overdue

No updates for a long time, and with good reason. Loads of work at office with everybody coming back from holidays and needing a password reset, loads of work in the house, and some private troubles.

Office work should be ok, it seems I'm on the shortlist to go to another project. We'll see how short that list actually is.
Work in our house is ongoing. But we do have a kitchen now! The gas is not connected yet, and the false ceiling is only half done - but at least all the rest is there. And it looks great :)

As for the private troubles, worry not: nothing wrong with me or my wife. We only got some very bad news a few days ago, the kind of news that arrives with a phonecall in the middle of the night, when you know instinctively something is seriously wrong...
In fact, my grandmothers house burned down. She was not inside, fortunately, but most of the house and the furniture are gone. Caused by the neighbours' tumbledrier. Ironically, his house is far less damaged than my grandmother's. I'll go see the damage tomorrow, and hope to get some pictures.

So for all who did not get it yet: tumbledriers are bad for you!

general stupidity

I spent the best part of yesterday afternoon cleaning virusses/spyware from a Windows 2000 laptop here in the office. I could not get it clean completely, so I called in expert, fully Microsoft certified, help - who, after another three hours, decided to wipe the system and prepare a new pc.

The cause? Apart from the known Windows problems: general, no-excuse, absolute stupidity from the user of that pc. She did about anything you can do to kill a good (protected!!) windows installation, except visiting porn websites.

So imagine: two well-paid technicians lose about 7 man-hours for this, and then the user complains on the fact we deleted his (illegaly downloaded) music from his (office!) laptop.

Two remarks:
- sometimes I regret you can't use violence in everyday office life
- I'm happy to use OS X at home!

As a side remark on this: in our IT problem logging system "spyware" is a subdirectory of "Windows 2000". A telltale sign, no?