So I'm contemplating my first ever trip to New York (that's actually not strictly true, but anyway).
Are there any must-sees, must-eats, must-gos I should know of?
In honor of the upcoming Olympics, what could you win a gold medal in?
Submitted by TheFiercestCalm.
I'd win a medal at not being extraordinarily good at anything at all.
This could be a new addiction. I have never been a very confident rider. Well, confident on horses that are sweet natured and don't generally put a foot wrong. Unfortunately, I don't have a horse like that. My horse is a cheeky bastard, who will test his rider again and again, and sometimes shows us his box of tricks still isn't nearing it's bottom.
So for me to sign up for something like the XC/cross country course was a big thing. A bit of a challenge to myself. Recently I have decided to do a few more things I've "always wanted to do" and this is one of them. Solon has been an absolute star, feeling very steady and confident. Even so, I'm somewhat relieved to find myself still alive when I get of the horse.
All in all though, pretty cool. And I just love his ears being pricked forward. He seems to be really enjoying himself.
Show us something you can't resist
Szeppie's puppy eye look is simply irresistable. Even worse than chocolate. You just can't fault him (even if he just weed on your floor).
Solon and me were being adventurous yesterday. First time ever doing XC. He was such a good boy, feeling very steady and more or less doing his thing, saying in his non speaking way "Never mind, I know what needs to be done, just go along for the ride". Except of course when there was water involved, at which point he threw a temper tantrum :-]
And to continue the horsey news... I added another beastie to the family. Barones. She's a 2 year old Dutch Warmblood. Still needs to grow up a little, but she's lovely and sweet (and has beautiful paces for a showjumper)
Fingers crossed today for Blondie's vetting...
I just realised I haven't posted in weeks. That's probably a lot to do with me never being online anymore when I'm at home ever since my laptop died a miserable death. Usually I post from work, but it's been a rollercoaster for 4 months straight, but I think we're nearing a temporary end now. I could use a bit of a breathing period.
Solon has been doing a few more showjumping courses and doing quite well. He's going to a huge show this weekend. Only downside is that his class on Saturday is starting at 8:00 am *yawn*.
Szep is doing great. He's just started teething now. He's a very good natured dog, always happy and quite well behaved. Quite surprising considering his breed(s). I think even the vet was impressed.
Storm and Sterre are suffering from a spring bug. Poor Storm was having a real hard time breathing. He's cleared up a little now and the whole family seems to be enjoying their time on the balcony. Little Sterre is still a brat though and scares me everytime she hops over to the neighbour's balcony.
Tonight I'll be seeing Nick Cave at the Heineken Music Hall, even though I kind of forgot about it, so really have to rush to get there.
Not a whole lot going on. I must be growing old and homely.
In a way, it felt like I had won the lottery, but with a massive BUT to it.
I've had my horse for 6 years now. In that time, he's grown to be my buddy, my master in crime, most irritating beast ever and superduperbeastie. We've had wars and make ups, ups and downs, great rides and big falls.
And then someone came along last sunday, after seeing him jump an almost all clear with the words "Are you interested in selling him?". My initial instant response was "no way!". My friend told me not to say no right away, so I said we'd discuss it and get back to them. She's more savvy in the wheeling and dealing of horse business, so she caught up with the people later.
The situations was... a huge, HUGE sum of money to sell him to an international rider. I mean, we're talking brand-ne- middle-class-car-amount here. A lot of money for a 9 year old horse, who has never done anything in his life and can be very stroppy to boot.
So I had to consider it, and it was terrible. I didn't sleep most of the night, and was completely absent at work. Every hour my decision would change from "yes" to "no".
Now, all my more commercially inclined friends are calling me crazy, but I don't care, 'cause I'm still quite happy with my little pony Solon and he's going to stay with me for a little while yet.
But what a difficult decision to make...
Meet Szep.
As an IT professional, I've always been aware of the need for decent anti-virus software. Not only making sure that it's installed, but keeping it up-to-date too. I have a long-term set of skills and experiences related to McAfee, but when I bought my first home PC in early 2002 I decided to go with what I then considered the joint market leader: Norton.
I've used Norton on this PC ever since, until I uninstalled it yesterday and switched to Kaspersky. Over the years I've also happily recommended it to friends and family. McAfee was a great business product (especially where the need for central administration was important), but Norton always seemed slicker and less clunky on individual PCs.
However, over the course of this month I've experienced three instances on three entirely separate PCs where Norton has comprehensively failed to identify and remove a serious and well-documented virus. The first was on my own home PC, which got infected with the CiD adware virus (also known as Lop) - its first infection in six years.
Even more surprising was that when I finally worked out what was going on, identified what I was dealing with, discovered the executable files in question and pointed Norton Anti-Virus 2007 in their direction, it told me they were entirely clean. This, despite the fact that its own website claims that it detects and removes Lop.
I wasn't very impressed with this. I decided that when my subscription runs out in May, I was going to change software. I did some research and discovered that Kaspersky seems to regularly get top marks for detection, generally falling down on user-friendliness issues. That doesn't bother me too much, as long as it finds things.
My second experience came a couple of weeks ago. My parents have bought a new laptop. It came pre-installed with a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus. The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to ensure that it had done a complete scan of the system. It hadn't, so I set one off and it completed by reporting that the machine was clean.
However, I was suspicious. I spotted that Kaspersky offers a free online scan (it detects but doesn't repair), so I tried it out. Several hours later, I discovered that their laptop had a Trojan lurking on its hard drive. Norton hadn't spotted it. I forgot to write its name down and I don't remember what it was, but it confirmed my suspicions about Norton.
Norton is simply not good enough at finding problems. So, with my parents' 30-day trial subscription to Norton rapidly coming to an end, we uninstalled Norton and put Kaspersky onto the laptop instead. I was quite impressed. It certainly wasn't as primitive in the usability stakes as I had been expecting and the functionality was comprehensive.
Then last weekend we were at my sister-in-law's and she asked if I'd look at their computer, which was running very slowly. My niece mentioned that it kept popping up loads of websites that they hadn't clicked on. It all sounded very familiar and a few minutes later I discovered that it had the same strain of CiD/Lop that my own PC had experienced.
Its anti-virus package? Yes, you guessed it... Norton Anti-Virus. I'd recommended it to them five years previously. So, to cut a long story short, we removed the virus manually (removing registry entries, executables and - crucially - a hidden scheduled job in C:\WINDOWS\Tasks), uninstalled Norton and loaded on Kaspersky.
After that experience (four hours) and the amount of time it had taken me to remove Lop from my own PC (six hours), I decided that I wasn't going to wait until May and yesterday I went ahead with removing Norton from my own PC and replacing it with Kaspersky. At £20 per year, it's a small price compared to losing a day's worth of computer time.
Generally the process went smoothly. The Norton software takes longer to uninstall than I had been expecting. On my parents' and sister-in-law's PCs the uninstall was smooth. On mine, the Norton LiveUpdate Notice component wouldn't uninstall properly, but eventually Symantec's Norton Removal Tool did the job.
Installing Kaspersky was straightforward. In all three cases I installed Kaspersky Anti-Virus (KAV), rather than the more comprehensive Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS) suite. On my sister-in-law's PC, the moment it was up-and-running, it told us that Lop was trying to disable it - the virus had somehow survived our manual removal.
Having used the KAV on my own PC for a day, I'm happy with it. There have been a few teething troubles, mainly related to the fact that I'm a paranoid power-user with several other security measures in place on my PC with which KAV has conflicted. These aren't issues that are likely to be experienced by the average user.
The three biggest problems I've experienced have all been related to KAV's ability to scan encrypted SSL traffic. It manages this using certificate substitution, a process that I've not come across previously. In a nutshell, this is entirely incompatible with my Carbonite online backup service and has also caused problems in Outlook.
The Outlook issues are basically because I have configured Outlook to connect to multiple mail accounts using the most secure protocols possible. I download all of my own e-mail using POP3 SSL (port 995) rather than basic POP3 (port 110). I also connect to a client's Exchange server using Outlook's RPC over HTTP functionality.
Though in theory Kaspersky can handle this, in practice the results are flaky. Also, I've found that sites using Google Analytics also fail to load properly because of GA's use of HTTP SSL (port 443). I initially tried the "prompt for scan" setting to allow me to decide whether to scan on a per-connection basis, but this fails when I'm away from the PC.
Eventually, I've turned off checking of encrypted connections. Initially I was wary of doing this, but then I realised that Norton Anti-Virus didn't do it anyway, so I wasn't losing out on something that I'd had previously. Hopefully one day I'll be able to turn it back on again, e.g. if Kaspersky implements a whitelist feature for identifying SSL sites that I trust.
I particularly like KAV's Proactive Defense feature. This is able to spot things like one process attempting to control another. It was a bit of a pain in the first 24 hours having to "train" it in all the instances where this is legitimate (e.g. Firefox launching Java), but now it's settled down I feel more confident that future virus attacks will be highlighted.
As for the dreaded full system scan... with Norton Anti-Virus 2007 this used to take around 8 hours on my six-year-old (but well specified) desktop PC. System performance was noticeably degraded while it was running. Kaspersky Anti-Virus takes fourteen hours (less efficient, or just working much harder?) but you can barely tell it's running.
It's still early days, so I'll update this post with any significant additional experiences over the coming weeks, but the main lessons that I've learned from this experience have been:
- on three entirely separate PCs, Norton Anti-Virus 2007 and 2008 simply did not detect significant threats;
- having researched the market, Kaspersky's anti-virus solutions get consistently high scores for reliability;
- my own experience so far has demonstrated that this reputation is well-deserved;
- Norton products can't always be removed cleanly purely by using Add/Remove Programs;
- if you're a power-user of your PC (particularly where SSL solutions are in use), Kaspersky needs tweaking;
- even for a knowledgeable IT professional, removal of CiD/Lop is a very time-consuming process.
It's been an interesting month.
