With everything else that’s been going on around the house (baby stuff, ripping up the carpets, rearranging furniture, etc), it’s been easy to forget that we’re right in the middle of remodeling the master bathroom. After a couple of weeks of neglect, we got back on the job yesterday.

It was time for the shower walls to be put up, so out came the sand paper and the Liquid Nails. We’re using plastic tub surrounds, and gluing them directly to the drywall. It’s less expensive than tile, and also lower maintenance. These bathrooms used to have tile walls, but one little crack would form in the grout, and it would just suck in the water. The drywall was basically mush when we finally got around to tearing everything out. These surrounds are nice units that come in five pieces, and you just glue them to the walls. The only places you have to watch out for water is in the joints where two pieces meet, but a little bit of caulk solves that problem. A one-piece fiberglass unit would probably be the most maintenance-free, but we didn’t want the hassle of trying to install one of those in a room that’s not only in the middle of a finished house, but that also has the plumbing fixtures already installed. So tub surrounds it is. Now there’s only about fifteen more steps before we have a functional bathroom.

Sometimes it seems like these projects are never going to end, like the house is going to be in this state of disarray forever, and that the pile of tools and trash and materials is just going to migrate from one room to the next. But we’re getting close. The only rooms that still need work are the baby nursery (which sort of has a deadline), the master bedroom and the master bath. Those three are nasty. Everything else has been cleaned, organized, polished, and is ready to show the world.

Slowly. Surely. Hopefully.

Everything at the office is back to normal now. The worm has been stamped out and we’re back online. But Sobig is as big as ever. Usually when a virus outbreak hits, I’ll see three or four copies of it pass across my inbox. This morning when I came in, I found 344 copies of Sobig sitting in my junk mail folder! That might be a little disproportionate to what most people are seeing, since they were all addressed to the webmaster address at my company’s website. But still. No wonder they’re calling this the most prolific worm ever.

The strange thing, though, is that none of them had the actual virus attachment on them. So they’re all harmless, and I didn’t have to worry about my anti-virus software popping up three hundred warning messages. I’m not sure where the attachment got stripped out, though. We have our own Exchange Server running here, and mail comes directly into it. I sure haven’t applied any kind of filters lately. It might be our ISP or someone above them stripping it out, but how does that work if there aren’t any other mail servers it passes through?

Primate Programming, Inc.

What about software testing?

Great apes (hominids) do not have tails, while monkeys do. Research indicates that great apes are very productive in the areas of software maintenance and report writing, while most monkeys will struggle. Monkeys however are great at software testing. So the rule of thumb is, if you don’t have a tail, you can probably program.

We train our baboons specifically for software testing, using various industry-standard testing tools.