Just a few days before the new year begins, the question on everyone's minds (or at least the people I work with) seems to be what are you doing New Year's Eve? Its becoming a mad scramble of sorts for them, trying to figure out exactly where they're going to be during the last moments of 2005 and the first moments of 2006. Quietly, I've been doing my own inquiring, to see if there is anything going on I might not mind being a part of. When anyone asks me what my plans are, I just tell them I haven't figured that out yet.
And its true...I haven't figured it out yet. No one seems to have any definitive plans at the moment, and its getting pretty close to the wire as far as planning things goes. I've sort of been dragging my feet when it comes to making plans for New Year's Eve because I don't know for sure yet if my plans will include Tom or not. As of right now, he has Robert that night. Yes, for the third year in a row, Tom has Robert. Once again, Faye has pulled the "I have to work later" card and has shrugged off all responsibility to Robert, despite it being her year to have him for the evening. So, I've been waiting to see what happens with that.... Knowing Tom, he won't do or say anything about it and one of two things will happen: either he'll get stuck at home that night, or his parents will watch Robert so he can go out. Neither of these happen to be the appropriate or fair solution, but nothing ever has been when it comes to this.
My parents (or to be more specific, my dad) have infested their computer with a bunch of rather debilitating viruses and have asked me to fix everything so they can get back to their normal computer using routine. Unfortunately, I am a hardware person, not software. Sure, I can take a look and do a few quick hacks, but I don't know much past that. But when theres a remote car starter courtesy of my dad, well of course I'm going to give it my best shot. Both my parents know I've been trying to save up a little extra cash aside from what I owe in bills and what I normally set aside for savings to have a car starter installed in my jetta. Aparently the health of my parents computer is so important to them that they'd spring for that car starter for me.
Initially, my dad was in such a state of panic when the viruses popped up and he couldn't remove them himself. He's fairly decent with computers, but when the software issues come up, he knows just enough to be dangerous. He started panicking because he didn't want to lose his entire music collection he currently has stored on his ipod via itunes. Hundreds of dollars have gone into downloading his collection (yes, he does most of it legally, unlike his daughter.) And thanks to companies like Apple and Microsoft who have made nearly impossible for the average user to make viable backups of their rightfully purchased digital files, my dad was freaking out about the possibility of losing the entire collection and having to pay for it all over again.
Long story short... I was able to save his entire music library and back it up onto my computer where it will hopefully stay safe in the event that the computer either melts down to a pile of rubble on the desk or we have to wipe the hard drive clean and start over, he doesn't have to start all over with his music collection. I was also able to identify and remove one particularly nasty program infecting their computer that completely disabled their internet use as well as a majority of their programs. Unfortunately, the car starter is not mine. I was unable to clear the computer of its viruses, in part due to the sheer number of them infecting the hard drive in addition to the location of said viruses. My dad, frequenter of questionable websites (ones that would make you cringe if I were to list them here) seems to have at least 27 viruses hiding in the depths of his temporary internet files folder as well as his temporary documents folder. Those are two places I dare not venture into ever again in my lifetime, after the things I saw there a few years ago (pre-windows XP user accounts and passwords features.) I attempted to just delete whole folders, but the contents of them being as hefty as they were, locked up the entire computer in the process.
And so the computer won. I threw my hands up and told my parents I tried my best but there wasn't much else I could do. Yeah, I lied to them about it...there was something else I could have done, but like I said, I would rather stay out of those folders belonging to my dad. Instead, I told them it would ivolve wiping the hard drive clean and installing everything fresh. While they were still annoyed at the fact that they need to click a Norton AntiVirus popup window 27 times before they can do anything every single time they log into an account, they were at least grateful of the fact that I was able to disable the program that had completely locked them out of the computer. But, the more they thought about all the things they would have to reinstall once they wipe the drive clean, the more annoyed they got at the idea, and the less annoyed they seemed to become at the 27 popup messages...
I hear its supposed to get colder this weekend. Its too bad I won't have that car starter I wanted ;0(