Interrupted Routine

Continuing warm weather and a relatively quiet to-do list had me all set for a fairly routine Wednesday when I rolled out to the levee to meet the group. Although we had to detour onto the grassy slope of the levee at one point where the police were blocking the road, presumably investigating a crime scene, the ride was pretty normal. There was this one tall guy wearing running shoes and gym shorts and riding an aluminum GT road bike, though. He turned out to be fairly stable, though, so no real problem there once I decided he wasn't going to do anything too scary.

Then, around noon, I finally got a big reimbursement check that had gotten bounced back a couple of times, so I took the car over to the bank and then to the Starbucks on Prytania to pick up some fresh coffee for the office. In honor of the impending season, I settled on their Christmas Blend. I'd had some last year and it was pretty good, and besides, the package is festive. It's supposed to get cold around here tomorrow night and so I'm expecting my craving for hot strong coffee to return with the front. In the meantime, it's looking like it will be cloudy and maybe a bit rainy this afternoon and tomorrow.

When I got back to my office, there was a big post-it note in the middle of my desk from Rebecca that just said, in big letters, "S.O.S!!" Her computer, it seemed, was quite screwed up. After some investigation, I found an odd file running, and when I killed the process, the strangeness, manifested by random flashes on the screen of an unidentifiable html file, (almost) stopped. Hmmm. Not good. So I ran McAfee on running programs and it found a Trojan, but I don't think the beast was killed. It's more like I stepped on a worker ant but didn't touch the Queen. After a while, it spontaneously re-booted, and a couple of times crashed to a blue screen, aka "the blue screen of death." So we called in the reinforcements, and the tech support guy pulled the hard drive so he could scan it on his computer. Don't know the outcome yet, though. Anyway, I love that kind of detective work, and it was a nice break from the more mundane phone calls that I still have to make because I happily put them on "hold" while I investigated the computer issue. The only problem is that I know just enough to be really dangerous, and I know it. Hopefully it's not a combination of problems, like a Trojan plus some bad memory (yeah, it was a stop error). Anyway, on the plus side I was able to pick the brain of the tech guy and find out the secret POP server address for the new Exchange server. Not sure if I'll use it, but it's nice to know, right?

There's a chance of rain tomorrow morning, but it's not higher than 30% so perhaps we won't get rained out.