Spyware hell
That was not fun. I just wasted a whole day or so trying to remove some evil spyware called “Vundo”. In short, it’s a nasty little piece of crap that pops up advertisements whenever it feels like it. It’s almost impossible to remove in Windows too, because it’s actually smart enough to resist almost every possible method of removal. Don’t take that as a complement, I’m just amazed that some moron somewhere has so little of a life that they have the time and energy to waste on something as pointless as this. In fact, it amazes me in general that morons who write spyware and virii don’t turn their skills to something productive, instead of joining the ranks of the scum and vermin of the internet.
So what did I do to remove it? After trying every single tool I could get my hands on to fix it, including (but not limited to) “VundoFix”, “Vundoh”, “Spyware Blaster”, “Spybot - Search and Destroy”, “Process Explorer”, “Advanced Process Manager”, “KillBox”, “ComboFix”, “Dellater”, “l2mfix”, “SmitFraudFix”, “Avenger”, “Brute Force Uninstaller”, and “HiJackThis” - none of which could actually remove the offending worthless piece of crap - I downloaded the Knoppix 5.1 Live CD, mounted my NTFS partition as read/write, deleted the offending DLL’s myself, then used HiJackThis to remove the offending registry entries.
What a pointless waste of time, and a tribute to Linux. Saved me again.
Cybersitters suck..
That’s all I have to say. There should be a law against it. Assholes.
Edit: I should have done something about this sooner, but I received an email a little while ago from a nice lady who pointed out that Cyber Sitters is a child minding agency in Australia and that my comments were coming up in web searches! Let me point out that while my original statement stands in the context of people who buy up ‘interesting’ internet domain names with the sole purpose of selling them on at extortionate prices, it does not apply to said agency. So to anyone who finds this post in error, my apologies ;-)
Edit: I should also point out that while I said ‘Cybersitters’, what I actually meant was ‘Cybersquatters’. Slipious tonguious. Oops.
Whew..
For a moment there I thought we’d hit a quite period in the contract world, having received nothing from the Freelancers Network website. All is well however, as today I received nothing short of a slew of interesting projects. Wish me luck!
Evening thoughts
Well Tela finally got back to me, so the stress levels are back to a low hum. I still can’t fully relax as Al and Nat are still looking for work so it’s still down to me to pay the rent back in London, and despite protests I still intend to settle Athena’s medical bills so she can get help without worrying. She’ll still worry of course, but anything I can do to help I will. I tend not to talk publicly about this side of my life, for a few reasons. Mostly because it’s nobody’s business but ours, but every now and then I feel the need to think out loud, and my blog is usually my soap box, and right now I have a few things on my mind.
Are we being sold short?
I understand this may be a misinterpretation on my part - exchange rate falls heavily on one side here, and when converting from dollars to sterling things seem really cheap over here. But while browsing through freelance websites I can’t help but notice that these projects are really badly paid. For example, a $250 budget for a complete member system user levels and document sharing really doesn’t seem a whole lot. There’s a few days work there and spread out over say 3 days (including testing and enhancement requests) it works out at just over $10 an hour. WIthout seeming ungrateful, this is actually less than I’d get working in McDonald’s back home.
So what gives? Are freelancers just really badly paid over here, or are companies just trying to take advantage of desperate contractors? Back home I make an average of $50-60 an hour. Something ‘aint right.
-
-
About Me
I'm Cliff, some guy on a huge spinning rock flying through space. Somehow amongst all the spinning and the flying I manage to hold down a relatively good career as freelance software developer.
I'm a jack of all trades, master of some ;-)
My Flickr
-
The Pradipta 416
