Rob's Ramblings

I highly encourage you to sign this petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/cmwo…

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Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Friend in Need
Summary: Emily isn't feeling well, and Hotch decides that what she needs is a friend to help her out.
Category: Hurt/Comfort/Romance
Characters: Emily Prentiss, Aaron Hotchner
Rating: K+
Note: Inspired when I heard that a good friend of mine was having rather a crappy weekend. Thank you to sjhw_tolerance for the beta. As always, I own absolutely nothing, say it again!

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Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: Do I Know You?
Summary: Emily and JJ are visiting Garcia for coffee, but are stunned at what they see when they arrive. Some humorous fluff for Valentine's Day.
Category: Humour/General
Characters: Emily Prentiss, Jennifer Jareau, Penelope Garcia
Rating: K+
Note: I own nothing. Especially not CM, or the things mentioned in this story, though I may want some of them. :) Thank you as always to sjhw_tolerance for the beta.

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Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Hard Day at Work
Summary: What really goes on inside Aaron Hotchner's head?
Category: Humour/Romance
Characters: Aaron Hotchner, Emily Prentiss
Rating: T for language and innuendo
Note: No, I don’t own anything. The challenge was to come up with a first person POV story, using a prompt from the TV Prompt Challenge forum on ff.net

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Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: A Letter to Santa
Summary: Jack Hotchner writes a letter to Santa about his Christmas wish
Category: Family/Romance
Characters: Aaron Hotchner, Jack Hotchner, Emily Prentiss
Rating: Everyone
Note: No, I don’t own anything. Thank you as always to sjhw_tolerance for being a wonderful beta.

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Fandom: Criminal Minds
Title: All About Chap Stick
Summary: Emily Prentiss' adventurous nature takes over one cold day
Category: Random humour
Characters: Primarily Emily Prentiss and Aaron Hotchner
Rating: Whatever the non movie version of PG is
Note: Thank you so much to sjhw_tolerance for the beta. All errors obviously remain mine, especially since this seems to be the first fanfic I've completed in over four years. Scary!

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ILE Closes

It happens way too often in the software industry, but in this case it seemed like a developer who had a clue and actually produced some good products. Certainly ones that I enjoyed playing a lot anyway - and indeed am still playing.

So you have a PC (90% of computers in the world run some form of Windows), with an anti-virus package, and possibly a firewall. You may even run some tools to clean spyware from your machine. So that means you're basically okay, right? Wrong. There's a very good chance that you're not okay at all.

Here's a link to a VERY interesting article on the state of the Computer Security industry:

Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security

And the followup article based on comments posted to the first article:

Community Comments & Feedback to Security Absurdity Article

So where does that leave the average computer user? Are we all going to need to be reformatting our hard drives every month or so and reinstalling our operating systems just to get rid of a particularly sinister root kit? Even Microsoft has admitted that it's becoming impossible to recover from malware problems in an April 2006 article in eWeek magazine. (For more information on rootkits, see this article from eWeek - VM Rootkits: The Next Big Threat?.)

But what to do? My favourite PC mag, Maximum PC, recommends the following computer protection tools:

• Firewall: ZoneAlarm


• Antivirus: AVG Free Edition


• Anti-Spyware: A-Squared


• Rootkit Scanner: Blacklight


• Anti-Malware: Hijack This


• Startup Diagnostic: Windows Defender

All of these, bar Windows Defender which has only two free support incidents, are free - and you probably need to be using all of them on a regular basis. Not just a firewall and an antivirus package. Long gone are the days when you just booted DOS and got on with it.

But all these are just band-aids. The real problem isn't going to go away until there is a fundamental change in operating system design. Even the NSA, the world's largest intelligence agency, thinks that to be the case in it's white paper The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments.

The second article I posted, Comments & Feedback to Security Absurdity Article, has a section towards the end on where Windows Vista fits into the picture. It looks like it definitely will improve things, but it remains to be seen how much. Until then, make sure you're running your firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, rootkit scanner, anti-malware, and startup diagnostic tools regularly.

And before anyone asks, there is no way I'm getting a Mac.

The Lifetime channel is running an online petition to support the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act of 2005, a bipartisan bill that aims to 'ban the practice of "drive-through" mastectomies, when women are forced to leave the hospital just hours after their surgeries and before they are ready to go home.' If you are in the US, I encourage you to go to the site listed below and complete the petition.

Lifetime Breast Cancer Petition

The petition only requires your name, zip code, and email address, and takes less than a minute to complete (depending on how fast you type ;).

Please support this worthwhile cause.