Sunday, July 04, 2004

Mysterious Excrement of DOOOOOOOM!!

This afternoon we paid a visit to our local Dewsons to buy the fixings for a delicious dinner, all had gone well, we were on our way back to the car when Caitie was heard to say "I'm BUSTING!". Another trip to the public toilets had become necessary.

I say another because we had already made a mad dash to the dunny about 15 minutes beforehand (this kid piddles a lot).

Hand in hand we walked briskly, unprepared for what was laying in wait just around the corner.

The toilets are about 10m down a corridor that is situated in an out of the way corner of the shopping centre. As we came closer to the corridor I said to Caitie "Gee, it's a bit stinky isn't it?" and then we saw why. There in the very centre of the floor, about 1 step into the corridor was a pile of poo. By pile I mean at least 3 large logs. Somebody had crapped on the floor, and boy did it STINK!

If it hadn't been a toilet emergency we would have just turned straight around, but Caitie was BUSTING. We had to edge our way past it and carry on. I had never really considered how poorly ventilated that corridor was, but I was considering it now.

I thought the walk to the toilet had been bad, but when we stepped out of the ladies, and looked back up the corridor we could see it on the floor in the distance, mocking us. Each step we took brought us closer to it, closer and closer, and then it was right there and we were edging around it again. And then we were out! We had safely made it past. I would have sighed with relief, but the smell was pretty bad, and you know how it is with horrible smells and breathing through your mouth, I certainly had no desire to 'taste' it.

I wonder if it is there still?

The cleaning ladies don't work on Sundays..

Saturday, July 03, 2004

Kill all spyware makers!

Well, the title says it all doesn't it? Yesterday I received a panicked phone call from Mel saying my computer wasn't working right. Something about an error with winlogon.exe after a reboot.

"Great" thinks I. Sounded like either my computer was close to dying, or a nasty piece of spyware had installed itself.

Thankfully my machine sits behind a transparent proxy on my LAN, so I could go back through the logs and find out exactly what had been installed. I found it was a nasty piece of crap from look2me.com, which judging from my squid logs, tries to push info out to their server at regular intervals after it is installed. Anyway, I proceeded to google for a fix. Which I found and used, fixing the problem. Strangely, the 'fix' was in fact a look2me.com provided uninstaller. The uninstaller was the only part of the whole thing that actually worked.

The mystery still remains, HOW did it download itself and install itself on my PC. XP is fully patched and up to date. The firewall my box sits behind is very restrictive, and we don't use IE for browsing. I'm stumped.

I've got a theory, it could be bunnies...