London Again!

4 Mar 2009

Well!

As you may have determined from my somewhat cryptic Twitter updates to my blog earlier this week, I’ve returned to London! After a three month epic battle with various government departments to secure a work permit and reentry visa for the UK, I’m 100% legal to be working and living in the UK.  While I was home, I was working for Spoonfed, enjoying the California sun and family time but it’s about time to be back in London.

Most of this week has been about getting over jet lag and getting reaquainted with the Spoonfed offices but I’m already making plans for a London-full weekend, including a trip to the fantastic Borough Market on the Southbank for fresh produce, homemade baked good and cheeses, and possibly some farm fresh meats. There will definitely be pictures so stay tuned.  Unfortunately the credit crunch has hit the UK as well so there are some unhappy rumours of steep rent increases for stalls at the famous market, potentially driving out some of the regular sellers so I want to make sure I get to enjoy the market in case those rumours come true.

I plan to get back in the swing of updating The Top Floor Flat blog regularly, including more travel trips (plans for trips to Scotland and Ireland are in the works), pictures, videos and general London experiences… you’ll have to give me a few more days to get over the last of the jet lag :).

Travelling Again (Text Message Updates for 2009-03-01)

2 Mar 2009
  • Ugh, landed early now waiting for a gate to open. Yawn, way tired eyen though i did sleep! #
  • And have lost faith in british airways. My seat tv screen didn’t work and crew was horrible! #
  • Whew, through customs, no problems, now trying to figure out these bags on the tube. #
  • Well here I am, back at the top floor flat #

If you can’t Tweet something nice, don’t Tweet nothing at all

18 Feb 2009

The media and internet chatter surrounding Twitter has reached a new height in the last two weeks. This is in large part due to the charity event Twestival, an international party that occurred in almost 200 cities around the world. Twitter users, who found out about, signed up for, and shared the party using social networking tool Twitter, were charged a $5 entry fee for their local event and raised, at last count, over $250,000 for Charity: Water. While this is, as some journalists have been quick to point out, is a far cry below the $1 million organisers had set as a reach target, the unbelievable magnitude of the event, coordinated entirely through short bursts of information no more than 140 characters long and organised in less than one month is a thrilling indication of the power of social media tools to channel a collective consciousness towards good works. I attended the small but enthusiastic group at Twestival Mountain View on 12 February and saw the event in action.

However there are some other Twitter tales that have become part of today’s Twitter talk and these ones aren’t so kindly towards human nature. As with any open communication channel, there is the potential for what should be a private conversation to make its way into the public sphere. What may begin as a misguided attempt at transparency can soon deteriorate into personal attacks viewed by thousands of other Twitter users and eternally cataloged on the net.

A recent and extreme example of this is a conversation between Canadian National Post journalist David George-Cosh and marketing professional April Dunford in which a bad day, a late phone call and a few ill-chosen words led to an expletive-strewn public exchange now being reposted across the web. The Twitter conversation likely will threaten both of their professional lives and has almost certainly disrupted their personal ones. In a slightly less dramatic example, two other professionals received negative attention for what turned into effectively public name calling on the Twitter channels.

Twitter has been extolled for it’s potential professional benefit, particularly when it relates to PR professionals and journalists. It allows instantaneous exchange of information and immediate feedback for ideas, and the opportunity to make or read a pitch short enough to absorb is appealing to many. I’m sure as time goes by I will begin to understand how to interact with other Twitterers in an effective professional capacity but at the moment I find the tool most exciting with regards to online entertainment. I’ve discovered business ideas, new blogs, movie trailers, new software and web apps, heard jokes, found intelligent people sharing their views, and receive updates when my favourite blogs make new posts. As an entertainment tool, Twitter makes it easy for me to learn about and share the web. As a professional tool, I may have to stick to charity events until everyone learns to think before tweeting.

Getting a Summer Job in London

17 Feb 2009

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of people get in touch with questions about how to get a job in London, particularly summer jobs for college students.  Although my experience is fairly different than that of most short-term travelers looking for jobs or internships, I thought I’d make a post to share some tips.

If you’re interested in a job, unfortunately you’ll need to sort out a visa before you leave the States – there is no other legal way to get paid. The best (and as far as I know, only) way for a short term student working visa is through a program called BUNAC which is the one that I used.  They give you a visa and then help you as little or as much as you need finding job and housing once you get to the UK. This is a 6 month visa and the BUNAC program typically recommends using the full time available on the visa. Of course you can leave after less time, and you can also do the program twice while still enrolled in college if you decide you want to go back but it is a bit costly if you’re only going to be there 8-10 weeks.

The other option is trying to find an unpaid internship (in fact there are very VERY few paid internships in the UK and they usually go to college grads). Many US students might be surprised by how common unpaid internships are in all industries but if you are expecting them, it’s less of a shock.  You can look at www.gumtree.com which is the London version of Craigslist. International students often work in pubs or restaurants – and in many cases these jobs provide accomodation as well.  Other professional industries offer internships but these tend to be competitive.

I have loved working in the UK and the BUNAC program makes it easy for students to do so.  If you have the funds to travel and work in an unpaid internship, that would be an amazing experience as well.  Good luck in the UK!

From Virtum-gen to nv4_disp.dll to distorted images: the epic tale of computer scan and rescue

15 Feb 2009

I’ve had a trying last few weeks when it comes to my computer to say the least.

I mentioned in a previous post how during a motherboard replacement operation, the technician removed a giant dust bunny from my computer.  I figured, new internal hardware, dust free insides? I’m good to go.

Unfortunately my problems we just beginning.  Things began to go downhill when I noticed that I was getting a ton of popups, my computer was running slowly and, most unnerving, whenever I did a Google search and clicked on one of the search results, I would be taken to a squeeze page for an affiliate product (in other words, an online advertisement for various products). I was well and truly virus infected and my virus scanners agreed.  I have to believe that some update or upgrade I had made in the past was lost with the new motherboard as I hadn’t changed any browsing habits, and still had the same virus protection as before the operation but now had an effectively worthless computer.  In addition to all that, my main virus software couldn’t even finish a scan to remove the virus as about halfway through I would receive the message:

This system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown initiated by NT Authority\System.
—————–
Windows must now restart because the DCOM Server Process Launcher Service terminated unexpectedly.

I finally learned that to stop the shutdown, I had to type [or copy and paste ] in to “Run” “shutdown -a” but that only allowed me to run the full virus scan, which informed me I was out of luck when it came to removing the thing, apparently a malware/trojan calling itself Virtum-gen.

Several more restarts and new malware removal tools later, I was getting a clean bill of computer health but had been warned that, as with most malware and Trojans, there was no way to ensure the virus hadn’t left backdoors for other viruses to enter, keyloggers to steal my passwords and financial details, and other nasty stuff.  This was confirmed as, despite the clean virus scan, I was still seeing the wrong page when I clicked on Google search results.

With no other real choice, I took the plunge to reformat my computer, literarlly wipe the entire operating system and all files off my computer and start over.  I was NOT a happy camper as all of my nice, expensive programs for which I no longer have the installation software (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Suite, pro virus protection, countless video games… ok, those are probably less important) were gone for good, as well as all my old settings.  Turned out, that was the least of my problems as, without the original installation CDs which are back in London, even with the help of the Dell service reps who walked me through the entire process on the phone, things seemed to have gone badly.

After the reformat, my effectively brand new computer just didn’t want to run properly.  The images were completely distorted (after a few minutes on, and looking at few different windows, it would look as if someone had used a paintbrush to smear everything across the screen).  Then, as if that weren’t enough, the computer would give up entirely, changing to the Blue Screen of Death with the note that the issue was caused by nv4_disp.dll stuck in an infinite loop.

Back on the phone with Dell (who have probably logged over 20 working hours with me amongst all of their employees in the last two and a half weeks) to establish it was a driver problem and install new drivers, old drivers, drivers I’d already installed and had to reinstall.  In the end, one Dell rep decided that all I needed was the new BIOS 14 driver to solve all my problems.

He was about half right.  The computer is… functional.  However I still have the occational distorted graphics, which do tend to disappear after a few moments; and when I type online text boxes (such as forums, blog posts, comment boxes, etc.) the window will hang briefly, during which time the text doesn’t appear when I type and that particular window is frozen.

I’m going to assume this is improved over where I was three weeks ago with a burnt out graphics card on my mother board, but to be honest, I’m pretty sure by this point it would have been cheaper for Dell to just send me a new computer given how much of their employee time has been wasted as they are unable to help me again and again.