triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Situation Update

Two weeks after my recent employment ended, something else has come my way. It is short term, part time, and not very challenging, but is nonetheless very encouraging. I am assisting an engineer who is doing data collection similar to what I'd been doing, and based on our conversations he thinks I could be working optimization engineering contracts rather than technician ones. Given that he was fielding calls from recruiters trying to line him up for two different positions, in design rather than optimization, it would seem there may be opportunity to not only remain in my current field but to advance within it.

In the meantime, I have been spending the days on which I am not out working pursuing various projects meant to constitute improvements around the house. Some have failed to achieve this goal. The wiring at the house we are moving to has proven to be so old as to reject minor improvement. The joists in the attic need crossbracing before I can start laying down flooring on top of them. Most serious has been the discovery that replacing Windows 98 with Windows 2000 Professional so as to be able to use the dvd drive and the motherboard's sound features did not constitute an upgrade. Upon completing the install, I went on line to check my mail and comments, and then to pursue updates for the OS. FireFox had become unreadable, so I opened IE. Inside of five minutes I had a bunch of popups, one in front of another, each offering me the option to decline the upload of a wonderful browsing enhancement. Sorry, too late.

After hours of cycling thru Ad-Aware, uninstall, regedit and even booting from a floppy so I could delete Windows-protected files, I have eliminated every visible trace of the wonderful browsing attachments. I removed my Internet connection and built a new one, and reinstalled FireFox from the drive. The damage done by the hijackers remains. I can rarely open more than one page before the browser informs me that it cannot find anything. I will be limited to blogging from the wee wifey's computer, when I can get a turn on it, until I can build myself a new system. The new system will reuse the existing hardware (2.2 gHz equivalent AMD processor in an Asus mobo) but will be built around a new hard drive on which I will install Windows 98SE (I have only a new system disk; upgrades have been unavailable) and whatever I can retrieve from the old drive. Linux will be going onto another partition, and will be getting far more attention once I don't need to boot up another machine to play with it.