Grrr. My algebra teacher left the school!

I was hoping I could take him when I needed higher classes, but he's gone. Apparently his parents have a 10,000 acre farm, and they're getting too old to take care of it, so he's gone home. I guess Alamogordo wasn't big enough to prove the 'you can't keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen the big city.'

I'm also a little ticked that he left while I was on vacation, I would have liked to have thanked him again for the class and said goodbye. Our class ended with five people taking the final.

The superhero movies that we'll probably never see

I think a Matter-Eater Lad movie would be great, but a Batroc the Leaper movie would be even greaterer!

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71023-0.html

I've been PWNED!

My laptop was hit with a trojan!

I don't know how it happened. It's been acting a little slow in Virginia and after, it seemed to be when I had installed printer drivers at Debora's and when the network card was in, but it seemed reasonable after that.

I'd been reading through my backlog of LiveJournal (I think I'm within 5 days of when I left for my vacation) and noticed a slightly odd behavior of my mouse pointer sliding across the screen to the scroll bar. My laptop has the little "eraser" mouse between the G, H, and B keys, and it has been known in the past to move of its own accord. So the behavior wasn't too odd in and of itself.

Tonight things got a little more weird. I went to the break area to nuke my dinner, came back, and my laptop had rebooted. Kind of weird. I hadn't installed any software, and there was no reason for a power failure to occur or force a reboot. So I didn't really follow that further. Then a teacher came in with a student needing help. I walked away from my desk to help them, and when I came back, the Add/Remove Programs dialog was open and it was scrolled down to uninstall my firewall. The mouse pointer was happily moving around with no one driving at the keyboard.

So I yanked out the network card.

Subsequent investigation showed that my anti-virus software had been uninstalled, though they hadn't gotten to my firewall yet. I'm guessing that they uninstalled the a/v software while I was in the break room and a reboot was required to complete it.


All seems well at the moment. I've installed a different version of anti-virus, upgraded Spybot S&D, and upgraded my firewall. I ran various scans and they found nothing, the consensus of my co-workers is that they breached my computer but had not yet managed to get a root kit installed. But I'll be doing more scanning before I'm fully satisfied, and I might end up reformating the drives and reinstalling the OS just to be safe. (edit -- one Spyware program found the Alexa toolbar which is known badness, it has been deleted.)


Absolutely no clue where the attack came from, very strange. I thought my firewall would do better than that, but apparently someone found a way to at least partially circumvent it.