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Emphatic Wins & Get Rid of AVG

It's been quite a busy week. Other than a fairly busy working week, the only thing that is blogable is me picking up Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 for the Wii for a very very cheap $35 in K-Mart's toy sale. I haven't played it that much yet, so we'll see how that goes.

The weekend went quickly enough. Saturday morning I got a haircut and then spent about an hour or so writing a script to fix some errors on this blog. A few weeks ago, after i got comment-spammed, i deleted the offending spam comments directly out of the database itself, and thus it didn't update the 'number of comments' value for each entry (because it is stored manually for performance reasons).

The script that i wrote basically checked that value against the actual database count for the number of comments per entry, and if inconsistent with the stored value, it updated it. It's been a while since i did some productive coding, so I actually quite relished and enjoyed the challenge.

Today I spent a fair bit of it doing the monthly maintenance for work, which was interrupted by our indoor game. We were playing the top team, and after our recent streak of good games we were quietly confident of picking up a win.

Although I was confident, I wasn't "8-1" confident, which was what the final scoreline was to us. We absolutely hammered them. Undoubtedly they had a bad day, but the extent to which we dominated and controlled the game in almost every way was quite surprising. We haven't played that well in a long time.

The only let-down for me was me missing about 4 or 5 dead easy chances which i put over the bar. I'm not sure what happened; the ball always seemed to kick up from the ground just when i was about to connect with it. I did get one goal though, but after the fourth shocking miss i played the rest of the game mostly defending.

They never really had a look in, and Ben especially was absolutely on fire, scoring 5 goals. The win might put us top of table (which is absolutely amazing considering we started the division way behind in 7th place (out of 8)), and hopefully should put us in a real good position to make the finals.

In IT news of the past few days: if anyone is using the free version of AVG Antivirus 8.0, i strongly recommend that you uninstall it and use the free versions of Avast or Antivir instead. The main reason for it is listed in these Slashdot and Register articles.

AVG, though it's users, are basically bringing many websites to their knees by end-users pre-crawling search-engine results to scan for threats. This is really dodgy and not only causing many websites to under-perform, but also unnecessarily wasting your bandwidth and download quota. Although in the past I have recommended AVG as a free AV program, I've never really been a fan of it (especially with it tagging every email that you send through Outlook noting it's been scanned). Dump it and get a better free Antivirus.

Edit: I see (on Whirlpool no less!) that it seems AVG are backing down from this ridiculous practice. Nevertheless, if a AV company thinks that it would be good to do that kind of thing, i still say dump them and go for something better. For the record, i use Avast.

5 thoughts on “Emphatic Wins & Get Rid of AVG”

  1. Yeah that was my impression after playing it for a short while. We'll see after i properly get into it.

    Nevertheless the Rabbids are still hilarious!

    Reply

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