geckoblue

You'll have to pardon my strong dislike of McAfee products. They may be effective, but they are also invasive and a hindrance to system efficiency. Let me tell you about one of my most hated McAfee products. If you just want to dive into battle and destroy this thing, skip the blue words and find your battle plan.

So if you are like me, you know how to browse the web better than the computer can tell you. Products like McAfee SiteAdvisor and Norton Safe Web are not tools to rely upon, even if you're a novice web user. Reputation is the key to browsing the web safely. If you've never heard of a website before, don't go there. Seek out advice from others on what sites are safe. Sure, these software products will help reduce your human errors, but if you're in the expert zone, they become a complete waste of CPU cycles. And if you're working in corporate business, you'd be lucky if SiteAdvisor or Safe Web wasn't disabled by policy anyway.

But corporate policy doesn't eliminate SiteAdvisor. Instead, it leaves a distasteful gray menu button at the top of your screen. In the era of maximized screen real estate, putting a button on top of everything is a HUGE no-no. It turns your product from a reliable tool into invasive nagware. It's not malicious, but it becomes so nefariously annoying (I'm talking Dr. Evil-level annoying) that the entire suite of McAfee products should be rightly thrown out and replaced by anything but.

In my continual quest to delete the SiteAdvisor from my computer, I have found very dumb cop-out answers like "Go to 'Programs and Features' and uninstall it". You can't do that when there is policy enforcement going on.

The latest conflict in my holy war against McAfee has been SiteAdvisor Enterprise 3.5.0. I arrived at work, turned on my computer and discovered that SiteAdvisor mucked up my proxy settings and forced itself upon Firefox. I don't care one bit about Internet Exploder, but when SiteAdvisor attempts to step on the holy ground of my Firefox experience, it immediately elevates to all-out battle.

The "wonderful" gray menu button of SiteAdvisor was covering up the "New Tab" button and the right-most tab to a point that I couldn't read the title of the tab or close the tab without shifting its position, which left another tab masked by the stupid button.

After restoring my proxy settings, I went to work attempting to defeat this Firefox extension. To no surprise, SiteAdvisor hides itself from the extension list now. They have learned the joy/pain of using distribution bundles--Plugins you can't delete or disable from within Firefox.

In addition to cramming its ugly paws in the distribution bundle folder, McAfee enacts policies to ensure you can't delete files owned by McAfee.

The Battle Plan

So here's what I did to cripple this trojan horse of a security tool. First, I discovered where SiteAdvisor is hiding itself these days, and here it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\distribution\bundles\{B7082FAA-CB62-4872-9106-E42DD88EDE45}

Now, if the fact that SiteAdvisor is hiding itself wasn't enough, hiding behind a UUID is even more dishonest. They'll argue that they're hiding from malware makers, but that's a complete joke. A dumb reason.

I found out that McAfee was blocking these files from deletion after I took my Administrative liberty to kill McAfee processes. Before you can kill SiteAdvisor, you need to kill McAfee itself. Terminate in this order:

1. mcshield.exe
2. McSACore.exe

Why terminate? Because McAfee prevents you from stopping its services. Makes sense, but what malware writer would kindly request McAfee services to stop running? Now that they are terminated, you should be able to delete the above folder with a euphoric glee. Be quick about it because McAfee likes to find ways to auto-start itself when certain triggers detect that it isn't running.

BUT WAIT! Deleting the extension from Firefox isn't enough. The next time SiteAdvisor starts up again, it will seek out Firefox and dig its dirty paws right back into the same place. So you have to take this battle two steps further. You have to delete these files at their source. When you have those processes down for the count, delete these files:

• Everything but 'sae.lock' in C:\Program Files (x86)\McAfee\SiteAdvisor Enterprise\Components


• The entire folder of C:\Program Files (x86)\McAfee\SiteAdvisor Enterprise\scripts


• The file, C:\Program Files (x86)\McAfee\SiteAdvisor Enterprise\chrome.manifest


• The file, C:\Program Files (x86)\McAfee\SiteAdvisor Enterprise\install.rdf


• Any DLLs with the letters "ff" in them under, C:\Program Files (x86)\McAfee\SiteAdvisor Enterprise

Now that you've deleted the files that McAfee enjoys spewing about, you should disable the service itself. Of course, McAfee prevents you from doing this in a normal fashion.

Open up "regedit.exe" from the "Run..." menu.

Seek out and change this key:

Old:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\McAfee SiteAdvisor Enterprise Service]
"Start"=dword:00000002
New:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\McAfee SiteAdvisor Enterprise Service]
"Start"=dword:00000004

This sets the services from "Automatic" to "Disabled". A value of 3 would be "Manual" or on-demand.

At minimum, this should eliminate SiteAdvisor from interrupting your Firefox browsing experience. At best, it will keep it from even taking up CPU cycles.

To give it all a test, reboot your computer or at least re-start the "McAfee McShield" windows service. You can find this by running "services.msc" and scrolling through the list. You should also see that "McAfee SiteAdvisor Enterprise Service" is listed as "Disabled".

Now, start up Firefox and go to the url "about:plugins". This will tell you what plugins are running. Make sure SiteAdvisor isn't listed. If it is, seek out the DLL file and destroy it like the rest (Don't forget to terminate mcshield.exe before deleting these files).

If I missed a step, or you have additional suggestions, let me know in the comments and I will update this solution.

I was just reading today a post by Don Miller about How to Get Along with an Introvert, and it sparked a couple thoughts.

Much of what Don said rings true with me, and for the most part that advice works if you're the type to smother the introverts in your life, but sometimes the advice is heard too well and it totally backfires. They take your advice so far as to alienate you while still saying you're friends, and they believe it. It goes from smothered to tin-can-phone isolation.

I saw the book Quiet by Susan Cain a while back and considered reading it; Now I kind of want to pick up a copy. I first caught wind of a book The Introvert Advantage by Dr. Marty Lansey. I read of it in Adam McHugh's book, Introverts in the Church, which drew a number of points from Dr. Lansey's book.

( Lansey's book...Collapse )

To preface this dream, I must note that I woke up at four in the morning with a case of heartburn, probably from eating out for dinner last night, plus my system has been off kilter from being sick last week. For the moment I was awake, I noted that the moon stood outside the east-facing window in my room. It was in its last quarter. I propped myself up and fell back to sleep.

I then dreamt that I woke up at 3:30a or so, and the moon was now stood out the north-facing window in my room. It was a full moon, and it was making some faces. He scrunched his eyebrows and made a rather jolly looking face and started speaking with his mouth, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. He wasn't addressing my, either. It seemed more like he was conversing with the Sun or something like that.

I wanted at this point to go back to sleep, but I was awake and couldn't get myself to drift back to sleep (in this dream). So I got up and went to the bathroom, which was far different from the bathroom in my home. The bathroom was much larger and the room was filled with piles of clothes all over. I was getting undressed to take a shower, and my mom barged in. The moment before my mom barged in, I wasn't wearing anything. When she opened the door, I complained that she didn't knock, and that it was a good thing I hadn't yet started getting ready to shower. I was fully clothes at that point. She grabbed whatever it was she needed and left.

Then the dream transitioned to the kitchen. I was getting a drink or something and was talking with my mom about how I woke up so early and couldn't go back to sleep. I then noted that I should get ready for work. I now moved across the room to a corner of the house that was a wall of windows, and this apparently was my room, but it was all windows, floor to ceiling.

Outside one of the windows was David Lamb and some other supposed college students. He and they said hello and asked how I was doing. I said I was good and asked the same of them. I didn't get a response. I then asked if they'd mind going somewhere else because I needed to get changed. They stepped away from the building a little ways, but were still visible. I then closed the drapes around the room, and it made the room dark, but I could still see outside. I figured that it was just a trick of the light and that they couldn't see into the house.

I got dressed and went back up to the kitchen area, which seemed to be the same room. My dad was there and he flicked a switch that opened a set of the drapes. I guess he also opened the other drapes with the remaining switches there. I felt kind of funny wasting my time using pull cords to close the drapes now that I knew there were switches to control them. He started fidgeting with the switches, which opened and closed the drapes. I told him to stop because it would wear out the switches.

I went outside into what appeared to be a rather wooded piece of property around our house. I don't know if I continued talking with the folks outside or if I went off to work. I really did wake up after all this and was a little surprised that it was actually 6am and not 4am. I also thought it strange that the sun was coming out at 4am in my dream. Also, I was a little disappointed that I had done all this work in my dream of getting ready to leave, and I hadn't actually done any of it.

I blame this one on the sick germs.

So Tuesday morning I worked from home because I was managed to catch the cold/flu thing that my mom passed around to my dad and then I. And apparently the dream I had that morning was weird enough to remember.

Like all my dreams seem to be, this one was just the very tail end of some elaborately extended dream state that I mostly forgot. I first recall being in my driveway next to the garage, standing where I typically would be if I were getting out of my car. I wasn't getting out of my car. Instead, I was looking down into the flower bed that sits next to the retaining wall to my left (east).

Instead of seeing the usual snow or daffodils in the flower bed, I saw the rear bumper of an old car, something kind of 90's era. The license plate on the bumper was from Ohio, but there were no numbers on the plate. It was like an Ohio novelty plate, and I noted that it was rather illegal to have no plate numbers on the rear bumper.

I think this fact came from driving home Monday evening and sitting behind a truck whose license plate was rusted off the bumper and simply resting behind the majority of the rear bumper of his pickup. I couldn't actually read the license plate, which was from New York, because the bumper was blocking the view.

Anyway, I pulled this bumper out of the flower bed, and turned around. Behind me was a rusted out car that seemed to be the origin of this bumper. I put my hands under the side of the car and lifted up, toppling the entire outer mold of the vehicle upside down into the west lane of the driveway. All that was left next to me was the frame of the car, and not much of anything at all inside/on top of the frame.

I walked into the garage, which was now to my left (south), and did something there that I forget. I then came out of the garage and noted a white creature, which I associated as a squirrel, but really looked more like the cat from ReMIND. And it had a chin similar to a human's chin, but still it was a white fury creature.

This white "squirrel" was in a cage between the two garage parking spaces, and directly against the north wall that divided the two. As I was walking out, it started singing a familiar love song to me, which I now forget. It seemed to be singing true to the words of this love song, which essentially bade me to stay. I put my hand to its chin, to the creature's right side, put my thumb over its mouth to make it stop singing. The touch was rather intimate but was a gesture that suggested I was declining the animal's love offering. I continued out of the garage and the white "squirrel" continued its sonnet.

The only reason that ReMIND seems to come into the picture here is because I'm expecting a box set of the first couple volumes of the graphic novel in my mailbox one of these days.

I got this answer partly from searching Google for "Google spreadsheet sum of column", which led me to this answer. However, the answer found there wasn't complete. It didn't accommodate summation formulas that resided in the same column as the summation itself. I wanted to create an automatic formula for a totals row at the bottom of my data. So here's what I did. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to comment and I'll continue to refine my answer here.

Formula from the forums: =SUM(INDIRECT("C11:C"&(ROWS(C:C)-1)))

My range: C2 (C1 is a heading) through current row minus 1.

Getting the current row less 1: ="C"&TO_TEXT(ROW()-1)

Getting the sum total: =SUM(INDIRECT("C2:C"&TO_TEXT(ROW()-1)))

And there you have it. Stick that at the bottom of the column and you will have a sum total of all previous columns not including the header column in your Google Spreadsheet.

So on Thursday I had another near-death dream experience. I first recall eating breakfast in my back yard on a very windy day.

A plane flew overhead to the west. The plane reached a certain longitude and hovered in mid-air, prevented from traveling further due to an extremely high wind. The plane struggled to press further, making all kinds of maneuvers in attempt to get beyond the wind barrier. At one point, the plane flipped slowly upside down in hopes of going beyond. This too failed and it righted itself, turned around and headed back east from wherever it came.

A second plane flew to the west shortly after, but its attempts to get past the same barrier also failed. It didn't make any flips, but it weaved around just the same. It too gave up and returned to the east. This plane too I observed from the ground.

Finally, a third plane traveled west and this time I was inside it, watching the pilot attempt to get beyond the wind. Unfortunately, it seemed the previous two pilots neglected to signal back and inform this pilot of the wind barrier. He tried as he could, but the plane began to lose altitude. I watched out the front window of the plane as it sailed down into a wide street.

The pilot called out mayday several times and gave his position. The plane plummeted rather level down and below the power lines. The landing gear was up still. This plane was just beginning its journey and was well fueled.

I cried out, "Lord, please, save me Jesus!"

The left wing grazed the street and burst in an explosion. The blast had two takes like a sneeze. It had a sound like when your ear runs under the shower, fills with water and then empties. It was almost exactly like an 8-bit video game double-explosion sound. Now, the left wing was gone completely, but the fuselage was intact.

Now, the right wing burst just seconds after the left wing. It too made the same double-bursting sound. Both wings were gone and the fuselage was still in one piece. The wall of the fuselage next to my seat was gone. I could look out at everything flying by at a very fast rate of speed. We crossed a highway and I could see in the distance, to our right, a large bridge holding the highway over some distant body of water.

We continued to travel nose-first through trees and land. I sensed that I'd certainly die if I remained in my seat as I was. I quickly worked to get the seat belt off with the plan to jump out into the gaping hole beside me. I figured that I'd be likely to live if I could throw myself from the plane.

In the process of doing this, I woke up.

So, strangely, on Sunday I had this dream that brought on a rather somber mood, much like Saturday's dream. Only difference is that my friend in the last dream didn't actually die.

I had a dream this morning that I witnessed a girl, who represented my girlfriend, get killed. I believe she was hit by a car, but the details are a little foggy. What made this dream worse was the aftermath of the incident that occurred.

I was at a college, though I don't believe I was attending college. I was just living in the area and hanging out with friends who were attending the college. Then this tragedy occurred. Every one of my friends knew that I witnessed my girlfriend get killed, and therefore they felt extremely sorry for me. They felt so bad about it that they acted as though they had no idea how to console my grief.

They had so little an idea how to approach such a situation that they avoided me entirely. I walked through the campus to go to the food court on this particular day, and I couldn't get a hold of any of my friends. I saw a couple girl friends of mine and when they acknowledged my presence, they have me a "I'm sorry" look and walked away without saying anything.

I awoke while I stood in a line that wrapped outside the building leading to the food court, and I had a feeling inside like I had no friends because they were all too sorry for me to continue being friends.

I back-dated this post to Saturday, which is when I had this particular dream. It's also strangely similar to the dream I had on Sunday, at least in one way or another.

So I first recall being out to lunch with some good friends. We were in some kind of eatery that faced north-west into a "Y" intersection. The main road ran south-to-north, and a side-road split off to the north-east. I was looking toward a building in the division of the two streets that was shaped to the corner, and a staircase exited the building at the very corner of the division.

As I was watching, my friend Matt Marlow exited the building and was suddenly shot in the left abdominal area. He slumped backward and slithered down the steps. I screamed out, "Matt Marlow," several times, my focus and my body behaved almost independently as I tried to keep a laser gaze on the scene unfolding and got myself up out of my seat at the shop and rushed across the street.

At the point I reached him, he had already slumped down the steps and all the way out into the far lane of the street. Cars were now approaching, unaware of what had just happened. I put my hand on the wound and applied pressure while at the same time I dragged him over the other lane and toward the shop we were just in.

I could tell that the bullet that hit him came from further down the main road and assumed few people realized that he was shot, so I dragged him across the main street to a position where ambulance workers might recognize that he was involved.

Rescue workers arrived. There were two other people, likely the intended targets, who were also shot and laying near each other. Rather than gurneys, the guy attending Matt placed him in what looked like a beige instrument case for a double bass. The other victims were also done the same, though Matt was alive and it was presumed the other two were dead.

So they slid this case, with Matt inside, into an ambulance and sped off. They did the same for the other two, but as they drove off, the two others slid out the back of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk.

At this point, something rather disturbing unfolded. The two individuals woke up, and were fenced into some kind of small yard. There was a basin of water next to the one on the left, and the one on the right was more elevated and lay facing toward the middle.

The left victim saw the basin and started drinking water out of it. This lowered the water slowly and a sign began to lift in front of the other victim, tied to the water level, and it started to read out a message that the water was poisoned. It felt like one of those Saw movie method killing contraptions where victim #2 could have saved victim #1 from death, but it was victim #1 who had to drink the water in order for the message to appear before victim #2. It was a catch 22 where the warning and the poisoning are linked.

I've been listening to the disgusting tumult of arguments for and against the impending assault weapons restrictions and/or ban, and I have to say, most of you are responding without being fully informed. While I am not Mr. Expert on this topic, I don't really agree with either side. So let me attempt to straighten out some confused and angry heads.

The NRA has foolishly taken the side of complaining about the prospective gun ban laws without providing truly sound laws. They have not done a good job of providing valid use cases for assault-type weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens. Instead, every ill-informed citizen believes the NRA wants guns in the hands of every imaginable person in the USA. And these same ill-informed people believe the NRA thinks assault weapons are used for hunting purposes--In a rare case, maybe; In most cases, no.

The Anti-Gun lobbyists and fearful citizens want guns out of everyone's hands except for our law enforcement and military. This is also a foolish concept in a world where rebel forces attack countries and crazed dictators perform nuclear tests. It's the same as the minarchism argument. If you strip down your government to almost nothing and initiate a moral love-your-neighbor culture, will the rest of the world follow your righteous example? No, they'll invade your town and dictate tyranny instead. If you take everyone's guns away, will the rest of the world follow your righteous example? No. They will invade your town and dictate just the same.

What's truly valid is that an assault weapons ban is an unwise choice on the part of citizens, and so it prolific circulation of weaponry. The true purpose of assault weapons in the hands of citizens is to eliminate two risks:

1. Foreign governments will attempt to invade an unarmed country.


2. An unarmed citizenry is ripe to be taken over by a tyrannical dictatorship.

If you're anti-guns, then you are right now saying, "that'll never happen," or, "but we live in a democracy." And you'd be mostly right, but you're not taking into account what evil ears and eyes will consider in the event that your citizens become disarmed.

( Let me explain.Collapse )

TL;DR: Citizens with guns are also useful for protecting life, defending country, and freedom (the revolutionary war). If you take the guns away, citizens become useless in preserving life and liberty. But we're here arguing about how we can curb gun violence, so why are we focusing on guns instead of the real problem? I myself may believe the root cause is our sin nature, but society may not. However, there is a wider moral bankruptcy within our society, and a total lack of value placed on the right to life, and that is recognizable. People would rather shoot it out than talk it out, they give up rather than step up, and they would rather instigate society to change through fear instead of ownership. In fact, our entertainment has unfortunately come to reflect this bankruptcy. Evil begets evil, youth learn instead that murder is a solution, and the spiral continues. In truth, gun violence is a symptom of a greater disease. Like a fever, it will go away when we focus on the real issues. I can't cram Jesus down everyone's throat, but I can point out the moral decay, and that is something society will get on board with. We can at least build up positive life-preserving values in our youth.

I just recently signed up to for Amazon Prime. I don't wait for the TV shows to come on the air, so I miss most new shows anyway (not that any of them are worth watching these days). So evaluating the cost of being able to watch (most of) what I want to watch at my own schedule, plus the benefit of free 2-day shipping on most anything I buy (and I do buy things quite frequently), plus the savings of not having a $25 free-shipping limit to knife by wallet, it seemed to be a good choice.

Now, it's been a little over a month and I'm just starting to learn how to effectively browse videos on our Blu-Ray player. I've poked at a few TV series discovering some I enjoy and others that are not worth the time. And in searching for good TV shows to watch I'm left with a listing under the "Your TV Shows" section on my Blu-Ray player filled with shows I don't want to watch.

Instead of being faced with a giant list of shows that I don't watch, and the possibility of people coming over and saying, "You love that show? So do I! Let's watch some [of this show you have no interest in]," or even worse, "I can't believe you watch that show. It's horrible." No, I didn't watch the show. I watched the pilot, if I even got that far.

So how do I remove these worthless shows? Amazon's support site is as elusive as you'd ever expect. I guess their support model left out the "explain what you think is obvious" mantra from their business plan. So I had to do a slight bit of hunting. It wasn't until I went to step 1 that I found where that list was hiding.

It was right on the front page of the Amazon Instant Video page. It just happens that the list hiding in plain sight right below all the videos they want you to rent/buy.

So, the next time you want to remove a TV show from that poorly implemented list of "Your TV Shows" on your Blu-Ray player, go to Amazon's website, drill into the "Unlimited Instant Videos" department, click on the "Amazon Instant Video store", then scroll down until you see that section titled "Your TV Shows". Every TV show has a "Remove from list" link, and you'll never again be embarrassed by (not that I ever was) a trailing list of shows you don't want to watch.