Well, since Charles and Vannesa (the lucky bride-to-be) had been kind enough to ask me again-and-again for over a year now, I just had to make that extra effort and fly back home again. Mind you, I hate plane flights.

Thanks to the nice ladies at Wings Travel in Glen Waverley who’ve always done a great job in organising my itineraries, I managed to secure a flight arriving in Kuching a day before Charles and Vannesa’s Big Day (just enough time for the Bachelor Paaaaaartaaaaay!!!). I packed my bags, and I was ready to go… I organised time off my (always running out of time) busy schedule, got things in order, and the next thing I knew I arrived at the Melbourne Airport.

Mind you, I wasn’t in a good mood. I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, and I had been busy all day. I was groggy, and all I was looking forward to was some uninterrupted sleep onboard. In addition, the Australian Customs Dept. has me in their Most Wanted list, so I knew they were gonna give me a hard time.

There was already a long queue at the Malaysia Airlines check-in counters when I got into the Departure terminal. Things didn’t look any better when people left the counters with annoyed faces and still pushing their luggages. Staff started walking around and talking to people queuing at the back, who then looked upset. Some guys behind me started dissin’ Malaysia Airlines and how they tend to overbook. I kept a little hope… After all, I’M NOT GONNA BLOODY DRIVE ONE HOUR HOME TONIGHT in my condition.

My hope was all in vain. When my turn came to step up the counter… The nice lady told me the FLIGHT WAS CANCELLED, and I was given this:

to be continued…

Tags: Malaysia Airlines, Delay, Cancelled, Annoyed, Irritated, Flight, Wings Travel, Melbourne Airport

Granted, it’s not as large as the BSOD in Toronto last November:

But hey; if the Great Gates himself admits that Windows isn’t as peachy as he’d like it to be- it can’t be all that bad, can it? Super K should be all smiles with his jolly Mac right about… now.

Tags: BSOD, Blue Screen of Death, Chadstone, Windows

I never knew oily, crunchy Smith’s potato chips were naturally healthy… Well, now I know. Now I can munch on them all day long without the guilt trip. Grab them from shelves labelled ‘Natural Health’ at Coles, Burwood Highway.

Note: This is not Photoshopped

Rest assured, whoever is reading this (you poor soul), that I’ll be back soon… Hopefully.

Tags: busy

Nonetheless, Microsoft’s new book Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? surely takes the cake. It’s a nice colourful picture book for the kiddies with easy-to-read words and pastel-coloured pictures that explains why there’s a blinking monster machine in the house that buzzes loudly after Daddy visits The Pirate Bay. Kiddies will learn to love the machine and acknowledge that it’s part of a happy and loving family, and other kids without it are like… totally jealous. Oh, and did I mention it seems like a desperate, corporate marketing propaganda from Microsoft at its best? Yet another bullet for Apple to poke fun at.

Somehow, Daddy looks kinda naughty here…

Amusing and humourous (in a tongue-in-cheek kinda way). Read the book in its entirety online for free, or surf over to Amazon to buy yourself a copy for your kiddies NOW. You know you want to.

Tags: Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?, Microsoft, Server at Home, Server, Picture Book, Propaganda, Marketing

For the uninitiated, explorer.exe is the Windows Explorer executable file, i.e. the Graphical User Interface (GUI) you see in Windows and use to work with files. ZoneAlarm promptly renamed explorer.exe to explorer.exe.vzr in the Windows folder when it couldn’t remove the worm. In addition, it quarantined another explorer.exe in the Windows’ system32\dllcache folder. Crap. With these files gone, and I restart Windows, the GUI won’t load at boot up. I’d either have to use the old skool Command Line Interface (CLI), or restore my computer’s settings from a backup, which… I never do (’backup’? Is that some kind of pastry?). I’m doomed. No, the Village Idiot can’t help me this time. I’d have to resort to my old friend Google.

Unfortunately, this time Google wasn’t as much help. Besides not returning many results at the initial time of Googling (approx 6 results), all but one of the results were in foreign languages (foreign to me at least). Fortunately, the one result in English happened to be AnandTech, “one of the largest online computer hardware journals in the English-speaking world” (or says my other friend Wikipedia).

When I first ventured into the forum, there were initially 5 posts. A couple of hours and refreshes later, the forum grew to ten posts. Apparently I wasn’t the only victim. Other hapless innocents were suffering from this problem. The plot thickens… It’s suggested (or hoped, rather) on the Kapersky Lab’s forums that it could be a ‘false positive‘… The problem was I wasn’t using Kapersky, but ZoneAlarm! Then, a shimmer of hope as I found a fellow ZoneAlarm user. The so-called ‘worm’ wasn’t a worm at all says Joey on her blog, but a malware that gets you (through your antivirus app) to delete explorer.exe. The guys and girls at Microsoft might’ve added a little ‘bundle of joy’ in the latest explorer.exe code as part of the latest Windows update that antivirus apps weren’t happy about.

Posts on the Kapersky Lab’s forums spread like wildfire… and more people started giving the same advice: DO NOT DELETE explorer.exe! WTF!?! BUT I DID ALREADY!!! Things were definitely not getting any rosier. With explorer.exe gone, Windows XP itself started complaining:

I hurriedly tried to copy explorer.exe from an uninfected PC, hoping to elevate some of my panic attack, but unfortunately, no… ZoneAlarm removes it again. I ran the ZoneAlarm auto updater in case they’d release a latest virus signature but no cigar. That darned Get a Mac - Viruses ad keeps playing over and over in my head… Supa K and his Mac should be laughing his head off now.

Alright, that’s it. I’m gonna go with the false positive ‘theory’ (by this time it could be fact). It seems the only solution is to restore explorer.exe in any way possible.

The first thing I did was to assume that ZoneAlarm is falsely accusing explorer.exe as being infected. Therefore, I had to switch off the ‘ZoneAlarm Anti-virus’ system.

Next, I restored the ‘infected’ files back to their original locations.

I then switched back on the ‘ZoneAlarm Anti-virus’ system, and inserted my Windows XP SP2 CD into the disc drive. Windows copied and replaced the ‘infected’ files with the ones from the disc… Hopefully everything went OK. It sure seemed that way. Only one way to find out: by restarting the computer.

TADA! It booted up as normal! Woot! I’m saved! Then an interesting little update from Microsoft popped up:

More reading on this topic revealed “On a Microsoft Windows XP SP2-based computer, the Explorer.exe process crashes“, and specifically “Some antivirus applications and some print applications use notification balloons to display messages. These applications may cause a race condition. Therefore, the Explorer.exe process crashes.” Hmm… I wonder if this problem I’m having is related? It does seem that way.

Well, my computer is saved for today. Thanks to all the help from the good people of the Net! My whole day’s worth of productivity and fun all down the drain… Whoever’s responsible for worm.win32.huhk.c should be tied to a tree, and severely punished by banned from computers, technology and the Internet for good.

Tags: Worm, Computer, Virus, explorer.exe, Windows Explorer, Windows XP, SP2, worm.win32.huhk.c, ZoneAlarm, antivirus, Kapersky, security, Windows Update, KB938828, Google

A cable was running from the main phone lines to a tree.

Well, my guess is either:

• Someone wanted to conduct a mad experiment to fry this tree if with a freak electricity jolt, or
• This tree desperately needed to connect to the Net.

If it was the latter, hey- who could blame it? I couldn’t live without the Net myself. I wonder what speed it gets, though…

Tags: Phone Cable, Cable, Experiment, Internet connected, Tree, Blackburn Rd, Mt Waverley

For those of you nosy SysAdmins, curious Bosses, and suspecting spouses looking to peep at what your employees (or loved ones) have been up to on their computers, I have just the thing for you… RescueTime: ridiculously easy time management even the Village Idiot can do it!

RescueTime is a web-based time management tool that’s currently in Beta (that means they’re ironing out bugs that might crash your valuable hentai collection). It’s a FREE service that lets you see what and how long software and websites have been accessed on the computers you have the RescueTime app installed on.

I’ve been using RescueTime for more than a month now and I can say that it’s a useful and amusing tool to have. You can ‘tag’ (giving meaningful labels/descriptions/categories to) top used apps (or all if you want) and track their usages over months, weeks, days, hours, or minutes by app or tags.

To get started, you’ll need to sign up for a free account on their website. It’s simple and only takes a couple of minutes. Once you’ve logged into your Dashboard, you’ll need to download and install the RescueTime Data Collector on the computers you want to monitor. It’s available for both Windows and Mac, so you Apple Fanboys can rejoice (sorry, no Linux version yet). Once installed and configured, it’ll run quietly and effortless on your System Tray. If you have a firewall app like ZoneAlarm, you’ll need to make sure it’ll allow you to gather info from your computer and launch said info into Cyberspace.

You’ll need to wait a couple of hours ’til the website absorbs the latest app usage from your computer(s), then you can log into your Dashboard to see your usage; you can always burn a couple of hours reading some blogs BenDawos.com.

As I pointed out earlier, RescueTime is useful because you can track which apps you’ve been wasting spending time on, and it’ll help you (or your staff or loved one) organise and prioritise your/their time better- RescueTime is after all, a time management tool. It’s also amusing to see exactly how much time you’ve been spending on ‘certain’ sites.

It’s not to say it doesn’t have its share of problems, like relatively-high memory usage (avg. 32MB on my PC) and the occasional crashes. After all, it is currently in Beta, and I’m sure it’ll get fixed over time. A good app is only as good as the quality of service and support provided, and the guys (no girls there yet) at RescueTime don’t disappoint; besides having a Blog detailing their progress, they’ve got an Interactive Q&A/Forum set up at Satisfaction.com to satisfy all your inquisitive and troublesome needs. What more could you ask for? Microsoft Tech Support?

RescueTime is a great app, and I can’t wait for it to go gold. Those of you itching to find out what naughtiness you’ve (or someone’s) been getting on your/their computers, sign up for and install RescueTime Beta now!

Tags: RescueTime, Time Management, Computer, Application, Software, Sastifaction.com, Productivity, Tracking, Usage, Dashboard, Monitoring, Priotising, Priotizing, Tags, Tech Support

LE MENU ALA BACHELOR

Appetisers

• Continental Cup-A-Soup - Creamy Seafood Bisque with Croutons
• Deli Shaved Champagne Ham

Main Course

• Heinz Macaroni and Cheese
• Sakata Sour Cream and Chives Rice Crackers
• Creamy Kraft Prawn and Crab Dip
• Served with free-flowing diabetes-inducing Solo

Dessert

• Home-Brand Strawberry Layered Cheesecake

After-Lunch ‘Mint’

• No-Doz

A Bachelor Feast, is of course, unlike any other meal you can find at the nearest five-star restaurant. The ‘art’ of preparing a Bachelor Feast, is ensure the meal fulfills the following requirements:

• Light and quick
• Instantly prepared
• Packed or packaged
• Full of carbs and fat; very little of everything else
• Very unhealthy
• High probability of giving you a bad case of indigestion afterwards
• Not in ANY circumstances something you’d eat with a date

If you’re up for it, now is the time for you to run to your nearest grocery store and grab what you need to prepare your Bachelor or Bachelorette Feast!

Tags: Bachelor Feast, Continental Soup, Deli Ham, Macaroni and Cheese, Rice Crackers, Kraft, Dip, Solo, No-Doz, Unhealthy food, Eating alone, Indigestion

Coming from a town that literally means ‘cat’ in Malay, i.e. Kuching, I absolutely wuuuuuv cats. I think cats are the cutest and smartest animals in this world, regardless of what scientists say about hairy chimps. I mean, hey- besides Wacko Jacko, do you see chimps pampered in homes?

My cat Meow Under Seven has been around for nine years now, and is still the cutest thing, ever…

…even when he gnaws on my paw for dessert.

I wuv cats so much I’ve got elements of them scattered all over the house, such as Meow’s pictures on the fridge:

My ‘07 and ‘06 calendars feature a-cat-a-day goodness:

P made me this Jewellery Box with pictures sliced and diced up from the ‘06 calendar:

She also gave me this cute little booklet appropriately titled “Your Cat (The Boss)”:

Cat (yes, a human ‘Cat’) got me these humorous cat tags:

Cat’s cat statuettes grace the top of one of the PC monitors:

Board magnets… There are actually six ‘cats’ in the picture below. My sis’ name is ‘Kat’ (that counts, doesn’t it?):

Tona gave me this coaster with two cat-looking things:

Don’t forget my morning poison (i.e. black coffee) mug with the emblazoned cat:

I don’t know whether this furball-looking thing dangling from one of my bag’s zippers even qualify as a ‘cat’:

I don’t even know WHAT this monstrosity is:

Tags: Cat, Cats