When a computer gets a cold…
Some time after Christmas a photographer friend of mine issued an S.O.S. Her computer had become infected with a virus, and apparently the antivirus software that she had on it could not remove the infection. She contacted me online to ask if I could help her, and of course I said I would.
I told her to bring the sick computer to our house, lock, stock and huge widescreen monitor, so I could apply the latest in fumigation techniques that I learned from our technical department.
The computer had one of those free downloadable antivirus programs that really didn’t do much especially if the signatures weren’t regularly updated and a daily full scan was not run. There were other ways of getting a virus, most common of which is through removable drives, which is how my friend’s computer got infected.
The virus hid all her photo folders, which to my friend looked like they were deleted. The virus also hid the Tools > Folder Options link from the File Manager, which removed the ability to unhide the folders.
Short story is, I installed a Kaspersky trial version, ran updates, ran all possible scans and in the end managed to get the virus out, the folders back, making my friend so happy she brought me a huge bag of goodies from Pan de Pugon.
Yummy! 
One plus one
More and more often these days I find myself wondering if online math help would have been much different a decade and a half ago, if Internet at home had been available to me and my young family. Math help would have been a boon with my sons growing up and in school. I was a young and unemployed full time mom at the time, and could have appreciated all the assistance that an online math tutor could provide. Ever since I started to be on the Internet on a regular basis I found that it was the best, if not only at times, source of information for me, especially in times that I needed free online math help.
My daughter and youngest child Maia, now five years old, learned to read on the internet. It was on a site called starfall.com which I now recommend to all of my friends with pre-school kids who have access to the internet at home. She learned not only to read, but to count and to do simple addition through its online math tutoring section. The only disadvantage to online tutoring is that my daughter did not learn to write by hand, actually holding a pencil to paper, because she had become accustomed to typing her letters and numbers out on a keyboard.
But that’s been remedied by going to kindergarten school, starting June of this year. Now her handwriting is quite legible, and coupled with reading on her books and on the internet I believe she has taken in far more information than her classmates who are less exposed to the internet. Of course, internet learning should not completely replace parent- or teacher-supervised learning. Human interaction, after all, is probably the best teaching tool a young person can have.
THAT time of the year
Now that it’s THAT time of the year it’s also the time to review each and every light fixture in our homes, as a safety precaution, especially if your electrical wiring is, as it is in our house, hidden behind the ceilings. This, as I say over and over again, is an old house that we live in, and much of the wiring is hidden behind wooden walls and ceilings, now mostly damaged by the flood brought about by Typhoon Ondoy.
Electrical wiring is a pain to check out in cases like this, but it is always a good think to err on the side of safety.
Life within the Monitor
Years and years ago I was the queen of the Internet. Or at least I thought I was. I had my own website on Geocities, reverse-engineered html sites that I liked. I even knew every chat software there was, I operated a registered channel on IRC, setup bots and quizzes and autoresponders.
I never thought back then that chat would slowly morph into a means to take care of my clients at the office, and even have live chat software as a plugin to our website.
Nothing beats instant response. For me that holds especially true when a client has a question and the phone lines are busy. Enabling the client to click on a button that says “Live Chat” or “Online Now” and getting an instant response to one’s inquiry is a great plus for any company.
About Me
