-Bryce

Before

From left to right, we have Matt Wagner, Dave Kearney, Do Kim, myself, Nathan McAffee, and Nathan's neighbor.

   The tactics were pretty loose, but we got better as the day progressed.  We played "air ball" (shooting at each other while taking cover behind inflatable obstacles), and "woodsball" team matches until someone had the bright idea of challenging a large contingent from the Woodinville High School Baseball Team who were there playing that day as well.  We were outnumbered by about 2.5 to one against this large band of high school boys and girls :-)  We acquitted ourselves honorably by taking out about 2 or more of theirs for every player we lost, and won 2 out of four matches by the time we were ready to pack things in.  There were no serious casualties, but a few paintballs did manage to find their way behind Matt's mask (the swelling had gone down considerably by Monday, thankfully :-)

-Bryce

After

75% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

-Bryce

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-Bryce

   This time however, was different:  Following the guidance contained in this article for PCs that aren't domain joined, I took the XP SP2 Media Center PC that serves as our primary desktop at home and kept the renamed administrator account password protected, limited the permissions of our shared primary login, removed it's password, and created another admin account without a password.  I had to make a few permissions tweaks to some files and directories to make Media Center happy among some other apps, but by and large it was truly painless this time.  Switching to admin is a matter of hitting Win+L and clicking over to the "red desktop" and my wife hasn't squeaked once about anything not working as it did before.

   So far it appears to be the most livable luser setup for Windows I've yet seen and I'll probably give this a try on our daughters' spyware server this next weekend :-)  Actually, the Microsoft Anti-Spyware utility has been running for quite a while on their PC and giving it a clean bill of health, but my uncle was not so lucky.  A few weeks ago, he called me up and asked me to drive up to his house up north and help him clean up his family PC.  His teenage kids had been running Kazaa on it for P2P and the machine was literally possessed of virii, spyware, and trojan malware!  Between the McAfee-identified virii (whose prompts my uncle had been ignoring because they were getting drowned out by the din of other pop-ups that were assailing him every time he logged on), and the Microsoft Anti-Spyware depth scans, more than 60 (yes, 60!) threats were identified and removed with apparent success!  If I'd had more time to get into it, I would likely have clean-installed the machine just to be safe but it does appear to be in much better shape now.  I went ahead and set his machine up as a luser box as well and he's been reporting that this is working well for him, though his kids have noted that their P2P apps tend to be much more unstable because their failed attempts to write to locations they shouldn't are apparently not being handled very gracefully ;-)

-Bryce