Creakin' Doors n the Last few megs

I hate creaking doors. I absolutely hate creaking doors. I just can not stand them. They somehow make me feel that Doomsday is near. I also hate the screeching sound of new chalks writing on the blackboard. I feel murderous impulses, and if the sound persists for a long time, I could actually go and throttle the professor.

Now to the usual stuff. I was down to my last few megs for the last few days. I have a 40 gig hard drive, of which 5 Gb is given to Linux partitions. The rest 35 Gb contain an assortment of movies, videos, documents, pictures, books, music, the usual. A problem people do not know about having low disk space is that it results in poor virtual memory management, due to which you overall system performance goes down a lot. For the last few days, the condition became so horrible that I had to first delete a file before downloading another. I used to get this horrible 'Not enough space on disk E:' warning on my taskbar all the time, so finally I decided enough was enough. I burned off some of the music I do not listen to that often into CDs, and lo n behold, I have ober 3 gigs of space on my drive.

To add the woes, my computer was hacked by someone. I had to disable my firewall for some time and when I returned I could no longer open my Registry Editor, not enable my firewall again. Event notification and logging was disabled too and so I could not even track who had done it. Virus definitions were out of date, and the antivirii [AVG and Norton] obstinately refused to update them. It was really nightmarish. Ultimately, I had to get someone to do it for me. So, here is a vow, "I will never leave my firewall disabled".

More on computer security. A lot of vulnerabilities are doing the rounds. A word of advice. Get your software patched. SP1, SP2 et al. You would never even realize what strikes when. The link is here. More importantly, keep you virus definitions updated. And keep your default windows firewall enabled whenever you are online. Another thing, never open mails from strangers, esp. if they contain attachments. Today's viruses can send anonymous or even proxy emails, so be double sure about opening attachments even from friends and family. Usual virus attachement extentions are .pif, .exe, .scr, .doc etc. so watch out for these.

And now to more mundane stuff. Finished The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. Strange book. The book is surreal at times, and seems to project Holden's thought process, while describing his life over a period of 3-4 days, between the time he ran away from his school and finally returned home. I agree with Holden Caulfield about people being pretensious and phony but that is where I digress from his observations. I do not share his cynicism, and chose to look at the bright side of people. Although I am never behind finding faults with people and with the world in general, I do believe that the world is a wonderful place, an optimised creation, and believe in optimism. Another thing, I really do not feel the book is upto all the review it has received over the last half-a-decade [It was published in 1951].

Classes start tomorrow, after a couple of days of no work. I hate them.

Current Music: Maachis - Chor Aaye Hum

PS: I have updated my other blog Lord of the Links with a lot of new links. Do check it out!