This is my journal, and it's basically friends only - bar for a few posts that are community service type things, fic, and some icons. If you're interested in friending me, please comment to this post with a little bit of information about yourself, so that I can friend you back.

Thanks

Gorgeous "friends only" banner is by oxoniensis.

Current Mood: curious

I highly encourage you to sign this petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/cmwomen/petition.html

( Additional Info )

Current Mood: disappointed

Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Friend in Need
Summary: Emily isn't feeling well, and Hotch decides that what she needs is a friend to help her out.
Category: Hurt/Comfort/Romance
Characters: Emily Prentiss, Aaron Hotchner
Rating: K+
Note: Inspired when I heard that a good friend of mine was having rather a crappy weekend. Thank you to sjhw_tolerance for the beta. As always, I own absolutely nothing, say it again!

( A Friend in Need )

Current Mood: working

Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: Do I Know You?
Summary: Emily and JJ are visiting Garcia for coffee, but are stunned at what they see when they arrive. Some humorous fluff for Valentine's Day.
Category: Humour/General
Characters: Emily Prentiss, Jennifer Jareau, Penelope Garcia
Rating: K+
Note: I own nothing. Especially not CM, or the things mentioned in this story, though I may want some of them. :) Thank you as always to sjhw_tolerance for the beta.

( Do I Know You? )

Current Mood: okay

Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Hard Day at Work
Summary: What really goes on inside Aaron Hotchner's head?
Category: Humour/Romance
Characters: Aaron Hotchner, Emily Prentiss
Rating: T for language and innuendo
Note: No, I don’t own anything. The challenge was to come up with a first person POV story, using a prompt from the TV Prompt Challenge forum on ff.net

( A Hard Day at Work )

Current Mood: okay

Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Letter to Santa
Summary: Jack Hotchner writes a letter to Santa about his Christmas wish
Category: Family/Romance
Characters: Aaron Hotchner, Jack Hotchner, Emily Prentiss
Rating: Everyone
Note: No, I don’t own anything. Thank you as always to sjhw_tolerance for being a wonderful beta.

( A Letter to Santa )

Current Mood: pleased

Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: All About Chap Stick
Summary: Emily Prentiss' adventurous nature takes over one cold day
Category: Random humour
Characters: Primarily Emily Prentiss and Aaron Hotchner
Rating: Whatever the non movie version of PG is
Note: Thank you so much to sjhw_tolerance for the beta. All errors obviously remain mine, especially since this seems to be the first fanfic I've completed in over four years. Scary!

( All About Chap Stick )

Current Mood: pleased

ILE Closes

It happens way too often in the software industry, but in this case it seemed like a developer who had a clue and actually produced some good products. Certainly ones that I enjoyed playing a lot anyway - and indeed am still playing.

Current Mood: disappointed

So you have a PC (90% of computers in the world run some form of Windows), with an anti-virus package, and possibly a firewall. You may even run some tools to clean spyware from your machine. So that means you're basically okay, right? Wrong. There's a very good chance that you're not okay at all.

Here's a link to a VERY interesting article on the state of the Computer Security industry:

Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security

And the followup article based on comments posted to the first article:

Community Comments & Feedback to Security Absurdity Article

So where does that leave the average computer user? Are we all going to need to be reformatting our hard drives every month or so and reinstalling our operating systems just to get rid of a particularly sinister root kit? Even Microsoft has admitted that it's becoming impossible to recover from malware problems in an April 2006 article in eWeek magazine. (For more information on rootkits, see this article from eWeek - VM Rootkits: The Next Big Threat?.)

But what to do? My favourite PC mag, Maximum PC, recommends the following computer protection tools:

• Firewall: ZoneAlarm


• Antivirus: AVG Free Edition


• Anti-Spyware: A-Squared


• Rootkit Scanner: Blacklight


• Anti-Malware: Hijack This


• Startup Diagnostic: Windows Defender

All of these, bar Windows Defender which has only two free support incidents, are free - and you probably need to be using all of them on a regular basis. Not just a firewall and an antivirus package. Long gone are the days when you just booted DOS and got on with it.

But all these are just band-aids. The real problem isn't going to go away until there is a fundamental change in operating system design. Even the NSA, the world's largest intelligence agency, thinks that to be the case in it's white paper The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments.

The second article I posted, Comments & Feedback to Security Absurdity Article, has a section towards the end on where Windows Vista fits into the picture. It looks like it definitely will improve things, but it remains to be seen how much. Until then, make sure you're running your firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, rootkit scanner, anti-malware, and startup diagnostic tools regularly.

And before anyone asks, there is no way I'm getting a Mac.

Current Mood: indescribable

The Lifetime channel is running an online petition to support the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act of 2005, a bipartisan bill that aims to 'ban the practice of "drive-through" mastectomies, when women are forced to leave the hospital just hours after their surgeries and before they are ready to go home.' If you are in the US, I encourage you to go to the site listed below and complete the petition.

Lifetime Breast Cancer Petition

The petition only requires your name, zip code, and email address, and takes less than a minute to complete (depending on how fast you type ;).

Please support this worthwhile cause.

Current Mood: determined

This is a sort of sequel to the ficlet that lisayaeger wrote yesterday. I apologise in advance if you're not on her flist as I think it's a locked post, but all really you need to know to understand this is that Lenny is the doorman at the building where General O'Neill lives in DC, and he opens the door on one occasion for both O'Neill and a Ms. Carter. And in the end, Jack asks if he can go golfing with Lenny (who is counting the hours remaining before his retirement).

It's really not as complicated as it sounds. Honest!

Anyway, without further ado ...

( Lenny goes Golfing )

More humorous than fluffy, but that's me I suppose. :)

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: frogs in the pond behind my house

If Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were alive today, their infamous sketch, "Who's on First?" might have turned out something like this:

( Costello calls to buy a computer from Abbott )

Current Mood: amused

It may already be the 27th everywhere in Australia, but here in the US I'm flying my Australian flag on my desk, and celebrating the day as it should be done.

Okay, I'm not really. It's too darn cold to fire up the barbie and cook a few snags, not that you can get anything like the snag quality here as in Aus, but I am at least going to be as Australian as I can be today. And no matter how much people may be navel gazing about what it truly means to be Australian, it all comes down to what's in my icon. ;)

Beuwdy mayte! Hope all you 'strines had a bloody rippaofaday!

Current Mood: jubilant

I'm cutting my thoughts here as they're not fandom related, and I don't want to have them in anyone's face unless they really want to read them. That said, these are my thoughts on areas that can be delicate. I'm not attempting to be incendiary, but that doesn't mean they won't be read that way. Please be respectful.

( Thoughts on Sanctity of Life Sunday )

Current Mood: thoughtful

The Ten Net Commandments

Something we should all think about adhering to, as they're remarkably sensible.

Current Mood: okay

FANDOM: Battlestar Galactica
TITLE: Hatred and Desire
SUMMARY: What do you do when something you thought you had seems to slip through your fingers?
CATEGORY: Angst, missing scene
CHARACTERS: Lee Adama
RATING: Nothing explicit
SPOILERS: Season One, Kobol's Last Gleaming part 1
NOTE: Thanks to seldear for the beta.

( Hatred and Desire )

Current Mood: lazy

John Dvorak of PC Magazine certainly seems to think so -> The Scheme to Discredit BitTorrent.

Interestingly, the guy who wrote BitTorrent has an LJ (bramcohen), and he posted a rebuttal today of some of Microsoft's claims regarding their new Avalanch product.

So maybe all this talk of adware and BitTorrent is just disinformation on Microsoft's part? I guess we'll see. I know I don't have problems, but then I like to be careful with checking for adware and spyware.

Current Mood: geeky

Watch what you're downloading, and especially what you agree to, when you're grabbing those BitTorrrent downloads:

Spyware Floods In Through BitTorrent

Aurora install source revealed, and 175 Megabytes of televisual terror

You may also want to check out the eWEEK.com Special Report on Spyware, for more information on various threats out there.

Current Mood: discontent

Looks like you've had a great day. Hope the evening is great, too!

Here's a little totally unbeta'd something for you.

( Birthday Supper )

Current Mood: mischievous

For those of you who use Windows XP in some way, April 12 is a very significant date. Why? Because April 12th is the date after which you will no longer be able to run Windows Update if you haven't installed Windows XP SP2.

The first thing you should do is check the version of Windows you are running. To do this, do Start -> Run, and type in the word:

winver

This will open a Window that says "About Windows", and has a whole bunch of information. What you're looking for is something that looks like:

Microsoft (R) Windows
Version 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp2... : Service Pack 1)
Copyright (C) 1981-2001 Microsoft Corporation

If you see something that says "Service Pack 2", you don't need to do anything. However, if you see anything else, you're going to have to upgrade to SP2 before April 12 or else you will no longer be able to get any critical updates to Windows.

I've been running Windows XP SP2 on my home PC since December without any problem, and I've been running it on my kids machine since January. While initially people said you shouldn't do the upgrade and it caused all sorts of problems, I don't think that's true any longer. However, you don't want to have Windows Update do the install. You want to do it yourself. That's the difference.

For details on how to do this, go and check out the following article - > How to SAFELY upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2. It's a good one, from a guy who writes an online newsletter I read regularly, and hopefully it will get you through the upgrade process painlessly.

Now, back to that work thing ...

Current Mood: busy