20, visit, spy, manual

I finally got up to 20 laps with a combination of crawl and backstroke. My arms are getting stronger, but it still wears me out. I had to drop back down to 12 last Friday since I was pressed for time. I'm headed to the pool again today, we'll see how it goes.

I visited my folks and my sister and brother in law for the weekend for my sister's birthday. We went out to Olive Garden for lunch and played some games - including a grueling game of Shanghai Rummy. Had a pretty good time just hanging out with the crew - but in the middle of a shopping trip to Menard's, my room-mate called on my Dad's cell phone for me. (my own cell phone was roaming and had 0 bars in the store and I'd turned it off).

He'd been using my computer and clicked on a pop-up that "looked" like the norton anti-virus requested to download an update. So, he did - and got the computer infected with some spyware. It's a pretty nasty program that claims to run a virus scan, displays a bunch of phony warnings, then prompts the user for a credit card for to download the full version.

I got my room-mate stopped before he put in his credit card in - and when I got back, I spent the rest of Sunday evening trying to remove the spyware - with no luck. I managed to kill it in the short term, but it keeps coming back.

So, I fired off an email to one of my colleagues to see if he can help. I hate asking for computer help, but I don't want to make things worse with an untested removal program - or damaging the registry files.

Also, confession time. Last week I looked for, download, and read the manual for some of the software we have on campus. It fixed the problem I was having, but I still felt bad about it. I joked with some people that I was going to start asking for directions when I'm out driving. Yeah, it was that bad.

that's it for now...