A tragedy. I hope you can get through it. *Hugs*


On topic, I could of swore someone named Mary called me and told me something about 'not coming in until later' so I have no idea what is going on. Should I even go to work today or risk getting yelled at by someone I have no idea exists?

I can only imagine how Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" would look to you. It stirs images in my head, and I'm not even Synesthetic. Give it a listen if you've never heard it.

(on an unrelated note, please check your GogPM)

I've never heard it. I'll give it a listen when I wake up. :)

(Go check yours.)

Good to know I'm not the only one who has thought of this.

Aggravating isn't it.

I made a FB group as a challenge to not get fat in the holidays. I invited about 15 friends who said yes and now thay are giving excuses and wont do it.

So...you'll be the slimmest of your friends once the holidays have been and gone? :D

Ill be too sexy for my GoGs lol

Three research papers due in a month. Lazier than hell. Any advice to defeat procrastination?

Protip: To defeat the procrastination, shoot at it until it dies.

Damn that sucks, thats basically what got my sister too (though hers was cancer induced). The only positive thing I can say is that they have REALLY good drugs in hospitals nowdays and the suffering won't be so pronounced.

Universities are usually pretty supportive when it comes to family death
Sounds similar to writers block. The one and only cure is to force yourself to write, it makes no difference what it is as long as you get over the blank page

See, if you're going to do an audit of my machine (I don't even have physical access to it, I just remote into it and from there do my job) please don't be a stupid fuck and rail on me for stupid things or else I will call your supervisor with a detailed report of your fucktitude and get you off my back/demoted/fired.

CAUTION, closely ties in to my Windows Registry love/work I've been doing lately so you'll either find this interesting/edumacating or boring as hell.

So, fucktard auditor starts the audit and checks my logs and all (regular procedure for us people who operate with sensitive data) and doesn't find anything. Then the smart-ass goes through a registry audit even though he has no idea how it works and what to look for; because of this I get the following remark:

--
HKLM\COMPONENTS\CanonicalData\Catalogs\3b54094f5a05267108b2055e89efc199eea78f49513c7d09cf77a799329e8d0e
HKLM\COMPONENTS\CanonicalData\Deployments\wpdfs.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_81e1c728ec4cc8a8
--

User tried to install PDF generating software which can be used to export data outside of the restricted access containment, violating the xxxx ITSec Policy.

Now, if the fucktard knew anything about his job he might have perhaps Googled those keys and found out that they are related to the Microsoft Windows Media Format Packages and not Adobe PDF.

Even easier, the HKLM\COMPONENTS is mostly about updates (Windows Updates / Microsoft Updates) to the OS, and as such, doesn't need to be human readable and what he was seeing were a lot of guids or file hashes (or something like that) used by the system updater internally.

See, it would be nice if, before you ruin my morning, you do your job and learn a little about the Registry before doing an audit on it (and it was clear this was the first time he did this):

There is a convention of apps storing registry values in essentially two places:

1. HKLM\SOFTWARE\VendorName\SoftwarePackageName (sometimes VendorName is left out)- these are intended to be config items used for systemwide installations of the software. HKLM is security protected so that it can only be written to by processes with admin or SYSTEM privs. So generally speaking this key should hold global things like paths, language versions, product activation hooha, etc.

2. HKCU\Software\VendorName\SoftwarePackageName (again VendorName is sometimes left out) - these are intended to be per-user local variables, like what size you last left the window at, your initials, favorites, menu customizations, etc. Here it's helpful to know that HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) is basically just a symlink to the registry hive located at %systemdrive%\Users\loggedonusername\NTUSER.DAT. The user profile, in other words. Similar to those things one might find in /usr/home/yourusername/.appname directories on *nix.

Now there are a few things stored elsewhere - for instance if an app needs to register a filename extension or certain other object types, that happens in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. And services have their own set of special keys in HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services (drivers are really a special class of services, by the way, at least from the registry's POV).

So if you were trying to find out what software I tried to install, and by some magic voodoo didn't make it in the logs but made it in the registry (which is impossible no matter how much of a 1337 hacker you can be short of modifying the entire kernel of a running machine who's uptime is almost 100%) don't look in places where keys shouldn't belong.

There are also the type that complain an notice they are getting heavier and no nothing besides complain. And give lame excuses like they dont have time. Like taking out 30 mins a day for 3 days is that hard.

Well on the challenge one already dropped out. This one is a skinny girl trying to get some mass. She has been trying some time and keeps loosing weight. I told her that she should change what she is doing since its obviously not working. But she just ignored my comment.

They never do listen to common sense and the advice of those that have had success with such matters. "Oh, it's my metabolism", they'll say, or something like "It's an overactive/underactive thyroid condition.". Condition my arse....most of them just have no self control.