It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

I just finished cleaning a pc of malware for a kid.. he's around ten, a smart kid, and somebody had given him their old pc for Christmas and it was doing "weird" things. The system was a fairly fast one actually - an eMachines 2.9Ghz w/512mb ram, an 80Gb drive, dvd, cdrw, etc.. not a doorstop at all. Somebody gave it to him because it was too slow.
Well.. lemme tell you why it was too slow.. it was running XP Service pack 1, it was running AOL's awesome spyware protection, it was running the full Norton suite (license only 6months expired so no updates in 6mos), and oh yeah it had about two dozen of the greatest trojans and malware apps you could hope to find running on it.
It was a full fledged spam bot. I could sit and watch it churn out hundreds of spam e-mails in a matter of minutes. It was kind of fascinating in a way. It was also quite slow from all this junk running on it.
The kid had a nice system, but some creeps had taken it and turned it into a piece of junk.

I cleaned off all the malware (including norton) and have it running fast again. By getting WinXP updated with all the patches it will help a lot in keeping the nasty stuff off, and I've put some apps on there for him to use that are a bit safer. So he should be ok for a while.

But this leads me to rant a bit.. wtf is going on when AOL and Norton can run their anti-spyware crap and report back that the system is clean when it's sitting there with so many Windows security patches missing and LOADED with spyware and trojans?? This is the fourth computer that I've cleaned up that was running Norton (and all of them had expired licenses) and on each one of them the systems were almost unusable and yet Norton was merrily running along telling the user that their systems were ok. The problem is partly because these folks didn't fork over the dough and get their virus scanner updated, but I'm just at a loss as to why Norton continues running six or eight months after the license has expired. It gives them some false sense of security and sets them up for real trouble.
Another thing that really chaps my #ss.. AOL. Why won't it just go away? Just you try to convince an AOL user to take the training wheels off and move away from AOL. The marketing folks at AOL are masters. Masters, I say.

And no, I'm not going to try to get this kid to switch to *nix or mac. If his system were patched up and he did things just a tiny bit differently then he wouldn't have these problems. I'd like to switch (back) to mac soon, but it's not because of security fears or the fear of getting a virus. My XP boxens run just fine despite my dislike for things from Microsoft.


Here's some stuff that I recommend for Windows users.. kind of a toolkit that I put on systems when I refresh them.

Firefox - Use it for your web browser.

THunderbird - Use it for your e-mail

Eudora - Another good e-mail client

SiteAdvisor - is a brand new system that will warn you if files you are about to download have adware/spyware/malware, or if the site is going to add you to a spam list if you give them your e-mail address. Give it a look..
or..
Netcraft Toolbar - stops a lot of phishing attempts cold

ewido - a nice tool for getting rid of the nasty malware. Will find and clean off most trojans, adware, etc.

EasyCleaner - Registry cleaner (use with caution.. know what you're doing.. not for noobs..). Good for inspecting and cleaning up the messes left behind in the registry by malware.

ad-aware - The freeware version of their spyware scanner. Will find and clean off most trojans, adware, etc.

clamwin antivirus - free open source virus scanner. Set it up to scan nightly, and scan downloads on demand. Personally I think the "always on, lock everything down and run everything through the virus scanner" approach is a bit heavy handed for most users.. clamwin does all most people need.. set it to run once a day and manually scan any email attachments that look suspicious.

Use a server side e-mail virus scanner. Many e-mail services and web hosting services come with or can be upgraded to scan all incoming e-mail for viruses before they even get to your system.
And if your e-mail provider won't scan the mail then most of the new web based e-mail services have virus scanning. Try gmail ( http://gmail.google.com ) if you can get an invitation to try it..

and how to secure windows xp http://markusjansson.net/exp.html has some good tips on how to secure XP so it's much more difficult for the creeps to touch.
(a properly updated and secured system will stop most viruses and malware from doing their thing)

So we were in Atlanta recently and stopped in the Ikea there and loaded up the pickup. One of the things we bought was some new flatware (spoons, forks, you know). We realized when we got home that we really should have bought another set or two, but no problem. Just go online and order some more. Wrong.

I went on their site and it said the items were in stock so I placed an order... I got an e-mail that said "--The order has no expected delivery date...--"

Then.. 3 days later I get an e-mail with this..
"Thank you for placing your recent IKEA order on our website. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with our ordering system, we were unable to process it."
The only solution they gave was a 1-800 number.. after 20 minutes I got through.. get this.. 2 sets of flatware.. $18 for shipping and handling and won't be to my door for _20_ days (and they're _in_stock_.. )

Which brought me to notice that there's kind of a cottage industry on eBay of people who buy things from the Ikea stores and then sell them on eBay for MORE than the items sell for in the store. Even if the items are listed on the Ikea online store. And the stuff sells. Amazing. Here's what I'm talking about

But hey, Ikea has some very cool Flash bits on their site..