At work we were cut off from the world for a few days. On Thursday last week all the computers started playing up, and it turned out that a worm had somehow got past all the firewalls and virus checkers and infected just about every computer in the country.

It was a very persistant worm. As soon as a PC was cleaned it got re-infected and if the AV software was updated, it kept generating a message saying it had found and cleaned the infection. Again. And again. It basically had to isolate all the sub nets while they went to work. It goes without saying that external e-mail was out, and connections to the proxy server for the Internet was out as well. Even worse than that, we could not even access network drives at all. This state of affairs continued for Friday as well.

The real surprise was that we still had no Internet or external mail on Monday morning. Access to the Internet only came back during Tuesday.

With all that in mind, I decided it was about I actually installed a virus checker at home. I had been meaning to for some time but never got round to it. I downloaded the free version of AVG. While I was in the mood for freeware, I also downloaded PhotoFiltre, which is pretty nifty. I wanted to edit a picture and realised that when I got the new PC I didn’t bother transferring across my old image editing software. This one did the trick, as you can see on the aerial photo of Broadfield on my web site. OK, its not terribly professional, but I have no artistic talent and it was my first go with a new package.