not my blog

Illiad over at UserFriendly has always had an entertaining little comic. Wonderful geek humor daily. Can’t ask for much more than that. Today’s comic was just too true not to make sure it was well shared to the world. Speaks volumes about our current culture and the new internet generation.

My other two favorite web comics, Sluggy and Penny Arcade have both also provided me with years worth of joy and laughs. Sluggy has possibly some of the longest and most interesting storylines of any comic strip I’ve ever read (with some storylines taking months to tell). Penny Arcade, well that’s just a wonderful satire on real life in general. In fact, at this moment, I have this strip as my desktop. Of course this is possibly one of the best ever. More of this story, laugh.

If you’ve ever read any of this blog you know that I work for a franchise of Geeks On Call. You know, one of those companies that provides on-site computer service and has really wierd/silly commercials. And pretty much as it stands the main competition that comes in (and the company that so many people confuse us with) is Geek Squad. And in case you live in a hole or have been at the North Pole for the past couple of years, you know that Best Buy owns Geek Squad. So I was checking out the Geeks On Call forum today and stumbled accross this beauty of a post from some franchise owner in Virginia. I was really just shocked at the stupidity of this post in general, but the last line really got me. Before reading this post remember, A) Our company is Geeks On Call, B) Our main competition is Geek Squad, C) Best Buy owns Geek Squad. So on with the drivel:

Does anybody know (or know where to look) if there is any type of federal program to assist low income people with either purchasing a computer or having it worked on.

It seems as the government has programs to assist americans in all kinds of ways and with titles such as “no child left behind”, I would think that the government would want everyone up on computers. If no program/voucher is available now, maybe we could start pushing for one. The thoughts are that even if the government does not pay us our normal rates, the appointments could be gap fillers when we are slow, while also doing good in our communities. Second, once most people get a computer and it then goes down they want it back up. So hopefully even if the government does not pay for additional service, there will be a whole lot more computers for us to service.

If no program is currently offered, maybe we could partner up with Microsoft or Bestbuy or some other big names to push congress for some type of voucher.

Ouch my head… need beer… must make brain stop hurting. Fridge empty. DOH! Must travel to store and acquire more beer. Must move quickly before brain implodes. To sum up this post before I leave for the evening I need to deliver my amazing response to this post on the forum:

/me blinks
/me checks vision
/me blinks

Google Talk = Google’s new IM service that they’re announcing tomorrow. All you need is a Jabber client, and a GMail address… read this and hop on the service today! (I’m not sure how long this will work, though.)

I’m on. Now we just need to start a revolution and get everyone to switch from the evil of AIM. Any compatible messaging client will do. Me, I use GAIM. But, there is always Trillian as well. All I can say is AOL better look out cause they are going to get PWN3D. =D

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It all started out like any other residential service call:

I can’t open Internet Explorer. The machine runs really slow. It does wierd things when we use it. Help us!

I looked at Jerry, my accomplice in getting this bad boy working again, and smiled. This should be no sweat. Little did I know what I was in for at the onset of this call. A quick inventory of the system left me with little in the way of worries:

• 2.4 GHz Pentium 4
• 1GB PC2700 RAM
• 40GB HD with around 23GB free
• XP Home with SP2 and Post SP2 patches
• Active, up to date McAfee Anti-virus
• No firewall – ok that’s an issue but not anything I haven’t seen in a long time

So first thing we do, whip out HijackThis! and see what we have going on. Quick run through and 122 entries removed. Hmm, might be an interesting one after all. Time for Bart to work his magic and make the bad things run away. Reboot and load up The Geek CD. Delete gobs of temp files and the System Restore and things are looking fairly mundane at this point. Boy, could I have been any more wrong!

Launched Ad-aware and AV Personal and let them do their thing. Ad-aware starts off fairly normally, maybe 500 items in the registry and AV Personal finds like three Virii. Next thing you know I look and Ad-aware is at like 1500 files found and we aren’t even remotely close to finishing the drive yet. Odd… oh well. Wait… we’re up to 7000 files now. Oh, this can’t be good. Hrm, AV Personal is still only at 15 virii, this can’t be that bad. Ad-aware at this point is close to 20,000 files found. Hope we can save it. Suddenly we hit C:\Windows and that’s when the shit hits the fan. BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. AV Personal goes nuts! This is never good. Ad-aware finally finishes with 37000+ items detected! Just need to get it it to remove them all. Unleash it on the beast and cross my fingers.

AV Personal finally completes it’s scan of C:\Windows with around 11000 virii and still with C:\Windows\System32 to go. It was quiet for a little bit as the directories between the two are scanned, but we hit System32 and the scanner goes nuts again! Finally after my ears start bleeding from the costant beeping it ends. 18725 virii. 18725 virii, wow, McAfee did a really great job keeping this system safe, that’s for sure. Well that’s done, let’s run Spy Sweeper see what we can get there. Keeping it simply I just check the registry and pull out an additional 3000 entries from the registry with Spy Sweeper.

Next up, Alternate Data Streams. ADSpy pulls out a whopping 599 ADS from the system. My head is really starting to hurt here… how the heck these people even used their computer at all was completely beyond me. Well, Bart has done his job and done it well once again… magic I tell you… magic. Back to Windows we go.

Things look good. IE opens, things all seem to be working. So time to install and run Microsoft’s AntiSpyware. And while we are at it, run A² Free as a backup to make sure things are nice and clean. Another 50 some files and 30 odd registry entries and A² pulling out another 3 trojans it looks like we are done. Drag the customer in to show them the damage and they smile with the fact that their dead computer has been resurrected. Glad they are happy, cause my head hurts and I need to not think about what I was just forced to endure to save her machine from the dreaded reload.

Geeks – 1

Spyware – 0

And for you non-believers:

Long day at work? Too much stress? This will help make your day go much better.

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