AWOL for a bit

To those of you who haven't heard yet, yes, Ivy caught a trojan last week (the hiloti one). I was able to catch it at some point, though not before it managed to eat AVG (which detected it as it came in from MegaUpload) and get past the McAfee scan. I was locked out of the school network at one point because it was trying to use my email to spread the virus but I managed to get rid of that bit as well (that was a fun evening at home). The result afterward was that Ivy is no longer contagious, I was allowed back on the network, but the OS is still glitchy.

I wasn't aware of the whole extend of glitchiness until the point where Ivy stopped booting at the login window, which made it necessary for me to ...well it wasn't important. The important part was that I was able to pull out all of my files safely and run a registry scan, which gave me over 1000 errors (I kid you not; I was deeply unhappy with this) in the reg and the option of either paying a rather lot to buy a software to fix it or fix all the errors manually, which I do not have the time to do.

So, like a good little amateur hacker that I once aspired to be, I swapped to Ubuntu. Which worked gloriously until this afternoon where Ivy's network component promptly died for no reason I can decipher. Both wireless and ethernet are gone right now and the computer's wireless card light is off, and I can't get it to turn back on. Will most likely be troubleshooting that at some point. Or possibly pay the student center people to, because this is now taking up way too much of my time. Meanwhile, 'net time's limited and I need have to put together a poster for the conference, probably on Zen. (Linux is awesome but there is no graphic software like Photoshop, which just doesn't seem to perform as well in Linux as MS.)