Interview progress and kitten update

[selenay]

Well, first of all I am fairly confident that I didn't get the job but it was good experience. Not least because the guy asked me 'what is normalisation and how is it achieved' and I went totally blank. So I now know that in addition to revising all those typical interview questions, I need to go back to basics and revised my relational theory to be better prepared for the next one. So that's cool.

The work does sound really interesting and I liked the company. In the highly unlikely event that they did offer it, I'd seriously consider saying yes. However, they are looking for someone with C# and ASP.Net who can hit the ground running and those are two skills that I don't have.

It was really good experience, though, so I'm glad that I went. Back to the drawing board then!

On the kitten front...I have already been approved as an adopter by the SPCA. They're now going to get into contact with the foster mother of the two that I spotted on their website to arrange a meeting. And if those two have been adopted, they've got lots of others for me to choose from. I'm approved as an adoptive mother!

My aunt has concluded that she'll take her computer down to the repair shop at the end of the road. This is not due to any failure on my part, more due to all the work that her house-mate is insisting they have done around the house resulting in the house (and her computer room in particular) being complete bedlam. There is nowhere for us to sit and work on the thing and the constant noise, banging and construction dust isn't helping. The repair shop do sound like they know what they're doing, though, so I don't feel too awful.

Someone reassure me that I'm right to advise my aunt not to run two anti-viruses at once? Apparently a friend advised her that it would be a good thing to do when the machine is sorted out (one is good, two must be better!) and I'm trying to talk her down from it.

And that is it. Today is going to be a quiet day. Or at least it will be when the piano tuner has finished playing!

Comments

[jedishadowolf.livejournal.com]

It depends on her processor speed and what anti-virus she's using. I run two anti-viruses as a back up because AVG has failed to update several times over the past few weeks. But it does slow me down something awful. AVG & AVAST aren't a bad combination to run but I wouldn't recommend running Norton & McAfee at the same time.

Congrats on the adoption approval, hope you have your furry companion soon. :)

[selenay]

Her computer is pretty basic so I doubt she's got a huge amount of CPU. She really only uses it for email, printing photos and the odd on-line game. Slowing it down even further might not be the most helpful thing!

She's been running AVG (the paid-for version) which has always been pretty good. I do wonder whether maybe it didn't update and that's why this thing got itself installed. The friend was advising adding Norton to the mix. She had Norton when she first got the computer but it slowed the machine down to a crawl and failed to spot all the crap that her house-mates grandkids downloaded when she was on holiday. Grrr. I've never been much of a Norton fan and watching it in action didn't improve my feelings on it. I've been a loyal McAfee user for years without problems.

If she's really, really determined to run more than one then I might try to steer her towards Avast.

I did a bit of Googling on the thing that the shop thinks she's got (Windows Antivirus 2008) and it looks to be the one that I'd also been thinking she has, going under a different name. Depressingly, a lot of the documentation indicates that most anti-virus software isn't identifying that one as a virus :-( So I'm not sure that adding Norton would help because that's the one mentioned as definitely not identifying it!

Thanks for the congrats. Can't wait to have some furry friends around here!

[jedishadowolf.livejournal.com]

Oh I know that virus! A friend of mine's husband is a tech that deals with that stuff. He has to run like 7 different scans before one will catch it then do work on the registry in order to remove it. It's icky and it's time consuming to get rid of, but it can be done.

[selenay]

The more I read about it, the more certain I am that it needs an expert! Nothing seems to detect it, there isn't much in the way of automated tools to sort it out and I've never edited the registry so I don't want to try for this kind of thing *sigh*

[sunlightdances.livejournal.com]

I'm approved as an adoptive mother!
YAY!

[selenay]

*g*

[gmul.livejournal.com]

Avoid anything with Norton in the name. Or Symantec (who own the Norton brand) for that matter - their products both corporate and consumer have been not of the best for the last few years. And don't run two at once. Causes more problems than it's worth.

My preference is still for AVG7, until they fix the issues which still seem to exist in 8 then I might change my mind. The McAfee corporate stuff is good too but I hated the consumer package from a usability point of view last I looked.

That's all *just* for the AV bits. For anti-everything-else I'd probably stick with Spybot on the grounds that it's pretty good and none of them catch everything. Needs running manually to be sure.

Add Firefox/Opera/etc, make sure they're not running as an administrator-level account and you've covered all the realistic bases I think.

Way more interested in the kitten news though. Hang on - hair products, knitting, kittens - that's *so* girly. Where's the real Sel and what have you done with her? ;-)

[selenay]

Avoid anything with Norton in the name.

That's always one of my big rules *blergh*

And I'm glad that I'm right about the two anti-v's at once thing!

My father swears by AVG, I love MacAfee due to familiarity. But I'll go with what she's used to, which is AVG and make sure that she's updating regularly.

I'll try to get Spybot installed once this is over and encourage her to do regular full scans with both it and the anti-virus stuff. She's been running Firefox as her browser since Dad looked at the computer last year, not sure what kind of account she's running though!

Um, yes, I appear to be turning into a girl. I'm sure the normal Sel will be back shortly :-) It's the hair product discussion that's worrying me...