Posted in January 2012

The story of yesterday had a happy end after all: my computer was pronounced clean, and I was admitted to internet. Perhaps I was overreacting as usual. I am sorry. Anyway you recognize I’m afraid of dentists…

Today I was deprived from the biggest and most fundamental priveledge of modern man: internet at working place. Another click lead me to an internal TU Delft web page which stated that my computer was infected with a deadly virus and has been quarantined indefinitely, at least till I clear it up and produce convincing proof that it has been indeed cleared. This given the fact that the TU computer administration runs a real-lime virus protection program at my computer, prophetically called F*-secure, that I cannot stop, that swallows 30 % of CPU power and has so far found two adwares for time period of four years.

So the day was ruined. Thinking back, there was something on Friday afternoon that could justify the warning. My comp has been doing strange things. I had to opt for an inspection where I’ve found a trojan and removed it with SpyBot. Was not the fist time for these years.

So today I’ve checked all over again, produce clean scan reports and submitted to the authorities hoping to have internet again. Guess what? I was kindly proposed to have my hard drives wiped and sys reinstalled… Looks like it was the only TU Delft ICT solution to supposingly identified rootkits.

Imagine a dentist who works as follows. He hears from an informer about your light tooth pain. He lures you to his practice, locks you in his working room and suggests you to solve the problem yourself. Since he is very insisting, you do your best and upon his return proudly demonstrate an unrooted bloody tooth. No, he doubts your pain is over. He produces a machete to chop your head off.

I wish to be wrong, yet so far I am not able to provide a better description of TU Delft ICT services.

Do not write much to the blog during January: a sign of “busy inactivity” state where activities are directed to things not needed and accomlishments remain to be completed. A part of non-needed activities was devoted to sweet art of scheduling.

While I has been dreaming of writting regular daily notes and making things done in a scheduled way since my early childhood, I did prefer the dreams to reality for most of my life. It is a slow intellectual degradation that came with age that lead me to an important discovery: the scheduling itself is an occupation worth the time spend, the occupation a way more pleasant and rewarding than the occupations to be scheduled. It gives a thrill of knowing and mastering the future, living life on full thrust, and immediate sense of accomplishment. It is about four years that I got mad about electronic agendas.

I’ve tried out several dozens of various PIM software titles that left me unsatisfied for one or another reason, mostly reason of taste. Most soft treats you as an idiot not able to customize the prog neither aware of advantages of such customization. They would suit if you are in jail, or feel like being there. Few softs really offering customization do offer too much of it, you tend to constanly change the colors of your appointments and end up missing them all. I was only satisfied with a wiki-style prog that I made functional with a dozen of home-brewed python scripts.

The crisis came when standart electronic agendas become wide-spread to the degree of being compulsory. It is already a year I feel a pressure to use TU central agenda, to synchronize my activities with those of society. I decided to give up this month. It gave me a head-ache of solving the compatibility problems between my custom things and — could not belive this — Microsoft Outlook. I have solved them today, it was interesting and gave me some programming fun, yet what a waist of time…
that could be devoted to proper scheduling.