It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m not working next week. Got the whoooooole week to myself. That’s all I wanted to say about that. Gloat over.
I may (just may) get this finished. Then again, I may not. I may (just may) also tidy up a bit. But then I won’t be able to find anything afterwards.
I’d like to do some walking or cycling. But it’ll probably rain – I think the last time the sun shone here I was on holiday. Typical British weather…

We got hit by a virus at work today. The first I heard about it was when one of our shops phoned me up and said they’d received an email from one of the secretaries here, and when they opened it the anti-virus program popped up.
So I went to have a look at our internal email server and found 238 identical emails in the outqueue waiting to be sent. It was connected as I looked, and every couple of seconds one of the outgoing emails disappeared. Ooooooppppss.. better shut that down asap.
Ok, have a look at these outgoing emails to see if I can work out who’s sending them. There seem to be four main culprits, so I go off to virus-check their pc’s. Only one reports a virus, the “sobig” worm found in one of the temporary internet files.
The other three PC’s came up clean, but every time I turned the email server back on, more emails started appearing in the outqueue. The emails all have a file attached to them, called photos_arc.exe. Time to google for that. The first page that came up was this one, all the way from Australia, no less. At least it contains some information I can check out.
It turns out that all four of the PC’s were infected with this virus, and removing it was simple once I knew what I was looking for. Of course, someone had to phone all our shops to tell them not to open this email, but to delete it straight away.
The next question was: why hadn’t our anti-virus program picked it up? I’d checked for updates yesterday and it said it was all current. I checked for updates again after the incident and still nothing. So I tried to connect to McAfee’s ftp server manually and couldn’t log on to it. Why the update said successful when in fact it couldn’t log on I don’t know. So I had a look at McAfee’s web site and found a new update ready for download. The new update had yesterday’s date on it, but I don’t know if the update was released before or after I checked yesterday. Anyway, new update downloaded, and all PC’s in the building should have updated themselves by lunchtime. I had some copies of the dodgy email in my “deleted items” folder, so after doing the update I tried to open the file on the email. Sure enough, McAfee spotted the virus, so we should be ok now.
Here’s McAfee’s description of the virus. All’s well that ends well, but I hope that the people we inadvertently sent the virus to this morning don’t have too much hassle with it…

I’m in a surprisingly good mood at the moment. The painkillers have kicked in and my back no longer hurts every time I move, the sun is shining (I know this because I went out at lunchtime – the only windows in my office are the ones on my computer screen), and amount of work piled up on my desk is getting smaller. Something’s got to go wrong, surely?

Four days off work (ok, two days if you don’t count the weekend, except I do count it because it makes it sound better) and 10 minutes into the working day I sneeze while leaning over a desk to put some paper in a printer and my whole back twinges. I’m in agony for the rest of the day. Perfect.
Still, managed to spot and fix a few deliberate mistakes my boss had made in my absence in an attempt to keep me on my toes. I’ll tell you, it’s working. Except that when I stand on my toes, my back hurts. Ouch.