Anyone for a game of go-phish?

So after having my email account hijacked, and in the process of preparing a lesson on internet safety for church on Sunday, one of my coworkers came up to me today to ask about an email she'd received, with an executable attachment and the instructions that the IT department was updating some software and needed her to run the attachment.  (My first thoughts were "yeah, right... what's the scam?")

Looking at it, the message appeared to be from "someone" in the IT department, granted someone that I've never heard of, and considering that we have a standing policy that only IT is allowed to install software on anyone's computer, I didn't have any reason to be concerned.

Here's where it gets stoopid: it was not a phishing expedition, no email was being spoofed.  It was a legitimate request from the IT department!!!  Needless to say, I called the help desk to see what they could tell me; I then sent back a few comments about how inappropriate the email was, and received a response DEFENDING the practice! 

Fortunately, our CIO backed me up.

And to get really stooopid: our office manager clicked on the emailed application without even considering that the message should be investigated.

Sciatica

That's what the doctor calls it.  I think it's a royal pain in the butt... or maybe lower back & left leg.

I'm told that time, stretching, and nyproxen will solve my woes.

CHOCOLATE

We received a package from our German exchange student:

The best was either the strawberry filled chocolate or the marsipan filled chocolate.

One more reason not to clean...

A coworker's son had a computer that died.  He was hoping that maybe I could salvage the data for him.  I determined that the power supply was most likely bad.

Plan "A": It's a power supply with a few cables that and that it was of a newer variety that I don't have a spare for.

Plan "B": Swap the hard drive into another machine.  Turns out the hard drive has a cable that I don't recognize.  A little research and I am now introduced to SATA hard drives, but none of the spare part machines are new enough to accept a SATA drive.

Plan "C": Swap the hard drive into the family machine; after all we can always use an extra 250 GB.  So, it's time to open up the family computer and see if there's a SATA port on that mother board... and here's where I make the mistake... as long as I've got the case open (and yes the power's off), I decide I ought to clean out the dust bunnies.

There IS a SATA port, so before installing the new drive, I power back on the computer, and it doesn't boot.  Evidently dust bunnies are critical equipment.

We did have a system crash a couple of months ago, and I had to reinstall Windows, however this time the HDD that Windows was installed on is not being found by BIOS.

Bet I know what I'm doing this weekend...