karniv0re's Journal: Systweak Scareware and Probability Models

One of my friends called me at work the other day and said, "So you know when you get a virus and you get this blue screen and it just says to call this number..." I was like, "No. No, that is never a thing."

*sigh*

Sometimes I forget that not all people know basic computer skills such as don't call numbers and get scammed out of hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, they hung up the phone and unplugged the computer just as things were getting hairy (they said the mouse was moving and the "tech support" guy was doing it).

So they brought it over and I took a look-see. It was surprisingly not terrible. It just had a bunch of shit from Systweak, a bullshit Scareware app that flags cookies as "threats." I removed McAffee since it had expired. Never fails, whenever I clean a friend's PC, it's got some old remnant antivirus that stopped working because they didn't buy the license. Just remove that shit, people. There's free shit that works just as well. So I installed Avast! and Malwarebytes, ran scans, and didn't come up with anything. Systweak was the only piece of shit contaminating the whole thing. The rest looked virtually untouched after a year of use. Good work! Let's keep it that way, mmmkay?

Side note: Windows 8 really is a piece of garbage. Fuck is that painful to navigate or do anything - literally anything.

I'm two weeks down on my Probability Models class. First 2 weeks of grad school in the books! Holy shit this is one of the hardest classes I've ever taken too. Way to ease back into things. The thing is, at the time I decided to go to grad school, this was about all I could take that I had the prereqs for. I don't remember shit from college. I mean, things are coming back, but I feel like Wolverine being fused to the adamantium skeleton. I'm going to be stronger after, but it's going to hurt like hell during.

I was kind of excited for this one because it seems pretty applicable to business, but so far, we've hit prob & stats I heavily, real analysis, calculus I & II, various theorems and inequalities not in the book, and the German Tank Problem. Uhhh, we're two weeks in. I'm still catching up on my prob & stats I and calculus. It's been anywhere between 5 and 10 years since I had some of these classes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually enjoying it. I spend just about all my spare time studying/doing homework, but I am not at all resentful. I think I'm just happy to have a higher calling. Something challenging. Something that I can think about, with all the bullshit of work, and remember that there is more to my future than the day-to-day. So I'm going to do this. I will learn Jensen's Inequality, Fubini's Theorem, as many random variable distributions as I can, fundamentals of prob & stats, calculus, Markov Chains, Queuing Theory... whatever else my professor throws at me. For I AM THE INFERNO. I AM LEGION. Little quote from Lamb of God's latest, which I've been jamming almost every day. Though as soon as it's released, I'll be pumping Mgla's new shit, Exercises In Futility. I mean, my God. No words. And such a great title for how I often view my personal and professional life.

Anyway, I need to sleep. Early-ish wakeup tomorrow. Got a clean laptop to deliver bright and early.