Searching for Tao

For those of you poor bastards still running Windows, my friend Ted has a public service announcement for all of you:

Should you receive an e-mail directing you to the website at familypostcards2008 dot com delete it immediately and do not click on the link contained in the email. Following the link will direct you to a hostile malware related website.

Additional information can be found at the sites below...

• antirootkit.com
• siteadvisor.com
• securityzone.org

It would seem that the virus/spyware/trojan writers are getting pretty smart. Now they send you an email that links to the bad stuff since everyone knows not to open email attachments but somehow, if it comes from a website, it's more legit.

So yeah, don't go there... unless you're not using Windows. In that case, by all means, go and download the file a few hundred times and use up their bandwidth ;-)

That didn't take long. Some enterprising young hacker has come up with a way around Microsoft's key system to allow you to download and use a copy of Vista without paying for it.

Score one for script kiddies of the world I suppose. Though I guess the downside of this is that people will keep using Microsoft's crappy software rather than going to something that actually works.

You'd think that being unemployed with no definite job on the horizon would be a scary thing but so far, I'm rather optimistic. I had a job interview today (details below) and have another one tomorrow. Not only that, but Noreen has been super-awesome and has been sending me job ads she's discovered in travels every day. The market is pretty good in Toronto presently so I'm not too worried.

Today's interview was awesome -- at a nice medium-sized company with a small company atmosphere right downtown. The HR guy was friendly and receptive and the job looked to be exciting.

It's at about this point that you should notice that the tense of the above paragraph is in the past. You see, while I killed on the interview, they ran into one rather important sticking point: They're a 100% Microsoft shop and I don't do Windows.

Now I should make it clear that my position on Windows is not one out of spite. I'm sure there's a lot of really neat things that can be done with Microsoft software. No, I couldn't take the job because frankly, Linux stuff is Very Different from Windows stuff. Sure, if you know one you can work your way through the other, but it's practically unheard of for one person to be straddling both architectures. The technologies are just too foreign to each other.

And so I'm onto the next set of interviews, hoping that the next company is as cool as this last one. But I'm not worried.

Not yet at least.