BIOS and Code Red

I've been leery of blogging over the past week becuz I got back a Code Red diagnosis (below) alerting me that me computer was infected by Malware after running a test at the DNS Working Group website. The background on the same image should be Green if the Estonian malware isn't detected on your computer. I downloaded an 'eraser' software but didn't get anywhere implementing it. The glitch was that you have to download and store the eraser software on and reboot your computer from a DVD or USB drive which translates in layman's terms that you have to reset your BIOS, usually the computer starts up from your manufacturer's hard drive when you turn the computer on. I prioritized the BIOS to restart from the eraser DVD instead of the hard drive, but after clicking the viola Enter Key, the computer nevertheless still rebooted from the hard drive. Tried and tried the same steps for about 4 hours last night like one of those hamsters.

Finally, it was 4 o'clock in the morning, that it dawned upon me, that perhaps the malware had disabled the function. So, whadda we do now. The Estonian malware bozos have already been apprehended by the FBI and Interpol but they've left their mess and legacy for others to clean up. I bet they plea bargained for reduce sentences if they handed over the antidote. If they were to serve a day in penitentary for every computer and router their malware infected, that would have amounted to hundred-of-thousands of days in the slammer. That doesn't even account for or address or approach the hours people took to erase the malware. I finally tried AVIRA and it worked instantly like a charm. No downloading their eraser to a sterile DVD, since I'm unable to reboot from an alternative DVD anyways, just download the eraser software, and hit the RUN button to implelement the fix. And yes, I realize there are other ways to resolve the issue, if not have prevented it to begin with, or perhaps old news by now too, however.

Is Pack Ratism Bad for the Mind

This past week I've been on a mission tossing things out. Metal tool boxes that had rusted piano hinges that prevented them from opening. Actually when you pried them open, the hinges and the sides of the toolbox warped. I then had to use a hammer to pound the hinge straight enough so I was able to shut the tool box close again. Then a cordless circular saw that had a lethargic lithium battery that ceased recharging up to the voltage level required to make it saw anything a little harder than a stick of butter. And, no, a replacement battery would cost more than the cordless saw was worth, or was worth it to me. It had a 14-volt lithium. Today, practically all cordless tools use 18-volt rechargeable batteries. I still have the battery itself until I find a deposal site to despose of it properly. And a few choice items that you accumulate over the years. These are far from memorabilia, so there wasn't a preponderance of logic behind keeping them. Just room. Or perhaps like Facebook stock, next week it'll go up. Another example, two old wheels for my handtruck. The original wheels had tubless tires in them and air always leaked out and in order to refill the tubeless I had to take them to the service station. So I went and bought replacement tires the kind with tubes in them. Over $20 a piece. $40 for two wheels/tires, for a hand truck that cost me $50 new about seven years ago from Home Depot. The same handtruck sells for $70 today. I just couldn't bring myself to part with the old wheels until now. Space junk.

Replenished Beach

They removed the orange fence, those temporary plastic barrier things, and the beach is again populated. Sparsely at this noon hour when I took the pic I surmise most of the visitors are out on a tour or still in their air conditioned hotel rooms zonked out with a hangover.

The lifeguard towers are elevated up on concrete columns to give the lifeguards a better vantage point. The cabin itself might be the standard design nationwide, and it figures prominently in my blog's banner above. The older towers were perched up on metal pipe stilts but the salt rusted the metal.

This tower was smack dab where they dumped the huge dune of sand that they pumped from offshore and had to be temporarily removed. They installed the lifeguard tower back where it use to be, but it sits flat on the sand until they find where they misplaced the concrete column. These things take a while around here.

The lifeguard cabin could be mistaken for a porta potty. For example, these visitors are looking for the sign.

Sunny Today

If this statute of Neptune was installed on the newly sand replenished beach at Waikiki, it would befit and crown the occasion, but instead, Neptune along with another 20 or more marble statutes are on the front yard of a nearby beach front property. I tunk it's Neptune. For all I know it may be Poseidon instead. Neptune is Roman, Poseidon, Greek. Poseidon is usually portrayed weilding a pitchfork (trident) at unwary mariners, while Neptune prefers romancing sea nymphs. And it's cumbersome to grasp sea nymphs if you have to hold on to a pitchfork.

The promontory of Diamond Head crater at the far end of Kapiolani Park. Da Duomo of Waikiki .... namely, "in the shadow of the duomo." Quiet around that area too. I don't get too much 'quiet' living along the Ala Wai with the steady drone of traffic. Sound travels up. You have to be at least 25 stories vertical to get beyond the trajectory and range of the up noise. Dunno the junk science of it, but the Waikiki library is less than 40-feet from the Ala Wai Blvd and you barely hear the traffic in the horizontal direction in their outdoor section.

An Empty Bottle of Bay Leaves

I use a fair amount of bay leaves, and unfortunately it's $8-$9 a bottle. At .14 oz net weight, that's what, a billion dollars per pound for bay leaves? Or, more. Okay, this way, at 20 leaves in a bottle, that's 40¢ per leaf! Money grows on trees almost. I couldn't find bay leaves on sale so as a last resort I went to Walmart. And there it was. The very last bottle of bay leaves on the rack at $5.60. I guess at $5.60 it goes fast. No wonder it's the last remaining bottle on the rack. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind, that kind of moment, and realized to my chagrin, somebody musta mistakenly put the bottle of bay leaves back on the wrong rack. Walmart has bar code stickers plastered on the front of the rack without room for the names of the individual spices next to the bar code. A worker was nice enough to price check it for me and sure enough bay leaves were $8 and something per bottle. Happy Aloha Friday the same. How, you?

Sands

Freshly replenished with brand new sand, I wonder whether with the remake if da Beach is re-eligible to be listed on Dr. Beach's Top 10 Beaches of 2012. I believe the rule is that once a given beach makes the list, it can't be on it again, or perhaps after so many years later or something like that. If you haven't noticed, today's pics are a fraction larger. They're 425 pixels wide. My standardized size was 400 pixel wide with no enlarged view. Does the extra 25 pixels wider make a huge difference? That's left to eagle eye of the beholder on the other side of the monitor screen, and on that note, "What, you hadn't noticed." If nobody is around to hear a tree fall in the middle of a forest, than it follows it wouldn't make a difference either with the historical inauguration of 425 pixels, here. I personally don't see the need for posting super large size pics. Well, if somebody is searching on the Internet for a photo for a screen saver. The way that I see it is that readers only look at a featured pic once, then mostly forget about it. There're always be new pics in the next post.

The Ala Wai Serpent

What goes down must come up, just like the economy, ha ha. That was a joke. Or maybe not, this incident will create jobs. Anyways, a few years ago they assembled the emergency sewer bypass pipe, kukai pipe, on the surface of the Ala Wai canal, then once all the individual sections were connected into a contiguous giant sewer line they broke the ceremonial bottle of champagne and submerged the pipe to the bottom of the canal where it lay peacefully until this past Saturday upon which a section of it (photo above) rose up and breached the surface. The way I understood it, is that, the pipe was empty and basically filled with air as there hasn't been a sewer emergency for a while and the volume of air inside the emergency bypass pipe caused the bouyancy and up she went.

Thank You for Visiting Amazon

I received the Email below from Amazon informing me that I had cancelled an order. No, I didn't. I didn't even place the order that the Email purports that I cancelled. I notified Amazon pronto about this discrepency inquiring if they might find the alias who did place the order under fictitious identity. Or did the Email itself originate from Nigeria? That kinda thing. To begin with, Amazon does not begin a purchase notification with a "Dear Customer" salutation. They address the customer by his or her name. Secondly, the Email's time stamp showed it was sent on the 6th. An Email sent on the 6th notifying me that I cancelled an order on the 7th is genius. There's a thin line between genius and the other extreme. Out of caution I did not click the link (underlined text, below). You can click on the underlined link yourself but I've disabled it .... it's just colored text with underline. I also examined the Email's 'details', and it shows that the Email, if replied to, the Return-Path is, "chanfbpwbokvpt (at) flashmail (dot) com," nought Amazon. Doesn't the lowly moron have better things to do? For some reason, I don't think the aforementioned link conceals a malicious virus. Instead, the link probably shanghai's you to a webpage for more traffic. Then there are clubs that people like these belong to where they compete for points for bragging rights or whatever. The person who accumulates the most points at the end of the month gets to be supreme leader. Prestige? Yea, prestige.

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully canceled. For your reference, here's a summary of your order:

You just canceled order 129-925-731 placed on May 7, 2012.

Status: CANCELED

___________________________________________

"Disingenuous" (2008), Second Edition
By: Lorraine Morgan

Sold by: Amazon.com LLC

___________________________________________

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Amazon.com Earth's Biggest Selection http://www.amazon.com

Kentucky Derby and NASCAR

As you already know, about the only tv that I watch is 24/7 news channels and the local evening news. And Hawaii Five-O and the semi-finals and the finals rounds in major professional sports. It's debatable whether the Kentucky Derby is a sport. However with all the hype surrounding the Kentuck Derby, it influences you to tune in to watch yesterday's live broadcast of the Running of the Roses as it's known. The only problem with the 'live' thing, is that it's an hour of pomp and circumstances with further ado, and much more further ado, before they actually after 50 mint julips finally get around to broadcasting the main race. Oh, well. Oh, well, not. I switched channels and NASCAR happened to be on another channel. Yea, the car race that goes round-and-round in circles. Ovals I guess is its geometric term somebody look it up.

I liked watching Formula 1 which is raced on road tracks which is better to my eyes. Well, NASCAR, or the promotion department, has coregraphed the race so that it's much more enjoyable to watch on the tv screen. Along with the cameras set up around the oval track, they've incorporated onboard cameras within the race cars' cages themselves which puts you in the drivers' seat in real time. It use to be that only a few race cars were equiped with cameras, but nowadays just about all cars have onboard cameras. There's even a separate camera that's devoted to showing the driver shifting gears from the passenger sideview angle while the picture vibrates. At 190mph things vibrate. There's also a camera that faces to the rear window so you can see what's happening behind the selected car. While the majority of the race is still covered the regular way from cameras stationed around the track, the broadcast switches back and forth to the onboard cameras to track the action as seen from drivers' seat.

I don't know whether NASCAR got the idea of switching back and forth to the drivers' eyeview cams from NASCAR video games. Parts of the coverage seems orchestrated, if that's the right word. When there's a yellow flag, caution flag, the drivers take the occassion en masse to make a pit stop to refuel or get new tires, etc. That's when the tv screen shows mulitple pics of different car teams working on the cars that have just pitted all on the same screen. But you can hear the whirl of the air guns and other associated mechanical noises. But none of the muliple cameras are that close enough in proximity to pit row within range to record the sound. Or they're patching in the sound from a camera that stationed in pit row just for the sound effects. Heck, the audio could have been dubbed from a sound archive for all I know. But it makes the race more well like you're watching a race in a movie.

Then Danica, she was in the lead group once in the race, but then she fade behind the pelethon like she was peddling a bike. The eventual winner pulled away in what seemed like the last 100 yards and won by a half a car hood if that. At that point all the chasing cars floor board it to the finish line and after passing the finish line make a full circle of the track in reduced speed to whine down. While this was happening a car behind Danica nudges her rear fender and she almost hits the wall. She chases up to what she perceives as a hit-and-run driver and bumps that driver's rear fender on purpose sending the driver into the wall and his car ends up limping the rest of the way back to pit row. Remember this is just the obligatory post race lap and supposedly all the elbowing is over until the next race. They interviewed Danica and she said that the driver apologized, alledgedly. On the other hand, they also interviewed Danica's sparring mate and he said that his front wheel locked up and his bump wasn't on purpose, but questioned if retaliating by sending him to the wall was all that necessary especially on a post race lap when the race is already over.

Not even a Canadian penny's worth of usable silicone

The old tube of silicone felt hard and barely anything squeezed out, but since all I needed was just a few dabs of silicone, I decided to peel off the metal skin of the tube, it's thin metal, and probe for any usable pockets of gel to avoid buying a brand new tube of silicone. None.

May Day at Kapiolani Park

Fast the year, May 1st already. The days went by in an eye blink. It seems like winter was just last week. Anyways, here's some random pics from the May Day celebration at Kapiolani Park in Waikiki. This was at 9am so the flora wasn't on display quite yet, but had plenty food.