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Questions and Answers - Part 3

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15:39 / 06.10.08

Recently I have been saying the phrase,

"Who can know the impossible future?"

a lot. Where on earth did I hear this? Google turns up nothing, and I'm convinced it's something from a Jack Kirby or Stan Lee comic. Someone help, it's really bugging me. Alternatively, if I've made it up myself, I'm very proud of it.

16:56 / 06.10.08

It does sound incredibly Kirby. I hope you've been shouting it while battling kung-fu mutants in THE SUBWAYS OF THE UNDER-BUDDHA!!

Blue Eyes Not Innocent

00:15 / 08.10.08

I don't think I've heard it before, but damn it's kinda catchy.

Figure I'll ask; where does one find a band? I'm looking to at least give singing a go, and I'm still trying to find a group to do it with. Most of the artsy types I know are actors or writers, not musicians. And what should I have ready as a singer? Mp3s of myself singing? A cover letter? I know none of this!

00:52 / 08.10.08

Best thing to have ready as a singer? Equipment. Seriously. If you own microphones and a PA system, you are halfway to becoming some band's lead singer.

As for finding a band? Read the ads in in your local arts/alternative weekly, or place one of your own. Are you still in Boston? Read the back pages of the Phoenix. Check Craigslist. Put up flyers at the T stops around Berklee. Boston is absolutely fucking crawling lousy with musicians.

Go to a bunch of shows. Don't look at the band, look at the audience. In every crowd you're gonna see a couple of people who are sneering. Sidle up to those people and say, "These guys suck. You know what? I'm looking to start a band. I've already got a PA—what do you play?"

See where that gets you. You might be surprised.

03:01 / 08.10.08

I'm about 60 pages into "For Whom the Bell Tolls". It's my first Hemingway. Is there any particular reason that the dialogue set in the Spanish civil war is full of doth's and thou's?

Edit: Wikipedia has shed some light on this. I'd still like to hear from people that have read the book, specifically about whether Hemingway's "foreign-ising" of the English language worked for them.

12:23 / 08.10.08

Worked for me but like any dialect it takes some getting used to. I think it's a fairly ingenious way of showing the native guerilla types are different from the sophisticated standard language speakers, but can understand if you think it's contrived.

Blue Eyes Not Innocent

21:52 / 09.10.08

Mics and a PA, huh? I need to get on that; I've got a small speaker I've been using for practicing the guitar with, but a decent microphone's not that expensive. Thanks! I've checked out Craigslist and emailed some people from there, found one that's probably a good lead and a few duds, and the pickings in the Phoenix's back section always seem kind of slim. I should get out to live shows more often, even if just for the hell of it; I haven't been in awhile. My main problem seems to be that nobody wants to take a chance on some guy that's never been in a band before.

Whisky Priestess

12:17 / 11.10.08

So the computer has a virus. It's a fairly non-annoying virus now (as it no longer seems to want to block Hotmail and half of Yahoo) - however, it still does the following things:

Interferes with Google: type in a search term, and though it will come up with the right links, when you click on them it takes you to a semi-relevant shopping site, not where you want to go.

Starts playing the radio - CelebTV.com is regularly advertised so I assume it's that, but there's no video, only audio - at random times and can't be made to stop. I can't see Windows Media player or anything else open, and this happens even when IE or Firefox are closed.

Aside from paying someone £100 to fix these annoying but not terminal problems, is there anything I can do about them?

23:46 / 11.10.08

If it hasn't been suggested before or already - there are two fairly decent malware prevention/removal tools out there that I can vouch for.

SpyBot - Search & Destroy

Spyware Blaster

The latter might be only for prevention, unless you pay to upgrade. The former I think is pretty comprehensive, including blocking browser hijacks. You should "Check for problems", and also "Immunize". It also comes with a resident (always running) agent called Teatimer, but that shouldn't be necessary.

There are more advanced tools, if those don't fix your problem (like HijackThis), but I would try Spybot first, then Spyware Blaster to prevent further problems.

These things can be a headache to remove, but those tools along with careful browsing (and maybe disabling javascript) should prevent it happening again.

11:12 / 15.10.08

Did you get rid of this virus WP? I find that i've got the same one. The links you posted to don't work for me RedC, but i'm not sure if that is the virus or not as it also seems to be stopping me connect to Norton to renew my anti-virus stuff there (should have down a while ago i know).

16:41 / 15.10.08

Do other websites work alright? This link should bring you directly to download page for SpyBot. Let me know if that doesn't work.

I'm not really a tech-head, so if anyone else has any ideas that can help, pipe up.

17:11 / 15.10.08

It seems to be a particualy nasty little virus. I downloaded Spybot from the link you just provided but the virus seems to stop Spybot from working by refusing to allow it to connect to the server after installation. The same thing happens when i try to re-new Norton.

I had some sucess with Yahoo Anti-Spy which found and removed a couple of things but was unable to remove or quarantine a virus called Nuwar B, which, i assume is the little fucker that is causing all the trouble.I can't do much research on the virus because it just sends search engines to shopping sites, often for dodgy looking Spybot type sites that want your credit card. Not sure where to go from here. Any more suggestions?

19:21 / 15.10.08

Spybot shouldn't have to connect to a server to scan. The one you downloaded should have all (or most) of the latest updates.

Can you run Spybot itself (not the updater), and Scan?

Alternatively download the HijackThis program and run it, which will give you a list of possibly dubious things running (click 'Just start', then 'Scan'). Read the FAQ if you can't run it.

Interpreting this list can be a bit of a headache, as it gives you a long list of things that you can remove. Including any changes from a "blank slate" Windows, such as a new IE homepage, Quicktime, or Ipod start-up programs.. The usual approach then is to copy and paste that list onto a forum, e.g. Bleeding Computers (can't particularly vouch for that site.. just a google result). You could post or PM me the log, but I'm a bit of a noob at it. Last time I had to to this, I just picked one dodgy-looking thing at a time for HijackThis to "Fix", and saw if it made a difference. You run the risk of damaging something, if you don't know what you're doing.

You might also want to try starting the computer in Windows Safe mode by pressing F8 during boot-up. That stops a lot of things (including malware?) from loading up, and might let you run things like SpyBot or other tools in a basic environment. Note that Safe Mode usually stops your graphics drivers from loading, and network drivers, so you'll end up in a low-rez desktop, and no internet. So make sure anything you want to run is visible/easily accessible.

19:25 / 15.10.08

Re: Nuwar B, can you see these very detailed long-winded instructions?

19:28 / 15.10.08

And finally, before trying anything that drastic, I highly recommend you back up your files. A complete Windows reinstall is the last-resort fix, and you should as a first step after that install SpyBot, etc., and then scan both your computer, and your back-up drive (before restoring your documents).

20:09 / 15.10.08

Thansk for all the help Red Concrete!

Re:Spybot. I initially was unable to install this after download and kept getting an 'error:unable to connect to server message'. So i then unclicked the 'Download updates immediatly' box on set-up and that seemed to do the trick and i'm now able to open Spybot ok. Problem now is that when i click the 'Check for Problems' box i get a 'Error:You need to install the detection updates first by using the updater'. And, of course, when i click on the updater i get, 'Error retrieving update info file!'

Can't see the 'longwinded instuctions' but i'll make a note of the address and read them on my macbook tomorrow and try the Hijack This route as well. Thanks again.

21:11 / 15.10.08

This stuff may be kind of rudimentary, but: I believe you can start in "safe mode with networking" which would allow spybot to update, and then you could run it. I don't know how good it is with browser hijacks, though. Symantec and a few other companies have websites you can scan your computer with online, but I don't even know if they can fix things, or just tell you "you're fucked, pay us and we'll fix it". Does anyone else know about that?
It's usually not as easy as running msconfig in safe mode, but you should probably try it if you've not done it before. In XP, go to "Start" "run", and type "msconfig", click ok and then hit the "startup" tab you'll see. It shows most everything that loads at startup, too often you'll see a huge list of crap that gets loaded by programs when they're installed, and often the trojans and viruses show up there. You can go to Sysinfo and type the name into their startup list database and see what they are. Everyone should do this, really. I've got four processes that run at startup, antivirus programs and stupid MS office that keeps reloading itself into startup. You don't really need to have the Java updater, for example; it just tells you when you need an update. You can just check yourself once every month or so, and you won't have another program hogging resources. Those things can really add up.

16:40 / 16.10.08

Can someone who saw last night´s debate please explain, what McCain is up to in this photo?

16:51 / 16.10.08

Spitting venom.

Like a cobra.

---

Seriously, he's in mid-realization that he's supposed to be walking off to stage left, house right, not vice versa.

17:01 / 16.10.08

Aha, I tried but couldn´t figure out, for what reason he would make such a face and gesture, when he´s seen live by millions of his potential voters. Thanks, grant!

21:54 / 16.10.08

having a cerebral vascular accident, hope not , that would leave the `alaskan`

03:10 / 17.10.08

Is Alex's Grandma back, or did she never actually leave? The name changes sometimes confuse me.

07:34 / 17.10.08

I haven´t seen him around recently. His name right now is Old dear. Gin. Problems.

07:54 / 17.10.08

He posted just this morning in the Nanowrimo thread.

trouble at bill

11:21 / 17.10.08

Don't believe any of that stage-left/stage right confusion stuff, it's a lame Republican propaganda smokescreen. Truth is, having been desperately repressing gay Afrophile tendencies all his life, McCain was sudenly seized with helpless lust for his opponent and, tongue lolling uncontrollably out, made a wild grab for his ass, just as you see in the pic. The slashfic community's going wild. This could change the political future of the USA, believe me, it's gonna be as big as the Hoover scandals...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:46 / 17.10.08

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

18:42 / 17.10.08

The slashfic community's going wild.

Aah. Must resist...the...urge...to google. Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert did enough damage to my psyche.

23:30 / 20.10.08

How could something so incredibly right be damaging?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:32 / 20.10.08

It's the kind of right that makes you brain explode at the possibilities.

11:58 / 30.10.08

My remembery is teh crap. Could the 'Lithers who live in Canada especially Montreal remind me who you are and indicate if I may inundate you with questions? Maybe there's a thread I should bump...

The spouse went a-gaming in Montreal last week (V:tES tournament) and would like us to move there. We've been looking for a city for quite some time that meets our ricockulous list of requirements and it seems like a winner.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

20:17 / 30.10.08

Children of the Lith, specifically those with a better grasp of Russian Literature than I: someone at dinner last night was trying to remember the name and author of a Russian story he read about a man who was attacked by punctuation and may have died when stabbed by an exclamation point. Someone thought it may have been Nikolai Gogol, but I'm having trouble finding evidence of it. Does it sound familiar to anyone?

23:31 / 01.11.08

Does anyone know how or where I can get a data usage tracker?

My poor misguided friend has signed up for mobile internets, I may yet help with the avoidance of massive and unfair charges. 10p per MB don't you know.

11:04 / 02.11.08

I'd like to know that too!

I'm using AnalogX Netstat at the moment (free, fairly comprehensive), but the log of how much you used last month doesn't seem to be reliable.

13:16 / 04.11.08

I have a bunch of untagged mp3s sitting on my hard drive and cannot face going through them manually and tagging them all. Can anyone recommend a decent freeware program that might be able to do this for me?

13:38 / 04.11.08

MP3BookHelper sounds like the thing for you. You can set the ID2/3 tags (ID3 always overrides ID2 on iPods) for a whole bunch of files. There's even a bunch of built in macros(?) so that you can do things like always setting the track title to the filename, or setting the album title to the folder name.

Alternatively you might just be able to get away with selecting groups of MP3s in explorer and right-clicking 'properties'. If all the files are .MP3 there will be a special tab for setting the album, artist, etc. Not sure how this would work with setting the track titles en masse.

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