Pride

They say that pride comes before a fall and sure enough, after trumpeting my success at virus-hunting yesterday, the first words that greeted me at work this morning were; ‘That virus is back.’ In all the excitement of having found the thing, we forgot to ask how it was transmitted between the machines. So, having cleaned all the machines up yesterday, we obviously missed one which came back and bit us – and reinfected the others. Hopefully we’ve got it sussed now though. None of the infected machines – and it was the same ones as yesterday – were properly updated with the latest security patches. For one reason or another they’d all slipped through the automatic patching system. It took half the day to get everything fixed.

Hopefully tomorrow though, the greeting will be a plain old ‘Good morning.’

The rest of the day was pretty mundane. Although I did notice some comments by Colin Powell about the US effort in Indonesia that made me smile: Muslims, along with the rest of the world, had "an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action … And I hope as a result of our efforts, … that value system of ours will be reinforced." If the Good Samaritan had made a speech like that while helping the injured traveller in the bible story then I’m not sure that incident would have been held up as an example of mercy and neighbourliness. To me it sounds rather arrogant, not to mention blatantly politicising a relief effort. I really don’t think that Osama Bin Laden is throwing up his hands tonight saying “Oh my, what a mistake I’ve made!”

It’s Twelfth Night tonight, so we’ve been taking down our Christmas decorations and wondering where to keep them for the next eleven months. There’s still quite a bit of the Christmas chocolate left over, so tonight we followed dinner with a couple of liqueur chocolates to cheer us up while looking at the room, which suddenly now seems so drab and bare.

Oh I got my first blog comment today – and from someone I don’t know too! Thank you, Adnan. No idea why anyone who doesn’t know me would want to read my blog, but it’s nice to catch the eye of passers-by!