Author: Doug McCaughan

Father of 5. Juggler. Ticked off at blogger.com.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Virus Writers Are Criminal

The dollar value I can assess to lost productivity to myself and my client because of the CWS CoolWebSearch (Inet20001) malware and viruses is ridiculous. Virus Writers and malware writers be damned! The stress of trying to remove this mess has taken time off the end of my life I’m sure. So not only are they stealing my money, they are killing me!

That said, today’s challenge. Take a windows 2000 workstation that would boot to the windows login screen then restart after reporting "svchost.exe The application failed to initialize properly. 0xc0000142" Booting to safe mode produced the same error (turns out this is from a copy in c:\temp\svchost.exe). Long and short. The machine did not have enough memory to run the Windows Ultimate Boot CD but did run the Linux Ultimate Boot CD and a virus scan showed some potentials. Notes taken. Damn Small Linux refuses to delete files from the hard drive. Go to the magic toolbox and pull out 6 floppies that are a modified set of Windows XP boot floppies with a Windows 2000 registry repair option (search MS.com) Registry repaired and files deleted from within DOS. Reboot reveals I missed much. Persistence prevails. (I’d go more detailed but I was cruising on a web application this morning and didn’t intend to have a 12 hour speed bump).

Posted on by — Leave a comment

My existence

I made the mistake
I lived for me.
What folly!
I lived for thee.

I breathe in
The air you exhale.
I am indebted to you
For the honor.

I live a life
Planned.
Altered.
Unstable.

I cannot let go
Things are right.
Twisted around
Mind fight.

I die
Still alive.
No afterlife
Spirit is gone.

I lived.
Never free.
Trapped.
Slave, of me.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Ooops. Guess I needed that.

Last night I brewed a pot of coffee at 10pm to assist in my allnighter. I decided then to take a few moments and sit with the wife in bed while I read a chapter. At the end of the third chapter I decided to lay my head for just a moment. Despite waking several times night, I could not motivate myself out of bed. So I finally rise to get to work and moments later Evan decides he needs my attention for a couple of hours. Frustrating and pleasurable at the same time.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Using Porn to Sell Clothes

Well now. Someone just sent me an interesting link. Apparently an apparrel company, SHAÏ, has decided to use pornography to sell clothing. Their catalog is a flash movie of people having sex but as they disrobe you can roll over the movie with your mouse to get details of the clothing article and add it to your shopping cart. The concept is extremely sharp in that you have models displaying the clothing in, um, interesting ways and that when you see what you like you can purchase the clothing. This could have been done without the sex and I bet we will see this style of catalog in different formats such as an interactive walkway with models displaying the goods. The catalog is NOT WORK SAFE and for adults only. I can’t tell you much about the clothes but I can say that the catalog is explicit enough that some people will blush while others might get a few new ideas.

Posted on by — 4 Comments

The Fog

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

I try to find a way to make
All our little joys relate
Without that ever present hate
But I know that it’s too late

The game of life is hard to play
I’m going to lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I’m beat
And to another give a seat
For that’s the only painless feat

The sword of time will pierce our skin
It doesn’t hurt when it begins
But as it works it’s way on in
The pain grows stronger watch it grin

A blind man once requested me
To answer questions that are key
Is it to be or not to be
And I replied, “Oh why ask me?”