Keep on the lookout for anything suspicious when browsing websites because it looks like there is a new virus/trojan out that is causing havoc. This Yahoo! News story gives more insight to the virus and what it is doing. Another one focuses on the financial implications.

The way it looks now is that this virus is shutting sites down and installing malicious code on a users computer to get bank account numbers, credit card info, etc.

If you go to a site and are asked to download anything before continuing, do not do it. This thing is nasty and I haven’t seen any updates by Symantec as of yet.

I still do not have my computer back, hopefully by the end of this week it will be back in my possession allowing me to actually get stuff done at home.

Work has been stressful lately because of deadlines and trying to meet close to impossible dates. The project we are working on isn’t huge, it just has some little quirks in it that make it a little more difficult than others. We are working fast and furious just to get most of it out on time.

I’ve been playing with my Gmail account a little and I’m still learning how it works. It doesn’t use folders so if you want to differentiate your messages you have to use these “labels” and apply them to a message then you can sort by label. It’s a neat concept but I don’t know if I like it or not. People have complained about ads in e-mail but to be honest I have only seen a couple of them and they weren’t intrusive or annoying so I don’t know what the problem is.

Yep, the Avalanche Journal (Lubbock’s newspaper) is doing a story on Segars Communications and the unique business environment here. They came in this morning and asked some questions and they are sending a photographer on Wednesday. So, that is pretty interesting and it will be cool to see how it turns out in the paper.

So my computer is out of commission for a while. The power supply and motherboard both died on Friday night so the parts are being replaced and I have no idea when I’ll be back on line (I’m making this post from the BA computer lab).

Those of you who usually contact me using an instant messaging client should e-mail me if you really need something (ssegraves [at] alltel dot net). I will be able to check e-mail from work so that of course is good.

Just wanted to update everyone so that they didn’t think I dissappeared.

The obstacles that stand in the way when dealing with non-tech savvy clients who have taken a “dive-in” approach in the past is usually bigger than you expect them to be. In dealing with a recent client’s hosting needs we almost ended up smack dab in the middle of a legal confrontation between the client and their hosting provider. We took a step back, evaluated the situation and let the two sort it out themselves.

Since then the hosting company has been nothing but a thorn in our side. We have let our client know of this and there is still hope that we will move them off of this hosts servers and on to our own. I have learned a lesson though, you can never plan to the last detail. We were originally going to be stuck on a server that had an old, old version of ASP and Access when what we were planning to use was PHP and MySQL.

We were able to push the hosting company to move the sites over to a Linux server running the software we needed.

In other news, I came across the owner of Cilantro’s blog located here. Check it out. If you don’t already know Cilantro’s is a burrito grill with some similarities to Freebird’s but I would say the atmosphere at Cilantro’s is more inviting.

Tom Hanks’ new movie The Terminal comes out on Friday and I am definitely seeing it. I really enjoy Tom Hanks’ acting and I do not think there has been a single movie of his that I didn’t like.

If you haven’t heard, The Terminal is directed by Steven Spielberg and is about a man (Hanks) who gets stuck in an airport after there is a coup in his home country. The previews for it look very promising so we’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and if you are in Lubbock and want to go see it, call me.

So the Democrats do not know what they want but they know the Republicans can’t give it to them. I think they want the U.S. to become an isolationist nation again, so let’s give it to them. Let’s pull out of Iraq completely, no soldiers, no contractors, no money. We’ll pull all of our outsourced jobs out of China and India. We’ll shutdown all of our military installations around the world and move them all back home. The last step would be to close the borders and limit immigration to the extreme. Sound like a plan?

What would the effects be? We’d basically shutdown the global economy and people wouldn’t be happy, probably the same people that aren’t happy now. So what’d we gain? Nothing.

There is no solution that will please everyone and since Kerry can’t decide what policies he should have (you would think he would have thought about this earlier) I will stick with Bush.

Thanks to Patrick for setting me up with an invite to a Google GMail account. I have been playing with it and the way it lays out your mail and stores it is pretty cool. Replies to e-mails with the same subject are stored as a conversation between you and the sender, which is pretty neat.

I’ll continue to play with it and see how bad the ads are that are going to be targeted at the content of the the e-mails.

My GMail address is ssegraves [at] gmail dot com, so feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

Thanks again to Patrick.

There’s a lengthy discussion going on at Sitepoint Forums about Wal-Mart selling websites. Some folks are very worried about this but not me. If people are looking for a quick way to get a canned design up, then let them go to Wal-Mart. When they realize that there is so much more they can do with their site they will contact people in the design/programming business.

I don’t really think this idea will take off with people anyway. When businesses think websites and internet they do not think Wal-Mart. In the past Wal-Mart has been able to dominate markets by basically forcing their suppliers to drop prices. They promise to buy more (and they do) to make up for the cost difference and this has led to companies becoming dependent on the business that Wal-Mart provides. So much so that a lot of the suppliers have moved their operations to Arkansas. I really do not think that is what Sam Walton had in mind when he started his chain.

I came across this iTunes plugin that allows you to display the currently playing song. It does this by uploading an XML to the web server and you can then use PHP to parse that file and output its contents.

Now for the plugin to be fully functional a donation of $10 is required. I don’t mind donating $10 for a nifty piece of software that I do not want to program myself (mostly because the iTunes SDK is in C). So, I may just grab this plugin and start using it because it makes sense. Everytime I am doing something on the computer I am usually listening to music.