did a search, either a different search engine would pop up or when I clicked a link, I went to a completely different website than what I clicked.

These programs are really helpful when they tell you you’re infected and they send you to a site that will scan your PC for free, then the scan tells you your PC is infected with 54 viruses that sound really nasty. Of course you want to get rid of them, but you have to pay $49.99 to download the anti-virus. And not just any anti-virus, their anti-virus, because it won’t let you go to any other site and download any other anti-virus.

Now What?

I tried to download a real anti-virus and I was able to download it, but every time I installed it, it would disappear. I couldn’t open a Command Line to run Microsoft’s MSRT program. Every time I would open a CMD window, it would open for a second, then disappear.

I tried going to legitimate sites that had virus scans and sometimes I could go there and start the scan, but it usually hung the system or got worse. Now I can’t start Internet Explorer or even another browser I downloaded earlier, it keeps bugging me about buying their protection and it won’t let me do anything else.

I also had something called “Spyware Doctor” that kept popping up too.

Every time I try and start a program a balloon pops up and tells me a program is a keylogger and it trying to steal my identity and sometimes it would throw in credit card information or equally scary stuff.

The program that kept bugging me to buy to fix everything was called “Security Tool” for $49 or for a lifetime of grief I could pay $79. Any time I would try and do something it would pop up and tell me something bad.

Going into control panel and clicking Add/Remove programs was when it would tell me it “detected harmful software” and they strongly recommend buying their crap to fix it. I couldn’t open the Properties of My Computer to go back to a Restore Point, this PC is really hosed.

I really feel bad for people that don’t know what to do, because even though I know what to do, it won’t let me.

What Did I Do?

To be continued…

My first thought, perfect… Following in the footsteps of the worst American President, Jimmy Carter. His fate is sealed. Even CNN has reported how ridiculous this is. Maybe it was his indecision about Afghanistan, but that can’t be, because his nomination had to be into the Nobel committee only two weeks after he was elected. Most of the comments about how he deserves this honor were about his good intentions, his hope for peace in the Middle East and of course, how well he spoke about peace.

When did the Peace Prize become a participation trophy? It wasn’t today, it became irrelevant awhile ago, but it was too irrelevant to even write about till now. The Prize has been awarded based on Hope and Change. Anyone else would see how silly this is and decline the award, but Obama is so arrogant he is going to accept this and probably even keep the money. He might say he’s giving it to a charity, but it will be his charity foundation.

I actually had to listen to his speech because it was carried by everyone. An arrogant man trying and failing to be humble and no mention of what he’s going to do with the money. What a crock.

Can we survive another three years? It’s only a year till 2010 when people can show they have woken up and replace some of the idiots in Congress. With some sort of stalemate in the government, maybe the left agenda will be on hold for awhile like what happened to Clinton. He had to come center right to get anything done. Putting some reins on this administration and this government as a whole is needed.

With this President following in the footsteps of Carter, who will emerge as our next Reagan. Sarah Palin? Probably not. She would be a good VP again, but she doesn’t have the leadership or the experience to pull us out of this mess, let alone the mess this country will be in several years from now. And the press will bring up the past when McCain threw her under the bus, let alone every other press fiasco, so maybe even VP wouldn’t be such a good choice. My vote is on Romney right now, but because of the chaos and disaster that may be upon us if this agenda goes any further, the pendulum will have such a wild swing the other direction we could be looking at someone like Ron Paul.

I’ve been approved as a Crossloop Certified Helper. What the heck is that?  Crossloop is the program that allows remote access to someone’s computer. You are completely under control of when and who connects to your computer. When you need help you start the Crossloop program and it generates a code you give to the person you want to give access to.

You can disconnect any time and they can not log in again with that same code while you’re not around, even if the program is still running. It’s a very secure way to grant temporary access to your computer while you sit there and supervise.

A Certified Helper has gone the extra step in receiving an independent background check, has been personally interviewed by Crossloop staff. The Certified Helper is familiar with the ethics, guarantees and the professionalism Crossloop wants to convey to the helpers customers.

If you need some help with your computer, I can be trusted to be ethical, honest, I passed a background check and Crossloop.com has put their trust in me to represent them professionally.

See the post that will explain Crossloop in more detail and watch the little video that explains the CrossLoop System.

What’s the best way to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP Pro or XP Home? You can’t, but you don’t have to format your drive either. If Windows 7 finds an operating system on the destination partition, it will ask you if you want to wipe it out or keep the old operating system.

Keep Your Stuff

What happens if you install Windows 7 over XP? Windows 7 will move your entire drive into a Windows.old directory it creates. When the new Windows 7 install is finished, when you boot it will ask you if you want to Boot into the new Windows 7 operating system or the old one. It doesn’t say XP it just says old. What happens if you boot into the old operating system? I don’t know. I did this on my wife’s machine and already messed it up once.

Rule #1

Always have a bootable CD (DVD) to restore your system. Make copies of your original install disks and keep the originals in a safe place and the copies in a safe place. My wife’s PC had a bad file and wouldn’t boot. I tried overwriting the file it said was bad with the same file from a different machine and it wouldn’t work. After hours of searching for some sort of ISO image for XP. A free ISO doesn’t exist on the net except as a torrent and how do you know which one to trust? You can’t even get a free trial from Microsoft anymore.

I finally gave up and installed a XP Home CD I had and got it to work. But then I figured I have a brand new Windows 7  the production release, (Schools received their copies early) and figured this was as good a time as any. Especially since my product key was for Pro and I had this Home disk I was going to have to do something else pretty soon anyway.

After installing 7 and restoring the data, I had to reinstall Office, but everything else I downloaded and found the keys in old email. Make sure you have enough space to keep both operating systems. The official space requirement for 7 is 16 gb a little more wouldn’t hurt so you have room to move folders around to your new user account on your data drive.

Personally I prefer a separate partition for my operating systems using Bootit NG (see side bar for link) as a boot manager, but if your going to only run one operating system on a drive and are a little concerned about wiping everything out, choosing installing over current operating system will work. Make sure you have backups somewhere else just in case.

This is the best book available for the Network+ N10-004 exam. Make sure you get the right book for the exam you’re going to be taking. The old exam is still being administered and books on the old exam of course are still out there. The new 2009 Network+ exam has been updated and concentrates on general network topologies, cabling, tools, protocols, the OSI model and other networking stuff. While the older exam asked questions about AppleTalk, Netware and some vendor specific networking.

The book covers some Cisco stuff but I didn’t have any Cisco protocol or router questions on my exam. I only used this book to study. I take that back a little, I ordered some practice exams from somewhere else at the last minute because I was panicking about not being ready. Don’t waste your time or your money, all of the questions and answers are in this book. While there may have been some other questions from the other place, the answers were still in this book. Even though I’m not thrilled with how the chapter and practice exams work, I would have bought extra questions, but the practice exams Sybex were selling weren’t for this N10-004 exam.

Todd Lammle (the author) must have access to the exams because the questions in the book were almost e same as the real exam. The only problem is the errata page. There are some practice test questions that give the wrong answer, but go to the website and get the corrections and you’ll be fine.

I really liked this book. I’m in the process of selling all of my textbooks and have decided to keep this one. It’s filled with great information. This is the first edition and they may have been corrected in later editions. In any case, ensure you log on to the website in the book and get the corrections.

The hardest part of the exam for me was trying to memorize all of the hardware. What cable goes with what network and how fast and how far they are spec’d. There were a lot of those questions for me and most were guesses. Everything on the test is in the book, read memorize, how ever you study. I tried a new technique for me – I used my RCA Voice Recorder reading parts and notes from the book, transferred to my PC, converted them to .wav then imported into iTunes to listen on my iPod while I’m walking the dog. I’m not sure if it helped or not, I should have concentrated more on the different cable specs, but I passed. There’s no score on your certificate but you have to pass with about 80%. I was getting a solid 80 or above on most of chapter and practice exams I was taking from this book.

Link: CompTIA Network+ Study Guide: Exam N10-004

I’m all for throwing something on the grill, meat, vegetables, (hot) dogs, brats, fish, shrimp, it’s all good. But when all you have is a campfire you need something that will hold your meat and marshmallows.

Using the new Google Voice service is awesome. It’s great if someone still has more than one phone, like a seperate number for their cell phone and home phone numbers. Just using it for voicemail is incredible and it’s freakin’ free.

Google Voice uses your Gmail contacts. If someone in your contacts either individually or in a group calls, you can setup different options as to what happens. Send them straight to voice mail, send your friends and family to your home phone, work contacts to your work phone and you can have a custom voice mail for every group or every contact if you want.

I can set up a voice mail for my contact to say, “Hey Paul, I’m out leave a message and I’ll call you back.” While everyone still gets the boring, “Leave your number at the tone.” message.

It does NOT cut out your mobile minutes. But if you’re on a plan that has unlimited calling to a certain number, you can add your Google Voice number and use Google Voice as your outgoing calls also. Google Voice mails are transcribed (sometimes may not be perfect), sent to your email or you can play on the web, download or forward to someone else. You have the option to record incoming calls and those will be transcribed and kept on the web in your Voice account.

Want to really block a number? Have it blocked and they get a “number has been disconnected” message. Don’t want the phone to ring late at night? Set it up to send all calls straight to voice mail or allow friends through. The best part, you can have this number for the rest of your life if you want, no matter how many times your cell, home and work numbers change.

You can look at, listen even tag your voice mail just like in Gmail. Even tag annoying calls as spam and they go directly to voice mail from now on.

Conference, add an incoming call to your current conversation, incredible call screening that will allow you to pick up, send to voice mail, listen to the voice mail as it happens and even pick up the call during the voice mail.

When you receive your invite, it took mine and my wife’s about a month to get back, you choose your number, either by numbers or letters in any area code. Of course it’s not going to give you a number that’s already taken no matter how bad you want to be able to dial your name by letters or some other combination may be taken. If you really don’t like the number you’ve chosen, you can change it later for $10.

We just changed our phone numbers and let everyone know our new numbers, I may wait awhile and I’ll send out another and change it one last time. It’s hard to believe it’s free, enjoy it while you can, there’s got to be a catch in there somewhere or someday. What ever they charge, it will be worth it.

I wish I had invites to hand out, but they’re not doing it like that for Voice. And 25 free business cards with your Google Voice number FREE.

Check the short videos about the features here – http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

In one day I’ve been sent or have seen on blogs I read, two separate videos about privacy and Google. One multi-part video from Big Honkin and another video from the Onion. The first is from the comedy film makers Big Honkin about what if Google moved in as a roommate? In three parts. The other is a “news” (satire) report from the Onion about what happens to the people that want to Opt-Out of Google.

These are funny, but as with all satire, there’s a little bit of truth. I use Gmail, Gcalendar, Gvoice, Gdocs, Goog411, there’s more but decided this list was long enough and now the Gphone. Of course all of my websites are in Google. Hopefully Google won’t turn out to be too evil and if they are I’m old enough I won’t have to put up with it for too long.

The information is out there already, it’s only a matter of who sees it and what they do with it. If it’s only a matter of selling you crap, that’s fine and no one really cares. But when it comes to health information and employers using information they find out on the web as a reason to not hire you whether it’s true or not, that’s when things become a problem and things like that are happening now, more and more.

You want to make sure the information about you that is online is factual and someone looking for you knows it’s you or not. If you have an uncommon name, it’s not that difficult to control. If you’re John Smith, you have to be unique in some other way. John Smith the Jazz Musician or John Smith the Plumber where someone looking for a musician name John Smith will be able to find you. You want your site to be found for friends, family, job contacts and other networking, but you still need to control your privacy like your address and phone number. It’s tough to control because everyone wants to know everything.

The Big Honkin Three Parts What if Google was Your Roommate.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here’s the report from the Onion:

I finished watching the Ken Burns The Civil War and it’s incredible the numbers of men that were lost in various battles. What’s even more incredible is the number of Generals that were absolutely worthless. When the Civil War started, if you had any kind of education or some sort of politician, you were made an officer, sometimes even a general. Several grads from West Point were on both sides, but more were needed.

It’s truly amazing some of the ineptitude and bungling of generals on both sides. One stupid mistake by some idiot in charge could cost thousands of lives. After the surrender at Appomattox the northern troops shared their rations with the Southerners, in a sign of what should have been a great healing of the country.

Almost every General in the Civil war seems to have a Fort or something named after them. All of the battles and the National Cemeteries are still reminders of the events that shaped this country.

Over 3 million served, 620,000 died, 1 million injured, that sounds like reparations paid in blood of the Americans that fought and died in what may not have started out to be a war officialy about slavery, but everyone knew it was.

Just took and passed my two tests from CompTIA and now have an A+ certification. After going through the prep classes at the college here, it was about six months later that I took the tests. Only using the original textbook, the practice exams on the included CD, I did pretty good. Since CompTIA doesn’t show you what you missed, I don’t know exactly what I got wrong on my two tests.

I took 601 and 602. Essentials and IT Technician exams. There were some questions in common from the two, but since I wasn’t sure I got them right the first time, hopefully I got them right the second time. If you have to retake a test, the only guide of what you missed is a summary of the “areas” where you got one or more questions wrong.

I looked everywhere I could for practice test questions, but they are few and far between unless you want to pay. The practice questions that come with the book were good but there were a lot of repeats. Four tests for each section (601, 602, 603, 604) fifty questions each. Out of 200 possible questions, I don’t know how many were unique, but I would guess about half, maybe more were actually unique.

This book is huge, over 1000 pages. After looking at reviews and other books on Amazon, I believe this is one of the best. I was looking for a smaller “cramming” book, but other book are just as big and it’s a little hard to cram for this test other than reading, doing the chapter questions and practice tests, start two weeks before you are scheduled to take the tests. I would love an audio version so I could listen while driving, but can’t find many technical books on audio, even though studies show you have better retention listening than reading.

It’s a nice start since this certification is one of the requirements on most computer jobs.  Not only do I get college credit for taking the classes, but the college gives a half price discount for the tests.

CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Sixth Edition