The Haphazard Blog

I’m disappointed with that loss. It looked like Super Bowl XLII out there. The Jets walked the walk.

There was a lot said about Bill Belichick versus rookie QBs. I wasn’t really buying it. Usually rookie QBs are playing on a bad team. Belichick’s only loss to a rookie QB was against Ben Roethlisberger. Aside from the fact that he has proven to be a play maker, he was playing for a good team. (I can not call him a good QB when the passing playbook consists of 1 play per formation: Run the drawn route, then scramble.) I think Belichick strives when he has more film, not less. Same thing with Mark Sanchez. There is very little film on the guy. Let’s see how he looks in the second half of the season.

Tom Brady was a pinball back there. He wasn’t sacked so much, but he was hit and it seemed like he had little time to throw the ball. Despite that, the game was close. The difference was basically the way the Jets came out to start the second half. They got that quick TD (missed tackle on the long play) and it was enough of a gap. The Patriots could not get it done when they had the chance. Settling for FGs instead of TDs. It probably hurt not to have Wes Welker out there. His replacement for the game, Julian Edelman, had 8 catches, but I heard this morning that he was targeted 16 times. I’m sure they weren’t all drops, but I saw some for sure. Joey Galloway is supposed to be a really good WR, but it seems like his hands are worse than Ben Watson’s have been over the years. Isn’t Galloway a former Seahawk? That could explain it.

The defense did a good job for the most part. They were stopping the run and did well on third down. It certainly is better than was predicted. I would have to put the blame on the offense. They looked like the guys who played the first 54 minutes of the Bills game last week. They won’t be as prolific as 2007, but right now there is a chasm between how they look now and 2007. Surely they can only get (a lot) better going forward. And if the defense is better than expected, this could be a better all around team than 2007.

I read an interesting article in Parade Magazine today. It was about CPR after someone’s heart stops.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta pointed to research that seemed to indicate that there is plenty of oxygen left in the blood and it’s much more important to do chest compressions to keep blood circulating to the brain than mouth-to-mouth to provide oxygen. This makes sense to me given that we can hold our breaths and still be OK for some time without getting more oxygen. The time you would take to do mouth-to-mouth would take away from chest compressions. And they recommend 100 compressions a minute.

I don’t really have a favorite restaurant. Just that go to place where I can go eat at anytime. So instead I try out new places every month or so. Yesterday we went to Marco’s Cantina in Wichita. We went there for lunch and it was pretty empty. In hindsight, I need to remember to call ahead and check if their beans and rice are vegetarian. It’s hit or miss around here. Some places will put either pork or bacon in their beans and will use chicken broth in the rice. Unfortunately, this was one of those restaurants. That basically ends up wiping out almost the whole menu. Since we were already there, we ordered cheese and cheese and spinach quesadillas. They aren’t all that difficult to make so there isn’t much to say. I think the spinach was frozen because it was a bit too salty. Overall. the staff was nice and helpful. Just not a good choice if you’re a vegetarian.

The Malware is all gone. It hooked in pretty deeply. It was actually pretty clever. It manages to load a library during boot-up before you even get to the Windows log in screen, and well before your anti-virus software is running. It does not stop there. It then attaches to any/multiple running processes as a thread so nothing looks out of sorts. So you look at the task manager and all the running processes appear legit. I assume that’s why the anti-virus software was clueless. In addition, it discretely disabled the Windows Security Center warnings when your anti-virus software is disabled and hid Windows Updates. (This is how I figured out the problem. I highly recommend Malwarebytes to everyone, it pointed me to the registry entries that were being changed.)

I first used RegMon to watch the registry entries to see what was changing the entries. It was odd that my mail program and explorer were doing it. So I used Process Explorer to see what those programs were up to. After that, Google led me to a program that took care of it once and for all, ComboFix. It’s straight forward to use if you follow the directions. I like that it installs the recovery console as a boot option.

Updated 9/29/2009: I just discovered that ComboFix resets the hosts file. For most, this won’t matter. I added some hosts for testing multiple web applications on different “domains”. It took me a little bit of time to realize why they would not work.

Two Days. That’s all it took for my machine to be compromised by something. I have no idea what it is, or how it got past my anti-virus software. I got it from a legitimate website. I suspect it was an advertisement type of attack. That’s what I get for using Internet Explorer and forgetting to disable the Adobe Acrobat plug-in. My anti-virus software was going nuts warning me and Acrobat launched. I closed it and I thought everything was fine.

A couple hours later popup ads started to spawn like crazy. I managed to close all the windows and kill the process. I did some Googling and found this product called Prevx. I downloaded it and ran it. It detected the problem and said it could fix it. This is where I’m annoyed. All it does is detect the malware. When you want to remove it, it’s time to pay for a subscription. I fully understand the business model, but it’s pretty cold to taunt the user. We found a problem, now pay up to fix it! I imagine this is pretty successful. I can’t believe PC Magazine awarded this software an Editor’s Choice award and doesn’t mention how crippled the “free” version is. To add to the annoyance, you can’t even exit the program easily. I had to kill the process.

I managed to do enough that I haven’t seen any popups, but it’s not gone. If I try to eliminate the DLLs, it becomes active. I’m pretty tired at this point. I’m going to shut down the PC and try to get rid of this in the morning. It is definitely something very hard to remove. I really don’t want to reformat and install Windows again.

It looks like the hard drive controller also went bad on my PC. I can’t get it to boot in any way. I tried to create a bootable USB flash drive loaded with Windows XP.  It worked on my laptop, but no matter what I tried on the other PC it would crash on the same driver. I tried new cables and different drives. So I think it’s just a giant paper weight. Replacement Dell main boards are quite expensive, so that was an unlikely way to go. My company offered to try and put together a temporary machine and send it out to me, but I just decided to use an old machine I have. It will only be temporary though. Looks like I’ll be getting a new PC.

So I’ve installed Windows XP and have been installing all the applications I need to get by. This takes a lot of time. Reboots, updates, configuring. I definitely need to push for a RAID 1 setup on my new machine. Storage is so cheap, an extra $100 is well worth avoiding data loss from a drive failure and having to rebuild a machine.

This brings me to J2EE. My Java IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) uses libraries to help with syntax checking, auto-complete, etc. I don’t understand why Sun does not make J2EE available as a standalone download. I have to download and install a J2EE application server to get theJ2EE JAR file. Given that, Jet Brains should bundle it with the IDE. I use Apache Tomcat as the application server and it does not require or come with J2EE.

That was a great come back. It reminded me of the Super Bowl winning Patriots — making the plays they needed to win. They were lucky to win that game.

Tom Brady didn’t look comfortable until he was in the hurry-up offense. Was it his knee? Was the hurry up going so fast that he didn’t have time to think about his knee? He was uncharacteristically inaccurate. Some passes high, some passes low. There were also some drops in there. I think back to last year. Before Brady went down, both Randy Moss and Wes Welker fumbled the ball. But, Brady was accurate. I joked to my brother who was 84? Ben Watson came up big. He has been known more for dropping passes and not living up to the hype. Is this the (contract) year?

The defense was getting destroyed on screen passes and short passes. They did a good job against the run. The red zone defense was not good. I assumed this would be an area they’d really improve in this season. They were really bad at it last year and Bill Belichick usually fixes major deficiencies year-to-year. Jerod Mayo went down and I’m not sure how bad it is. He did run a bit after getting hurt. I’d think that means it isn’t season ending. My feeling going into the season was he was going to be our Ray Lewis — a real play maker. Didn’t have much of those. I can only think of the pair of sacks at the end of the game. Looks like they’ll be able to get to the passer on obvious passing situations. They really need some play makers on defense.

The big play was obviously the forced fumble on the kick off. I don’t think the defense forces a 3 and out if Buffalo doesn’t fumble.Heads up play by Brandon Meriweather to make the hit and hold Leodis McKelvin up for Pierre Woods to knock the ball lose. Stephen Gostkowski was also Johnny on the spot to get the ball.

Next week it’s the Jets. They’ve been doing a lot of talking (and I’m sure there will be more). I’d say no one does that and gets away with it, but Joey Porter was able to do it last year. I think if Brady has better accuracy the Pats will be fine.