Thursday, March 10, 2005
Met with Ron and Anthony from Dell and the Student Computing Committee to talk about setting up a new Dell computer package for incoming fall 2005 students. The meeting went well. They admitted that last year had been problematic and seem to be working harder to gain and retain our trust this time around. I'm pleased. Continued troubleshooting laptop problems for a student; she has a 2.7 GB local user profile and her computer had picked up a virus. Started virus and spyware scans on James's computer. He's been having a strange problem with PharmAdMIT 2005 and we need to be more certain than normal that his computer is very clean. Resolved a lot of listservs which had outdated e-mail addresses. Updated listservs to include a student's resolved e-mail address problem, then updated the student database accordingly. Back to the student's laptop—she had a bunch of spyware. Ad-Aware found a lot, and then Spybot-S&D found a lot as well. I had to manually remove something called mqdscli.exe and mqdscli.dll. These files had information inside them saying they were "Microsoft MQ Client Directory Service" which sounds important but I couldn't find any mention of this service on Microsoft's site. I did a file find for mqdscli and within the results I started renaming mqdscli.exe to mqdscli.exe.bad and then mqdscli.dll to mqdscli.dll.bad. I was able to do the renaming, but immediately a new copy would appear in (I think it was) c:\windows\system32\dllcache so I knew then that it was a baddie and I restarted in Safe Mode to just outright delete the darned things. There were various copies of these files in c:\windows\prefetch and c:\windows\system32 and c:\windows\softwaredistribution\download\[some really long string of hex digits here]. Don't forget to look in c:\windows\system32\dllcache. After that, I opened regedit and searched for occurrences of mqdscli. Make sure to remove the line in HKCU\Soft\Micr\Wind\CurrentVersion\Run. Chatted with Chris about e-mail migration for our office and about password policy. Lunch with Melissa, Ena, and Joel. We got food from Millberry Union and sat in the commons area in front of the library, first in the sun, then in the shade (too hot!). Joel is looking for a new place to live. After lunch, Joel showed me more cool tote bags he had made with his sewing machine, and he gave me a Rite Aid ball point pen, which I will cherish for as long as the ink lasts. "With us, it's personal" it says imprinted on it. Reconverted InDesign schedule documents to PDF and uploaded them to the web, sent related announcements. Tried to figure out how to make user profiles smaller when it's not a roaming profile—just a local profile—no clear answer yet since most people covering this problem talk about roaming profiles. I showed Joel RSS today. Dinner at home with Patrick: braised beef stew meat over stir-fried chinese vegetables, "mild" curry rice for Patrick, naan for me. I coded the drama piece for Lodestar, switching to XHTML and CSS code that is better than what I have used for drama pieces in the past. Now the code more accurately reflects the structure of the document. We've noticed that some of the things we buy at Trader Joe's misleads us into thinking that the food item isn't spicy but in actuality it is. Like the "mild" curry rice tonight. It says "mild" on the box, and perhaps it's mild to a person from India who grew up eating spicy foods every day, but it's not mild to American palates, not by the measure of most people, I think. Next time we go to TJ's we need to remember to fill out the comment card. Disappointing us at the moment of our meal time is one way to lose our hearts. (Just ask Webvan.) Experimented with favicons again.