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like a closely-cropped lawn
Sunday, September 19 2010
David and Penny sometimes go yard saling without me, and then when they find things I might like, they call me to tell me about them. They'd known for some time that I am looking for a replacement from the greenhouse door, which is an increasingly-rotten improvisation made from a cheap closet door. Today they found a nice door with a big pane of insulated glass. It was 36 inches wide but had large expanses of wood on either side of the glass and looked like it could be cut down. I agreed that I wanted it, though I was little skeptical. David calls me so much about his yardsale finds that I feel sometimes I should give him the satisfaction that such calls are not completely in vain. It turned out that the yard sale in question was a bit out of the way, off to the northwest of Saugerties (which is a little outside my casual driving range). But I found the yardsale, strapped the door to the roof of the Subaru, and also bought some wine glasses. Often one sees nothing but crap at yardsales, but this one was disproportionately good stuff.
On the drive home I noticed the tell-tale sound of a failing exhaust pipe. Something had rusted through and now I was going to have to fix it. Oh, and guess what else? The fuel filler pipe was leaking again, nearly as bad as it ever had. Fuck! Such is the curse of driving 12 year old cars. But I wouldn't do it any other way.
After being harassed by a garishly obvious Google search result hijacker for a few too many days, the other day I'd hooked Woodchuck's hard drive to a different computer and gone on an anti-shitware jihad. Unfortunately, there are a lot of places to hide in a modern operating system even without the cloaking techniques available to a rootkit (which this evidently was; none of the programs running on Woodchuck could identify anything that was amiss). I'd deleted some things while the hard drive was attached to the other computer, but after a day or so, it was clear that the result hijacker was there. It knew enough to lay low and not hijack every search result. But it seemed to be hiajcking every tenth one or so. It was also screwing up browser behavior when I hit the back button after visiting a page link from a Google search result page, sending me back two pages instead of one in some cases.
So I figured that by now someone had prepared an ISO-based boot disc for someone to boot from to search for rootkits and other nefarious bastards willing to cloak themselves beneath the level of the operating system. What I found wasn't exactly that, but it was close enough. It's a program called UBCD4WIN that contains a number of free anti-virus and anti-rootkit programs (as well as other utilities). Since it's a violation of copyright law to distribute an ISO with a bootable Windows XP installation on it, this program is used to create a bootable ISO using your copy of Windows XP. You tell it where to look and then it builds the ISO. Then you burn it to a CD, boot, and tell it to begin its jihad against terrorist programs (who, at this point, are defenseless in the face of an operating system they no longer control). I ran the antivirus scanner and it found a number of things, including a tentacle of the WhenU franchise as well as something more nefarious. Once they were done, I rebooted my computer and tested a dozen or so Google searches. None of them were hijacked.
Gretchen would be attending a late afternoon gathering of Hudson Valley writers at the Rhinecliff Hotel (across the Hudson in Rhinecliff) and she invited me to come along, saying we could get dinner later across the street at the China Rose. It doesn't take much to convince me to go the China Rose, and though I'm not normally one to sit through hours of strangers reading their works (in this case Gretchen wouldn't even be reading), I decided to go.
Man oh man, was the gather dull! We hadn't even made it to the wine bar before Gretchen got wrapped up in a very long and very dull conversation with another writer. And I felt like I had to stand there nodding occasionally. But I didn't know what else to do; I didn't yet know what the bar protocol was (was it free?) and I hate marching up to a bar without knowing whether or not is free (the bartender invariably makes some microexpression that makes me feel like a cheapskate if I ask). It turned out that the bar was a cash bar, so that meant this wasn't going to be a cheap experience. Nobody can endure a gathering of late-middle-age writers without alcohol. It turned out that I knew Jen and Chris (Jen had taken photographs for a book about Hudson Valley writers that was being sold at the schwag table), so that was nice. But really, for this two hours of time I would have much rather been at home trying to crank out the various websites I'm supposed to be building.
At some point on Gretchen's advice, I took a break and took the dogs for a walk. They'd been out in the car and we'd been hearing Eleanor barking at pedestrians almost continuously for the whole reading; this had only been a little less irritating than the constant auditory interruption of Amtrak trains roaring by on the railway outside. I ended up walking the dogs all the way to the northern most end of the Rhinecliff Amtrak station's long term parking lot. There is a long narrow pond on the east side of this parking lot (41.923666N, 73.949967W), and as we walked by, dozens of enormous frogs jumped into the water, most of them letting out little yelpw as they did so. The surface of their pond was so bright green with duckweed that it looked like a closely-cropped lawn and it was a little surprising to see waves spread across it. Looking closer, I could see that the pond contained a great many beer cans and other artifacts of American packaging.
We ate outside at the China Rose. Our food was surprisingly mediocre. It was unusually greasy and a bit too salty. I drank one of their famous "sake margaritas," which, because we were outside, was served frathouse style, in a plastic cup. It was $9.
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