(10:45 pm) You might notice a bit of a change in the format (for all two of you that are reading this). I'm still playing with the look of this site. Any comments are appreciated. While I write this, there's a bit of Fleetwood Mac playing in the background.

Had the grandkids over today, as we do every Sunday. They are, obviously, very cute and I really enjoy them both (Joelle is almost 3, Liam is 1). We also invited some friends over who are in the middle of their kitchen remodel. We figured that they might like a home-cooked meal, after living on microwaves and toaster ovens. They have 5 kids, including some big strapping teenage boys who really know how to eat. We had chicken stir-fry, and "Swedish Meatballs". Those are meatballs in a cream of mushroom sauce, with white rice. Very low-fat (heh), but tasty. I have no idea why they are Swedish, though, other than the fact that my wife found the recipe in a Swedish cookbook.

For dessert, a simple nut brownie with vanilla ice cream, and Hershey's chocolate sauce on top. That was good.

This weeks projects at work are starting with the teleworking committee. Although we have some teleworkers, there isn't really a good management of the whole thing. I've done the initial research, using as a base the teleworking program in use by the State of California (our motto: "we have a bigger deficit than you"). There are representatives from all of the departments in the company, including HR, so I'm hoping for good results. There also are a few audits of some servers to see how they are getting in line with the 'as-built' standards. That is including an audit of our spam server that the consultant put together. That will be a bit harder. He has very good hacking knowledge, and he said that he put a few obscure things in there I am supposed to be able to find. That should be interesting.

Time to go; the alarm clock goes off at 5am. (Yikes!)

(8:45pm) Today started out a bit exciting. The W32/Sobig@MM virus (see here) made an appearance in my own internal company mailbox. (It mostly benign, it just propagates itself to others in your mailbox, but, as always, be very careful about opening any attachment, even if it's from someone you know.) The virus attachment is a PIF file.

Network Associates had it on 'low' alert last Friday, but over the weekend (probably starting Friday afternoon) it started getting a bit more visible, so they decided to accelerate the release of the DAT file (version 4242) that would have been normally released on Wed (1/15/03). Our Webshield (mail virus scanner) got the update sometime on Saturday, but not before the infected message made an appearance into our email system.

Our email system is GroupWise, so we aren't as susceptable to Outlook-type viruses, so our exposure is normally minimal. But, it did get through. So I spent the first hour at work (along with the rest of the virus team) alerting the users, ensuring protection at the email gateway, etc. It looks like we had only a couple of users actually open the attachment, but it apparently did no damage.

So, lessons learned: we have a pretty good alert process for viruses, and a good procedure for handling them, up to escalating it to the level of shutting down the email system if needed (with the appropriate alerts to everyone). And we have a pretty good company-wide protection with the VirusScan program kept up to date automatically. (In our case, since we are a Novell network, we used ZenWorks to automatically push down the DAT file update on each login. Some departments don't use ZenWorks yet, so a command in the login script runs the current SUPERDAT.EXE, which will update the user's DAT file during login.)

And we also have a continuing education process for the users (which needs some improvement) so that most of them know about viruses, and attachments. We also set up our mail gateway (Webshield) to automatically block all PIF files. I'm not sure why we hadn't done that before. And we are considering blocking all EXE files. That combination of protection has blocked incoming files; we just got hit on this one because of a slower update from Network Associates. We would have been protected if we had previously blocked all PIF files.

Now, how are you protected at work, and at home? Have you upgraded your virus files lately? Have you checked the settings to make sure that everything is getting scanned? Do you practice "safe computing"? (I keep a bottle of bleach nearby to disinfect all floppies, and sometimes I just spray the cables and modems to be safe. <don't try that at home, please>.)

The fact is that if you are connected to the network, or if you have email, you need to (as Sgt. Esterhaus used to say on "Hill Street Blues") "Let's be careful out there!".

Minor housekeeping note: Brian C. told me that the link to the Friday section was broken on all the pages. It's fixed now. And there were some linking errors and grammar problems in the Digital Choke book; also fixed. Thanks for the sharp eyes, Brian!

 (7:30 pm) More efforts on the virus front today at work. I got another one, with the attachment this time. The attachment should have been stripped by Webshield. For some reason, that didn't work, so we had to re-do the blocking rule. We also added stripping of COM and EXE executable files, along with the mail address that shows up in that message. A bit of testing, and it looks like everything worked.

Part of our new procedure about virus incidents is doing a post-mortem on the incident. I finished that up today, and from it we learned a few lessons. We hadn't really gotten all the attachment blocking just right; that really should have been checked by the guy in charge of the Webshield server. We also don't have a good way to ensure that all workstations have the proper anti-virus settings. The default settings on installation are not correct, and the installation maker (it makes the MSI install file) doesn't work quite right either. Network Associates tells us that we need to use e-Policy Orchestrator to ensure virus setting compliance. It's a good solution, since it will also enforce virus settings for all workstations that connect to the network, even at remote sites. But it costs quite a bit, so it's not quite in the budget yet. We're working on getting it installed before the end of this fiscal year.

Although this virus didn't do much damage, and our using GroupWise as our mail system protects us from a large majority of viruses (especially propagation on our mail system), we are not fully protected. Sort of like going outside at John Dominik's place (in Minnesota) in the winter with heavy clothing, but wearing sandals. (You might enjoy his daily writings, by the way.) Monday he noted that the temperature in his town is hovering (shivering?) around 0 F. Too cold for me.

We're also in the 'what projects do we want to work on this year' phase. There are quite a few interesting ones, I suspect that if you hang around here long enough, you'll find out about them as we go along.

Tonight, of course, being Tuesday, is "24" night. Good show; it has turned into one of my favorites. It gets pretty intense, and usually has a few surprises that you don't expect. So, time for a bit of "Daynotes surfing", and then off to couch-potato land we go.

Had a few meetings today, some project types, and some planning types.

On the project side, we're trying to hammer out a email use and retention policy. Email can be considered a 'public record', and there isn't really a good existing policy or guidelines at our company on what email should be saved as a public record. We are required to keep those kinds of records around, but not everyone knows or may be aware that email is as much a public record as a memo or letter.

So, how do you handle email as a public record. Some users are packrats, saving everything. We have users with 6000+ messages in their mailbox. That's a lot of storage space on the mail servers. Some users organize thier mailboxes with folders for each project, and put all the related email in the appropriate folder. Others print out everything and stick it in a file. We don't really have a good records management system. "Records" can include email, paper, project plans, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawings, etc. How do you manage all of that stuff so you can find it if you need it.

And how do you take care of people that delete emails that might need to be saved as part of the public record? What if there is a legal request for records? Do you search only among the active email? Do you have to restore tapes and search through that? How long should you keep email backup tapes? Or even should you? Ask any corporate big shot about old emails retrieved from backups. Like Ollie North or the guys at Enron, or even Bill Gates and others.

Lots of interesting questions. We're working on the answers by looking at other public agencies in the state, and private companies too.

Ttommorow is the big teleworking committee meeting. We're developing policies and procedures for that, and have a group of people from all the departments in the company to hash out that policy. I built an initial policy and guidelines, based upon the State of California's teleworking program. They've been doing it for over 9 years, so have a good process. We'll use that as a starting point, mold it a bit to fit our company, and see what the result is.

As an incentive to get everyone to the meeting, I promised a home made treat. So tonight I worked on (all by myself) "Snickerdoodles". They are a cinnamon sugar cookie that is quite good, and one of my favorites. Fairly easy to make, just sugar, eggs, flour, shortening, cinnamon, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt. You mix all the stuff together, and then make little balls of the cookie dough, and roll them in a cinnamon/sugar mixture. Bake it for 10 minutes, let them cool, and you are done.

I'll admit to not being an experienced cook. Although my wife makes them all the time, this was my first solo. And I made the dough balls a bit too big. That resulted in Snickerdoodle pancakes; they were about 3" across, and sort of combined into just about one giant cookie blob. Quite humorous, I thought. Still tasty, though. I made the next oven batch about half the size of the first, and they turned out OK.

And, someone sent me this link: http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/ . It purports to be a new Homeland Security thing that will help monitor the Internet usage. Thought you might like it.

Time for "West Wing", and a bit more couch potatoing. And I'll think I'll grab a couple of the giant Snickerdoodles.

The teleworking meeting went well. There were some new faces there, so the story about my making cookies was a somewhat humorous way to start up the meeting to make things a bit more comfortable. They were quite impressed that I had made the cookies myself, rather than my wife. Especially the females in the group. They seem to think that we men are helpless in the kitchen (although perhaps that's the way that we want it to appear). They were even impressed that I cleaned up the kitchen after I was done. It is a bit hard to get the ladies in the meeting to have more than one cookie, especially it being January (motto: "I put on all that weight during the holidays, so I have to cut down on the snacks this month").

In fact, there was an article in the paper a couple of days ago about how January is usually a big month for the excercise places. And I can relate to that. Last January, when I started going to the gym again, it was very crowded. The article mentioned that it takes about 6-8 weeks to calm down a bit. The 'regulars' complain about all the 'newbies' cluttering up the place, not knowing how to work the equipment, not using it right. And that is exactly how it works. The regulars think they are superiour to the newbies trying to use the equipment. They laugh (covertly) at them as the newbies work the equipment. They fume (flame) at the time required to teach the newbies how to use the equipment, or try to dazzle them with all the techno-talk, so the newbies are even more confused. Or they say "why don't you read the manual on that equipment? You'll find it in the how-to section." The problem being that the 'how-to' section is not easily determined, or found.

Sound familiar?

Now, substitute "computer" for "excercis equipment" in the above sections. Is it familiar now? Are we (the 'regulars') acting the same way to the newbie computer users? How about how some of the experienced Linux users act towards Linux newbies. Some of those conversations can get quite abusive. "Why don't you just look at the 'how-to' or 'man' pages. All you need to do is type 'man filter pipe grep tar gzip gnu'. Why aren't you smart enough to figure it out yourself? Why are you wasting my time with these lame questions?"

Lighten up a bit! You (this is a generic 'you') were there once. How did you gain all of your knowledge? Was there someone that helped you? Perhaps using computers comes a bit easier to you than the other guy. Perhaps you are a lousy cook, but you don't see Emeril berating your knowledge. Perhaps you should 'give forward' a bit. And be patient.

Got a few things accomplished today. Cleaned out the garage (well, a corner of it), took a 'Lone Ranger' trip ("to the dump, to the dump, to the dump-dump-dump"). Helped my son replace one of the front brake pads on his car. Took a look at the youngest daughter's car; it needs new radiator hoses, as there is a slow leak. That will be a task for Monday (a holiday around here).

Had a couple of realtors and their clients stop by. No action, though.

Then watched the grandkids while my daughter and their husband went on a date. Watched "Shrek" and "Lilo and Stitch". Had dinner, baths, popcorn during the movies. An enjoyable evening. We lead an exciting life, eh?

But it's late, and I don't have anything profound to say. (What's that? You haven't seen anything profound yet? heh.)