Boing!

After only 5.5 hours in the car, 6 hours of yelling at my computer and an hour and a half of a stressful meeting, I am home safe. Thanks to mydwynter for calling and making me giggle so's I'd stay awake.

I need a dog and some mindless TV to stare at. After all, tomorrow is another day.

My graphics controller driver shit the bed (while uninstalling old software, I think). I'm at 4 bit, 640x480.

Partying like it's 1993 ovah heah.

Is there a setting such that when I click on a new link, it opens up a new tab in my current window, rather than a new window?

Anyone know how to find out if a hosting company folded up and went away, or is just having the worst day of their life courtesy of their upstream provider?

Our website and incoming email are down, and the websites for the company are also down (www.extreme-programming.com and www.xpinc.com). Their phone number has a "our support lines are down, please email or leave a voicemail" message, which I got when I called them last week, but we've had service until this point.

Oddly, our outgoing email is also screwed up, but that's handled by our ISP, and we have internet service (duh). I can send email just fine using my personal outgoing server, but not the outgoing server for the ISP. (and to complicate matters further, I can't test outgoing mail on Outlook on my computer while AT the office, because it's configured to work from home, and I don't want to fux0r that up)

Anyone?

EDIT:
Annnnnd....they're back up. No idea why. No call/email from the webhost. I'm up to my eyeballs in the invoicing now, but I'll be hollering down there way in the next day or so to see if I can learn what's what. In the meantime, our tech is investigating other hosting options, just in case.

(oh, and why am I doing all this if we have a tech? I wonder the same thing...)

Here on my desk, I have my work laptop, and my gigundo monitor for my home PC, and the keyboard and mouse for the home PC, and a mouse for my laptop. To clean the clutter and keep me from losing my mind, I got a KVM switch. Worked great for a couple weeks, and then it stopped working on my laptop.

Turns out the cable was defective, so I returned it to the company I bought it from, and they sent me a brandy new one yesterday.

Connected it this morning, everything worked fine. Rebooted my laptop because it was getting slow and finicky (not unreasonable given how long it's been since my last reboot). Now when I hit the switch to go from the home PC to the laptop, it shows the laptop screen output, and then in 5 seconds automatically switches back to the PC.

I think we've got another busted cable. Only both Belkin and the place I got it are on the west coast, and don't open until 11 and 11:30 my time. Plus, I think the place I got it has some weird "we'll replace it once" policy.

I just want less clutter. Is that so much to ask?

So on Monday, one of those popups saying "would you like to install blah blah blah" appeared -- I missed and clicked "yes". Instantly, I tried to shut everything down, in an effort to forestall disaster.

Too late.

I *just* finished cleaning up my system this morning. So none of you have to go through the same thing I did, here are the resources I used:

Ad-Aware
I've been using this one for a long while now -- my only complaint is that there's no setting for it to automatically check for updates before scanning; you have to handle that manually. That may be a problem only on the free version.

Spybot - Search & Destroy
Free, easy, and will popup whenever a known threat tries to load, to give you the option to block it.

Spywareblaster
Prevents BadStuff(TM) from being installed -- has a bigger prevented list than Spybot (which graciously acknowledges said fact).

Hijack This
Lists all installed browser add-on, buttons, startup items and allows you to inspect, and optionally remove selected items. Tread lightly, though -- the next link provides a great deal of guidance here.

Browser Hijacking -- A Guide
VERY comprehensive list of instructions to follow, with links to sites for doublechecking things before you do anything dumb (especially in Hijack This).

And that's all I know. (tm tinuvien)