The Noblesvillain

After the previous two entries (The Half-Way Point, Iowa and Arrived In South Dakota) I figured I should complete the story.  It is now two weeks since Mark and I returned to Indiana, and yes, we did make it safely.

Days 4, 5, and 6 (the rest of the story)

The story left off on Friday with the Weekend and Monday still remaining.  Saturday morning we (including my folks) hiked one block to have breakfast with two of my former teachers, bz and cz (who gifted Jenny & I with a wedding cake composed of terry cloth and bath soap, plus a personal cook book 11 years ago).  Both of them taught computers, albeit in very different manners.  bz likes to cook and he had a great pile of fruit and a delicious breakfast bread.  When I say breakfast bread, don't think steaming French bread with butter, think monkey bread in a bunt pan.  MMMmmmmm carmel...  Mark enjoyed playing with the three dogs and the adults had excellent conversation.

After lunch Mark and I said our goodbyes to leave to visit Ihlen, MN.  A relative of mine, Brian, was getting his Eagle Scout award on Sunday.  Staying at the Westerburs were Michelle; Brenda, John, and Abigail; Laurie and John; and Mark and myself (oh, and Brian, too).  Mark and I took over Brian's room since Brian was going to be at a band competition in Sioux Falls until very late (Pipestone, for whom Brian is a drum major won 8th place and color guard honors out of 44 bands, most of them much larger).

The Eagle Scout Court of Honor had the right mix of formal regalia and personal touches.  Both Brian's band director and his former scoutmaster took time to demonstrate the impact Brian has had in his leadership roles (writeup in Pipestone Star).  I was so proud to hear about Brian's accomplishments--the Eagle Scout award is just an insignia--it is the impact on people's lives that makes the difference.

[Brian] went on, “My secret to balance is prayer. I pray about things a lot, and I know that God helps me, because I know I couldn’t physically do everything that I do without his help, and that’s a big part of it. I have really been blessed because I have made every Court of Honor, only missed one track meet, and I have made it to every band competition. Things have just worked out where I could be where I needed to be at the time without conflicts.”

Mark sat through both the ceremony and reception very well.  It didn't hurt that there were balloons and his toys at the reception.  I enjoyed catching up with old friends and new ones, some of whom I met in my last trip out when Brenda got married.  My plans to leave the reception after an hour were foiled by the fun time I was having.  Mark and I had an appointment with Travis (a high school running teammate) and Gina an 90 minutes away.

After picking up my camera from the Westerbur's home (it didn't take very good pictures of the reception there...) Mark & I braved a deluge on our way to Windom, MN.  Jenny & I first visited Travis & Gina for their wedding.  We've since visited each time we've passed through Minnesota.  They have a two-year-old, Eli, who I was excited to see again (and he was excited to see the balloon we brought in with us).  Once again leaving later than desired (well, I would have loved to stay even longer, so I should say later than my itinerary desired...) Mark and I got on the road. 

For this evening we didn't have hotel reservations as I wanted to judge the start time of the trip (anticipating that I'd be poor at leaving events on schedule) and how Mark was traveling.  Let me make a note, Mark travels as well as anyone I've ever traveled with!  In addition to some interesting conversation (mostly centering around farm vehicles and construction--he's a blue-collar three year old with a green thumb), he also commented on my driving, and helped to decide where we should eat.  During this long evening of travel he demonstrated true patience as I know how much time he had spent in the car (albeit with frequent stops) this week.  Now we were driving late into the night and he did his best to keep me entertained (I think the 'turbines' or 'wind mills' on Buffalo Ridge were the favorites of both of us see: Wikipedia's Buffalo Ridge Wind Farm).  Because Mark was being such a great traveler and to keep the following day's drive short, we pressed on until past midnight (and past Des Moines, too).  There's a good story here about my new toy, a Garmin Nuvi 200 (a car navigation system) and how it helped me find a place to stay, but that will need to wait for another post.  By turning the corner from I-35 to I-80 in Iowa we were close to half way home, and a good thing since we would loose an hour going back to Eastern Daylight Time.

The next morning (now Monday) we got up, ate a continental breakfast, and got back on the road.  We had brunch at a great restaurant called the Machine Shed (any restaurant that has a tractor in front of it and gives a John Deere to kids along with their crayons for pre-meal entertainment deserves our patronage).  We also stopped at an Iowa rest area with a look out tower, a covered bridge, and a great play area (it also had free wireless Internet, a fact which I tried to ignore despite the fact I didn't know how my Fantasy Football team fared the day before).  At this point Mark started to wish he was home, but in a wistful manner, not yet a 'complainy' way (he went from wistful to excited, so no worries about a turn for the worse).  We went past an implement factory that has two tractors 'stuck' in the ground nose first with a full, bigger-than-you've-ever-seen plow sticking six stories straight up in the sky.  In Peoria we saw the Caterpillar Headquarters and lots of new equipment (both static and on flatbeds on the Interstate).  Getting close to home we saw lots of combine harvesters and grain trucks.

I'll wrap this up with a comment that I enjoyed this trip thoroughly.  Prepared to endure a 'moderate ordeal' my mental state set expectations at a level where Mark was a dream traveling companion.  We logged more than two thousand miles and 26+ hours of driving, but he only complained twice (sometimes we break that record before breakfast).  While our Dodge Caravan does have a DVD player, Mark watched two half hour videos two different times usually at a point where it was after his bed time.  I have an odd satisfied feeling about this trip.  Not only was I present at Brian's Eagle Scout ceremony (the reason for the trip) but I spent time with my family and created some special memories with Mark.  Driving (as opposed to flying) was the right decision.  I feel a little guilty 'stealing' this special time with Mark. I'll just need to schedule something similar with both Adam and to make sure Jenny & I get a special trip like this for ourselves also sometime.

For the first two posts I didn't have pictures.  For this post I have pictures but they're on the wrong computer. Rather than move them for this post, I decided I'd gather images from this trip and post them together.  I owe my 'regular' correspondents a picture update in any case.

If you missed Day 1 (Indiana to Iowa), you can read about the trip that Mark and I are taking. (The second part of this post covers some malware checking tips.)

Days 2 & 3

After two days of travel, Mark & I arrived (yesterday) at my folk's house in South Dakota.  Yesterday's travel was around eight hours total, seven hours of it moving.  The speed limit in Illinois is 65, 70 in Iowa, and 75 in South Dakota (one wonders if it would would continue if we kept going West ).  The total mileage (including side trips) for the two days was 915 miles, approx 13 hours.

Mark remained patient throughout the trip aided by numerous combines harvesting, irrigation systems (sitting idle), and one Fire Engine video playing on the DVD player.  He didn't take a nap but was in a good mood kept his nice temperament even when Grandpa and Grandma kept him up somewhat late.  Mark got a rare treat by sleeping in a twin bed and new (to him) toys to accompany his slumber.

I wasn't able to post yesterday because there have been some issues with the computer here (more on that later).  This morning started early, but since Grandpa Marv was up early, he took care of spoiling feeding Mark breakfast (drinking yogurt from one of the kid-friendly cups).  I arose around 9am (dawdling since I didn't hear anything disastrous) to find Mark sipping his yogurt while watching PBS Kids in his PJ's.

Today's planned activity was going to the Zoo.  Even though the weather looked like this:
It was overcast and looked ugly, but the rain was past and we had the zoo to ourselves (actually we shared it with an abundance of wildlife, but you probably gathered that).  When visiting the zoo with a three-year-old, you should be ready for surprised.  The highlight for Mark was seeing the ducks and geese.  He was not interested in the jumping kangaroos at all...  He did show proper attention to the white Bengal tiger.  I'll see if I can copy some images over.  If so, I'll edit this post.  In all we spent about two hours looking at the wonderful aviary, monkeys, waterfowl, and some big animals.  He got to hear a donkey braying, chickens crowing and chirping, ducks and geese sounding, and lemur's shouting.  He thought the gray foxes were 'cute and tiny' (ti-ny being two syllables).

We needed to awaken Mark from his nap today as the neighbor was getting a new sidewalk poured.  Mark had slept for perhaps two hours (one can never tell when the playing stops can the sleeping begins) when the cement truck showed up.  He had already missed the street sweeper/leaf sucker go by and I didn't want him to miss out on everything!  Grandpa took a nap also (Grandma was off playing for a funeral) so felt encumbered to nap as well.  This evening we got to see friends Chuck & Helen (they helped build our church in Indiana and were how we got introduced to Bethel Lutheran), Jean, and Mavone.  Grandma finished the day by playing matching cards with Mark.  He had a great time choosing three cards that would match to create a dump truck or police car.  Tomorrow we eat breakfast with BZ and CZ, but that's another post.

Computer Repair

Today I've been downloading and running virus and malware scanners on my folk's PC that I set up for them two years ago.  I've put Mark to bed and think that I've figured out the problem.  When searching, this computer would bring up a list of results that looked legitimate, but the sites that they linked to would be pay-per-click advertising.  Some sort of nasty landed in the computer that subverted the search.  When trying to download some of the tools to check and fix this, the web browser wouldn't permit browsing of these sites.

[grrrr....I'm retyping much of this part of the post due to the computer eating it...next time I won't click the spell-check button...]

Warning, geek stuff follows...

I suspected that there was an issue with DNS lookups because both Firefox and IE were having the same problems.  Most sites would load fine but search sites would show incorrect results (sometimes using Google's Russian pages) and the links to AdAware and SpyBot Search & Destroy were not going through.  When I encountered (and fixed) this problem six months ago (using Microsoft's Remote Assistance, which worked great!) I learned that I could get to those sites by using an IP address, but not directly.

Being present at the computer allowed me to download several spyware detection programs.  Many different things were found (each program turning up different items), but the problem did not go away (despite the programs indicating successful removal of the offending files/reg entries).  I finally discovered a helpful forum posting of a user with the same symptoms.  In the end, I needed to go to my Network Settings, TCP/IP properties, and to set the DNS server to automatically be obtained from my IP.  While the malware had been removed, the side effect of setting up a custom DNS server hadn't been reset and this trick was needed to make things right.

I did find two very good posts about deleting malware found on your computer.

• Boot into safe mode.  This has the best chance of not loading any nasties along the way
• Run several free malware/adware/grayware checkers.  I found each one works differently and looks for different things.
• Run a series of on-line malware checkers (adding to the variety of checks and increasing the potential of finding something)
• Turn off System Restore, reboot, turn ON System Restore.  This will delete any old system restore points that will likely be corrupted by the malware that you just removed from your machine.

I hope this helps someone (perhaps me, the next time I need it) to clean an infected computer and perhaps save some time doing it.

Just for fun (and to allow me to compare later), here's my folk's speed chart from DSLReports:

Edit: another test from 2008 09 27

Mark and I are taking a trip.  We're taking a long trip.  Today we began our journey from Indiana to South Dakota (right-to-left below).  The twelve-hour trip is long enough on its own without having keep a three-year-old interested.   To give ourselves a better chance to arrive in good spirits, I choose a half-way point that split the drive into two even days.

Day 1 (364 mi -- 6 hours) & Day 2 (495 miles -- 7 hours)

Using Priceline, I got a (really) good deal at the Marriott Convention Center.  Had I not had an unchangeable reservation, I probably would have pushed further to get to Des Moines since the day went so well.  Mark & I were on the road a little after 8am.  We stopped at a rest area, for a long lunch at a Burger King (where Mark played with four girls on the play equipment), and more than an hour at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum (it had both history and squirrels to keep us both occupied) and we still managed to arrive at the Marriott at the proscribed 4pm check-in time.

Here are some photos from Flickr tagged with Hoover Birthplace.  I'll add a more personal picture when I remember to bring the camera in with me...

We settled into the room and unpacked some.  I'm using a "2-person" tent and his regular crib (I mean big boy) mattress for Mark's sleeping accommodations.  Since he'll be going to sleep well before I choose to, I tried to partition some space for him.

The day wasn't quite ideal, though...We ate some pizza for supper and then headed to watch Mark's first movie in a theater.  The movie was Ratatouille which was the only G-rated movie showing.  We made it through the advertisements, the one preview, and the Pixar short ("Lifted") just fine.  However, ten minutes into the feature there was a lightning scene closely followed by another scene with a series of loud pops and violent jump cuts.  This was too much excitement for the just-turned-three year old and we left the theater.  To chase out the scary thoughts we watched a video feature about Tractor Trailers on the half-hour drive back to the hotel.

Mark is now 'asleep' in his tent.  I'm typing a blog.  It has been a very good day all things considered.  Oh, and I'm really excited about my birthday present from Jenny, a car navigation system.  That will have to be another post...