Tone Parsons

Around 11pm last night I was just getting ready to go to bed… then my phone rang.

It was Amy, the woman who works the graveyard shift in my department. Apparently, she’s quite ill and didn’t know who to call.

There must be something wrong with me because I said I’d take care of it. I’m second on the list to call, the guy who’s first on the list has tomorrow off as a personal day, so she didn’t want to call him (we need our days off from time to time).

So…. I had a quick 2 hour nap, brewed some wickedly strong coffee, and got in my car. I arrived here at 2:10 am (nearly hitting 2 deer on the way in… what’s with the deer playing chicken with cars at that time of the morning anyway?).

*sigh*

I don’t miss doing this shift. It is the giant pile of suck that I remember it to be.

Working this shift also screws me for next week. I had planned on taking it off. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to finish the FTPS install and test the firewall for the servers I flew to Boston for by the end of today, and our network guy is off on Friday… so I need to do it on Monday. I also have to come in on Wednesday to do an upgrade to another server (that’s the day it has to be done).

Of course, I keep trying to schedule a week off, and it keeps getting bumped (I’m the one who bumps it… I have work to do). Scouts honor… I will take some time off this year. I’m to the “use it or lose it” point with vacation hours…. you can only carry over 240 to the next year. I’m currently just below that and acquiring another 4.62 hours every two weeks.

*ugh*

I need more coffee.

My laptop has been less than pleased with the world since my trip to Boston.

While connected to the hotel’s network, it appears that it became infested with all manner of evil. I was having issues with popups, something trying to modify my registry, etc.

After installing and running 4 different spyware programs (Spybot, Ad-Aware, Defender, and Ewido) as well as my anti-virus, it became very clear that things were bad in laptop land.

After doing all of this, I thought I had it… I thought it was clean and I was good to go. I thought wrong.

Whatever was having it’s way with my laptop was hidden well. It appears that they used the Sony DRM rootkit to hide the source and I was only picking off the files that were infected (thanks a lot, Sony….. you fuckers!). I would clean it, it would stay that way for a couple of days, then all hell would break lose again.

Yesterday, I decided I’d had enough of it, backed up my documents, and re-imaged the laptop back to the way it was when our IT department assigned it to me. I was able to save everything with the exception of my archive .pst for 2006 (there goes all the email I’ve recieved for this year!). It could have been much, much worse.

The 3 main things I found while scanning the drives were:
Backdoor.Sensive.51 (who ever wrote this needs a kick in the gonads)
Downloader.Zlob.ja (aka: SpyAxe… those bastards!)
Dialer.Rpcnet.b (which doesn’t show up on google at all)

Things appear to be good now. I spent most of yesterday and last night re-installing my applications and getting it back to where it needs to be so I can do my job. Hopefully, I didn’t forget to back up anything too critical.

Today was my annual review at work.

The company is finally doing well again (we had some hard times and a lot of layoffs in previous years) and I was hopeful that I would get a reasonable raise. I did ok in that department (not exactly what I wanted, but within half a percent of it).

I also found out that they’ve changed my job title to more accurately reflect what I do for a living: from “Senior Applications Engineer” to “Solutions Engineer”.

You’ll notice that the “Senior” bit didn’t follow me to my new title.

It shouldn’t bother me. My duties are still what they were when I came to work this morning and I make more money now than I did when I came to work today… but it does. I feel like I’ve been stripped of my authority, that my value has somewhat diminished. I guess it’s all in perception.

I told them it didn’t bother me, but I’m finding after a little time to reflect, it does bother me… quite a bit. Of course, I’ll never say anything about it at work (that’s not my way) and will continue to keep doing what I do. Perhaps I’ll earn it back next year.

We’ll see.