I did more web­i­fy­ing today, and got all hap­py because I resolved a tem­plate prob­lem. I don’t “know” php, as in I don’t write my own scripts. I’m learn­ing more and more about it work­ing with oth­er peo­ple’s tem­plates, and have got­ten to where I can mix and match from dif­fer­ent tem­plates to get the effects I want. I also spent some time in mysql, try­ing to clean up some of this site’s tables to make it load faster.

I also read a lit­tle, and I’m real­ly, real­ly try­ing to fin­ish the book I’m on before div­ing into the deli­cious stack of books my sweet­ie brought home from the library for me. I wrapped up the week’s class assign­ments, too. I want­ed to stitch, but I was attacked by a rogue nap.

My project man­age­ment teacher released the study guide for the final, which is 3–4 weeks away (you can do it any time dur­ing week 8, and we just fin­ished week 4). Um, does any­body real­ly study that far in advance? I’ve nev­er been very dis­ci­plined about study­ing.

Sam is edit­ing a chap­ter of Fledg­ling, which he re-record­ed because he was dis­pleased with the sound qual­i­ty. He edit­ed Square One ear­li­er. Sor­ry, Hope, but I don’t think he got to record the lat­est chap­ter of Heart of the Hunter 🙁

It’s still Feb­ru­ary, right? The tem­per­a­ture was way up in the 70s today! It’s back down to 50 now—outside. Inside, the temp is still too hot for sleep­ing com­fort­ably. Pout.

Are there any Word­Press geeks read­ing this? I could have sworn that I saw a plug-in that allowed com­menters to send a pri­vate mes­sage to a blog’s own­er, sort of like hav­ing com­ments screened in LJ except that the own­er does­n’t ever (could­n’t, as I under­stand it) make the “whis­per” pub­lic. I can’t find such a thing in the offi­cial plu­g­in repos­i­to­ry at WordPress.org, though. Any­body know of such a thing? I don’t want to use a com­ment form, because of secu­ri­ty con­cerns.¹

A few weeks ago, my PC was some­how infect­ed with some nasty thing that tried to turn it in to a spam­bot via dri­ve­by down­load. I had the cur­rent ver­sion of Syman­tec AntiVirus run­ning, set to the absolute high­est para­noia lev­els and updat­ed dai­ly. I also had Spy­bot Search & Destroy run­ning, again, updat­ed dai­ly and care­ful­ly con­fig­ured. I had both do full sys­tem scans every day, as well as keep­ing them mem­o­ry-res­i­dent at all times.

Nei­ther pro­gram ever gave so much as a peep. In fact, when I found the orig­i­nal file that was to blame and checked it man­u­al­ly with Syman­tec AV, it passed as though it were as inno­cent as a babe. If I had­n’t had the antivirus soft­ware con­fig­ured to show me an icon in the systray when it was check­ing out­go­ing mail, who knows when I would have real­ized that the sys­tem was com­pro­mised? As it was, I knew with­in sec­onds. (Hey, I notice “out­go­ing mail” when my email pro­gram isn’t even open.) I end­ed up pulling out the eth­er­net cable to stop com­mu­ni­ca­tions ’til the sys­tem was clean.