Hello!

You have recieved a Hallmark E-Card from your friend.

To see it, check the attachment.

There’s something special about that E-Card feeling. We invite you to make a friend’s day and send one.

Hope to see you soon,
Your friends at Hallmark

Your privacy is our priority. Click the “Privacy and Security” link at the bottom of this E-mail to view our policy.

Hallmark.com | Privacy & Security | Customer Service | Store Locator

And since it was my birthday I thought “how nice, someone remembered!” Then I saw the attachment: postcard.zip.

Hallmark does not zip its ecards, hardly any postcard service does. They have a pickup link, or immediately show the ecard as an embedded image. As this was in my Yahoo account I clicked on the Scan before download link and true enough, Yahoo’s Norton Antivirus scanner detected a virus in the file.

Hallmark themselves know that this and has released useful information on their site on how to combat this email. The first versions of this email came out in 2007 and has been reported to be still ciruclating around May of this year.

The good thing about email services like Yahoo is that they have built-in antivirus checking, so that the chances of your downloading malware is almost nil. However, if you get it in your email client and your antivirus program (gasp! you don’t have one??!) is not up to date, you may be in for a heap of trouble.

I got the dreaded “power calibration” error while trying to burn a backup disk on this three-year-old IBM T43. As this was the first time I had encountered it (and half past midnight really isn’t a very good time to encounter problems for the first time) I had to go ask my good buddy Google for help.

It appears that there are three main causes of the power calibration error.

1. The drive doesn’t like the media. With the proliferation of cheap blank media there will be instances when the blank cd itself is the problem. I thought this was my problem at first, having bought a stack of 100 cd’s from a local dealer that prides itself on very affordable prices, but consequently offers little if any warranty.
2. Power consumption. In this era of usb hubs that look make your peripherals look like sucklings on a sow there may be a chance that your cd recorder is not getting the power that it needs to burn your cd’s. So off went the usb hub and I suffered the eraser-head pointer tool on the T43 keyboard. Still no go.
3. Dirt. Yuk. Yep, this was actually the culprit in my case. I live in a country where dust and grime is part of everyday life and I remember again that this laptop was assigned to a heavy smoker before it ended up on my lap. I took out my bottle of micro clean and spritzed a q-tip, swabbed the lens (very gently) and then gave it a few bursts of the rubber dust blower. THAT fixed it.

Am burning happily again now, and I’ve passed the tip on to my buddies at work. Hope it helps you too.

With all the software upgrading these days, including the latest Firefox v 3.0, I lost track of the other program versions I have on my machine. I had also installed the powerful (but trial) version of Kaspersky Internet Security which found all the malfeasants on my machine, but has apparently also affected my uTorrent.

The problem was this: whenever my uTorrent was open, whether downloading or just seeding, I couldn’t browse any websites. The browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, Flock etc) would just say “connecting” or “waiting”, but no pages would be served.

First I made sure that uTorrent was in Kaspersky’s list of safe programs–it was already there I didn’t have to re-include uTorrent in the list. Then I tried switching from wireless to wired. Still no go.

Finally I took the easy way out and uninstalled uTorrent (saved all the unfinished download torrent files on a separate folder for later use of course). Rebooted my machine. Went to the uTorrent site and downloaded the latest version available. Reinstalled uTorrent.

Now I am writing this post as I am downloading from uTorrent. And the whole process took less than 5 minutes (yes I am not kidding) to do. Rather than try to fiddle with settings and stuff, I would prefer to just start from the beginning. Same attitude I have towards real life.