Crazy times

A number of things have happened since I last posted. So, a quick summary:

Last Saturday I flew to Los Angeles to attend an orientation at the Taiwanese Consulate for this scholarship I received from them to study Chinese at National Taiwan University next year. I stayed with a friend, and got to see a bunch of other friends who either lived in L.A. or were around for the weekend. I just got back yesterday morning, after taking the red-eye flight out of LAX, so I'm still a little weird from lack of sleep, but I went to work today and got through it okay.

In that same vein, I got my visa for Taiwan, so I can actually get into the country. The biggest issue now is finding housing, and more and more, it's looking like I'll just have to search for apartments once I get to Taipei. Being at the orientation actually got me more excited about going, because everything I heard about Taipei just sounded awesome. I'm looking forward to being in a proper big city, not a sprawling mega-city like Los Angeles.

My personal computer is infected with massive amounts of viruses, so I'm writing this on my parents' computer. I just dropped my computer off at the tech guy today, and hopefully it will be alright when I get it back on Tuesday. Unfortunately, I think I will have to do away with my blog at LiveJournal, since that's apparently where I picked up all the viruses. I mainly use that blog as a writing journal, and it's kind of a nice way to have a community of writers that are more international, so it's kind of frustrating to have to give that up. But my dad is saying that perhaps after a few weeks, whatever viruses are on the site will get picked up by the system's firewall or security system and just go away. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

And, in football news, Juve have more or less called off their pursuit of Xabi Alonso, so I feel like I can breathe a bit easier. There are a few rumors bouncing around about Arsenal maybe showing some interest, but I can't see that happening. I think if Juve have cooled on the deal, Rafa is just going to keep Alonso on and maybe scrap the deal with Barry to focus on bringing in Robbie Keane instead. Liverpool are back in preseason training, and it sounds like the younger players are showing some good stuff, albeit against lower level competition. It's great to see Daniel Agger back on the pitch, and I'm just super excited to see the Reds backline give opponents hell this season. Agger, Carragher and Skrtel = toughness epitomized. I've found a pub in Taipei that shows Reds games, so you can be sure that, no matter the time difference, I will be watching as many matches as possible this coming season.

A little heads up: computer virus

Picked up a nasty, nasty spyware on my computer yesterday, and spent a good part of the day screwing with my antivirus software (Norton). Judging by the information I looked up on the net, this spyware (Sakora.exe) is a variant of a Trojan horse, and was so new that a number of forums had only seen it once or twice, and the official Norton website didn’t have it in its definitions. I guess I was one of the lucky ones who got an early hit, and I have no idea where I got it—I hadn’t opened any e-mail attachments or visited any new sites.

I couldn’t delete the damn file off my hard drive, and was getting all set to fork over three hundred dollars or so for a tech service to strip my computer down and nuke the thing. Then my dad suggested I take a look at the Processes running in my Task Manager. Lo and behold, there was the spyware, plugging away, no doubt digging through my computer for credit card numbers, bank account info, etc. I ended the process, then went back into my Program Files and was able to delete the damn thing.

So, if for some reason you have the same luck as me and find this thing on your computer (you’ll probably get a few weird popup things, or your antivirus will start going berserk, look for it in your Program Files), go to your Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del), click on Processes, and End Sakora.exe. Then go back to your Program Files and delete the thing. Simple fix, but it appears to have worked for me.