Random Doodles

And just to show that I do doodle other things, here is a bright cheery sun to liven the day.








A camera, which matches nicely to the home security system I was designing in the diagram below.









Here is a diagram of our northern California vacation that we took in the summer of 2009. It covers visits to San Francisco, Concours d'Elegance in Carmel, Fort Bragg, the redwoods, our son in Chico, my father in Lincoln, and a much needed tour of the wineries in Napa.









And sometimes, the doodles are of nothing at all.

Doodling A House

Another favorite thing of mine to doodle is buildings. Apparently, recently I've limited that to doodles of our house. At least, the outside of it.

Here's another rough sketch of it. I don't doodle buildings as much as I used to, they've kind of fallen out of favor with me for some reason.

We've been considering putting in a pool, so the real focus of many drawings of the house has been pool options. Here's one with the pool on the left side of the yard, with a hot tub on the left bottom edge and a fountain on the left top edge.

A circular design I considered, with a patio on the left, a hot tub top center, and the pool area on the right.

Troy Pics

Time for more Troy pics! About a week ago, I wandered out front with the camera to take pictures of Lucy's new car. Troy and Marcy followed me, so I took that opportunity to get a few shots of Troy.

He's out in front of our house, enjoying a 70 degree San Diego winter day.

We bought this blue parrot whistle when our boys, David and Ron, were little. You blow in one end and adjust a lever on the other end, which changes the pitch of the whistle. It is a very fun toy - but can get very annoying if done for too long.

Luckily, Troy can't blow that hard yet so he can play with it until his heart's content. One day when he's got more wind, the toy will mysteriously disappear. As it did when our boys were little. lol

My favorite photo from that day.

Troy, surveying his kingdom.

Troy Videos

David, Lucy and Troy came over Friday and I was able to get a bit of video of Troy and Marcy. Enjoy!










and even a video of Just Marcy:

HTC Evo Shift

I left my old cell phone in the truck one very cold night, and after that the battery would drain in about six hours. Instead of getting a new battery, I started looked closer at the new cell phones since it was about time for my wife to get a new one also (hers is so old it doesn't have a qwerty pad). We ended up with two HTC Evo Shifts, which have been out since the beginning of January. We love these phones so far! Having full access to the internet anywhere at any time is fabulous!

Lucy's New Car: 2006 Rendezvous

 David and Lucy went car shopping this week and came home with a real winner: a 2006 Rendezvous. It is really the perfect car for their young family, and they picked a gorgeous one. It looks great, holds all their kid-oriented stuff, and is makes getting Troy in and out very easy.

 They traded David's 2004 G35 in for it, which was another smart move. While David's car was very nice, it wasn't very practical for a young family. By the way, that's Troy and Marcy in the background. When they saw me heading out the door with the camera, they were right on my heels.

So Lucy will drive this beauty, and David will drive her old Honda until he figures out what he wants to drive. Congrats, kids! Very good decision!

Computer Protection

Or something like it, anyway. That's what I need.

For the second time (almost one year apart), I have "caught" a malware virus on my computer.

I know exactly how it happens. I get sloppy. I use Google to search for something, then go to untrustworthy websites one of which invariably has the malware. It happened to me in Jan 2010, and I was a good boy for 12 months. Then, I got sloppy last night and went to sites I shouldn't have. And got bit again.

The way I know I've caught something is several-fold:

- I keep getting the message "Windows can't find hard disk space. Hard drive error."

- I get error messages when I try to run virtually any application saying application failed.

- A phony "System Defragmenter" tries to run, and gives phony error messages (see FAKE illustration below)

- Strange sounds - odd clips of commercials, etc - come out of my speakers

Last year, I had success with Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware in getting rid of it. But, since the malware virus blocks running programs, Anti-Malware wouldn't run until I used something called "RKill" first. Once I ran RKill followed by Anti-Malware, I was virus free.





So this year, I decided to do the same thing. I got the latest RKill and Anti-Malware versions (from the Malwarebyte site, so I knew I wasn't being tricked into getting yet another virus) and ran them. Everything looked great.

Until I started doing Google search. For example, when I ran the search shown to the left and clicked on the first link (which looks like it would take me to the Malwarebyte site), I was being redirected to other sites that were very shady. Unfortunately, these sites were loading me back up with viruses again.

So I was back at square one. Using another uninfected computer, I searched around and found a few products that were said to get rid of the Google redirection problem. The problem is, they didn't get rid of it.

Out of sheer frustration, I decided I was going to reload my computer from scratch. I've been good and have all my data backed up, so it would simply be a matter of reinstalling the OS and the handful of programs I use. Not too painful, eh?

Normally, it isn't too painful. But with my computer infected, it was not straightforward. Then I made a discovery. Under Assessories -> System Tools -> System Restore, it asked me if I wanted to restore my system to an earlier date. Since I had never created a checkpoint, I figured this would not work but hey, it couldn't hurt to try. So I picked a day a couple of days before I got infected and did a restore. And guess what? It worked! I am now virus free! No more redirects either!

Thank you Microsoft!

So now I'm very happy. And I'm double checking my virus protection software to ensure it is up-to-date. Just so you know, no one product catches all viruses. It doesn't matter if you use Norton, McAfee, or Trend Micro, some things are going to get through. Some estimates are that these protection packages catch just 60% of the viruses active on the internet. Just make sure your backups are current and you have the CDs for any software you may have to reinstall...in case you have to reformat your drive.

I know this isn't a sexy topic, but it is a necessary one to keep your computer healthy.