Wednesday already. Still not found any confirmed work, so chased up a couple of people who promised some. One said 'we should hear back from the client next week', another said 'I'll send you through a spec by the end of the day'. So, I arranged a meeting with my tax guy to sort out my UK tax affairs while I'm here, and took Mee out for a ride on the pushbikes for an hour or so. Then, I escaped on my own down to Jon's house for an hour or so and played around with his new beatbox toy for a bit. I noticed the computer I sorted out for him last year gathering dust in the corner. He said it got a virus, and hasn't worked since, so I offered to give it a service for him.

He dropped it by our house, and I set to work with the hoover. Jon's flat rarely gets cleaned, and the dust that had built up in the fans etc was incredible. Then, I booted it up on the network and transferred his music and data off to the home Samba server. It was a Win2K 'professional' (!) install, with loads of random crappy third-party software installed, plus the fallout from some virus - it needed formatting and starting from scratch. I briefly toyed with the idea of installing Linux/GNOME, but he did say he would need to run Cubase on it. I installed WinXP, and used the 'Add/Remove Programs' control panel to remove Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, and installed Firefox and Thunderbird in their place. I'm very impressed with them, and am considering doing the same on my dad's computer (and grandad's). I also removed Messenger, and installed Exodus. It all works, and he'll probably be surprised to hear he can come and pick it up tomorrow.

Despite being all patched up, he doesn't have any virus software installed. I don't agree with antivirus software - it can't protect against viruses it doesn't yet know about, it slows computers down by having to checking everything for viruses it does know about. Viruses can only survive and spread due to flaws in the design and implementation of a particular operating system. I explained to him that by replacing MSIE and MSOE, I've only reduced his chances of his computer getting infected, not elimated them. He should obviously still keep his updates applied and his fingers crossed!

This evening, we watched Head of State with Chris Rock, which I thought was very amusing. Yesterday, we saw Starsky and Hutch, which was also very amusing. I should also mention Hidalgo, Hellboy and 50 First Dates, which I saw on the planes from Bangkok to London, which were all good films. Mind you, there aren't many films I don't like. I'd never make a good film critic!