I suppose I should write something on here to herald the new year, even though it looked for a while as if things were conspiring to allow the shit to ooze through into 2010 from 2009. I almost got dragged into a pointless debate about whether it's a new decade or not after some crabby old bat left a rather short-tempered reply to my New Year's facebook status, but in the end I managed not to rise to her ill-flavoured bait. Breaking with tradition by working at home for the first day back at work after a lengthy period of absence (17 wonderful days) on account of (a) the snow and (b) Nikki taking a day off sick with a nasty cold, saw me locked out of the corporate network owing to my anti-virus definitions being too far out of date.
Trouble was, several thousand other staff members were in the same boat, and had also elected to work at home. I don't know whether their wives/girlfriends/partners had nasty colds, but most of them probably had snow. So the VPN was totally swamped and my repeated attempts to update my AV definitions resulted in nothing but server timeouts throughout the whole day. By far the quietest first-day-back on record, the downside being that I had to struggle into the office through even more snow (around 7 inches fell overnight) today to get access.
Lest this first post of 2010 leave as nasty a taste in the mouth as the aforementioned crabby bait, I should say that it's not all been bad. I did get to see Avatar for a second time (on New Year's Eve actually, but who's counting?) after we cried off from the planned NYE party with various medical complaints; the Christmas deccies came down in short order (two hours) on Saturday, and now sit boxed awaiting their annual departure for the upper floor; and our aquarium completed its nitrogen cycle on Sunday, so we popped out and bought another three cherry barbs to make the shoal up to six. Apart from one very large female who arrived in the new group, the other five are now virtually indistinguishable, so we no longer know which is Bee, Bop, or Lulu. It's looking like we may need a rechristening. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich is a possibility, although as there's six of the blighters we'll have to split Dave and Dee, and of course the enormous female just has to be Tich.
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Not sure how you're alerted to new AV definitions, because as you know, I don't use Microsoft. I do get update alerts, some regarding security, not every day but at least twice a week, and when I do, I do the install. It involves hitting a button, inputting my password, and Bob's your uncle.
I've made it a necessary step to keep up with the upgrades, and I don't seem to have problems. I interact with the computer at work running a virtual desktop program (it's running microsoft server 2003) really fast.
I'm writing another novel. Sorry.
Left to its own devices, Norton checks for its own upgrades and applies them in the background. Occasionally this requires a reboot, which it politely asks for. But all that obviously depends on being connected, so my works laptop, sitting in its bag for 17 days, stood no chance.
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