So what drew me to the NSA? Two words: computers and spies. The recruiter told me that they had lots of fascinating jobs for brilliant computer scientists, but couldn’t tell me what they were since they were all classified. Still, computers and spies. And OK, they were going to pay me, which seemed like a really cool prospect.

I also got a free trip to Maryland for interviews and screening. For example, there was a psychological evaluation wherein they used sly and subtle questions to determine if I was suffering from some psychotic disorder, like “True or False: People are out to get me” and “True or False: I think Nixon was a good president.”

For one portion of the interview, I was escorted into a real working NSA building at Fort Meade. There were red flashing siren lights on the ceiling and lots of people scurrying about yelling things like, “Red badge in the area!”  It was all pretty exciting — what kind of crisis could possibly be underway? Then I realized that it was all because of me. A “red badge” is a visitor without a security clearance, and they had to be sure no one accidentally disclosed the location of the secret box from Sneakers or something.

The polygraph test was pretty much like they say in the NSA video. They tell you word-for-word what all of the questions will be in advance, and they are all yes or no questions. The questions are in one of two categories: (1) stuff they already know, and (2) stuff they want to know. In the first category are things like my name and address — that is, “Is your name Eric James Smith?” These are all to be answered “yes”, and set a baseline. Stuff they want to know includes things like whether I’ve used illegal drugs, if I intend to divulge classified information to foreign spies, and whether I’ve engaged in any adult homosexual activity.

Early in the test, the examiner asked me if I lived at such and such address, to which I honestly replied, “No”. There was a little confused silence that I wasn’t allowed to remedy since I was just supposed to answer the questions. Eventually he figured out that he had read my address wrong. After that, things went pretty smoothly.

“Have you engaged in espionage against the United States?”

“No.”

“Have you engaged in any adult homosexual activity?”

“No.”

“Is your name Eric James Smith?”

“Yes.”

And so on. Most of the questions were repeated a few times. The one about homosexuality seemed to be coming up a lot. After answering it truthfully several times, it came up yet again. Oh my gosh! He thinks I’m gay!!! Somehow a simple yes or no question, when repeated enough times, starts to sound like an accusation. It’s like, “I don’t believe your last response, so let me give you another chance. The truth this time!” Did I have some kind of physiological response on that one? I’m surprised the machine didn’t burst into flames like in The Simpsons. Even though I’m not secretly/openly/questionably gay, I’m sure there was a big spike on the chart when I suddenly thought that he thought I was lying.

Here’s a copy of the official polygraph report, which I got by filing a FOIA request several years later (gray redactions mine, black redactions theirs):

Polygraph Report (Click to enlarge)

In the end, I didn’t get the job. Maybe it was because I had lived at 15 different addresses in three countries over the previous five years, along with travel to three additional countries, and nobody wanted to background check all of that for an intern. Maybe I wasn’t a brilliant enough computer scientist. Or maybe they just didn’t trust that my lifestyle was in-bounds.

I’m beta testing a wireless music player right now. It’s one of those things that’s awesome when it works — instant access to all my music, streaming music from Pandora, podcasts from MediaFly — but it unfortunately needs a lot of TLC at this stage to keep it working. Sometimes an app (MediaFly) will take the device over and only surrender with a factory reset. Sometimes a firmware update (which come fast and frequent since the device is still in development) will break something completely.

I got a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo for Christmas. It’s basically a little Linux computer with a big hard drive. I can play my music off it (see above), use it as a print server for my home network, and send backups to it. Again, it’s pretty cool, but getting it set up was a bit of a trick. For example, while it was fairly easy to get the print server set up. It was not as easy to figure out how to get it set up so that print jobs didn’t have a two minute delay before they were processed.

Another Christmas gift was an LG BD390 — a network video and Blu-Ray player. The reviews I read were all pretty glowy, but things were rocky right from the start. As soon as I got it set up, it said that there was a firmware update. I couldn’t, however, get it to actually download. The wireless connection seemed extraordinarily shaky despite having a clear line of sight to my router (maybe 25 ft away), and of all the streaming content available, only Vudu seemed to work reliably. Of course, once I got support on the phone, the firmware update worked right away.

After Netflix streaming worked maybe twice in fifty attempts, I got back on the phone. It was an unpleasant experience wherein the support person continued to proffer bat guano explanations as to why it wasn’t working. That’s a metaphor, by the way. Real bat guano would probably gum things up pretty bad as well. But I didn’t take it very gracefully, so he told me to try a wired connection and left it at that. It didn’t help. It’s now waiting for FedEx to ship off on what I hope to be a quest of self-enlightenment at the repair center.

Finally I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage all my passwords in such a way that they are accessible on my Palm Pre. I’ve used KeePass for years with a synchronized folder that makes the database available at work, too. There’s no client for webOS, though, and no particularly easy way to sync the database even if there were. I looked at Passpack for a while, which I can access through the Pre’s browser, but it is kind of slow and not very mobile friendly. I’ve been trying LastPass more recently since they have a beta version of a webOS client. It doesn’t quite feel right to me, though. For one, they need desperately to get a graphic designer. Also, the desktop application is a browser plug-in, and there are lots of information bar prompts like the browser’s built-in password manager, only more confusing. There’s a distinct loss of control. For example, I changed my password on a site using LastPass and it didn’t update the existing site entry. Instead it created a new, uncategorized site entry with the new password. I don’t think it’s going to work out.

So, I feel like I’m living this sort of meta-life. I’m not enjoying music, I’m fiddling with the player. I’m not watching movies, I’m arguing with tech support. I’m not visiting interesting web sites, I’m trying to get ubiquitous access to my passwords. (I’m not sure what the real-life activity is for a NAS. Maybe futzing with it is the “real” activity.) But in spite of all this, I still find myself thinking, “How can I get a computer into the kitchen? It’d be nice to replace my kids’ magnetic chore chart with a slick application that rotates everything around automatically…” Maybe it’s a disease of some kind.

Usually in a situation like this, I use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. The scans I ran that way didn’t find anything, though.

Other information on the internet suggests booting the system in Safe Mode and running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to clean the system. This also didn’t work.

There are several sites that give manual removal instructions. On my friend’s system, none of the binaries or registry keys from the instructions existed.

Here’s what I did that appears to have worked:

1. Get a copy of Process Explorer, probably easiest done on another machine and put on a USB flash drive.
2. Boot the computer normally.
3. Let the race begin. Start Process Explorer before Antivirus System Pro does.
4. Bring up Antivirus System Pro’s scan window.
5. Use the Process Explorer’s “Find Window’s Process” tool by dragging it over the scan window.
6. Now you know the executable that is Antivirus System Pro, which was bsuhsysgaurd.exe on my friend’s machine.
7. By showing the “Image Path” column in Process Explorer, you can also see where it is running from.
8. Go ahead and kill the process. It feels good.
9. Delete the executable.
10. Search the registry for references to the executable and delete those (such as from Start keys).
11. Get rid of the proxy in IE by going to Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings and uncheck “Use a proxy server for your LAN”.

I also installed the newly free Microsoft Security Essentials on my friend’s machine, since although there was a version of MacAfee on there, it was FUBAR. I’m not sure if that was something Antivirus System Pro had accomplished or if it being that way was what let the malware through in the first place.

All seems well for now…

My number one complaint about cell service, and what kept me from getting one until about a year ago, is that I couldn’t see paying $40 a month for something I didn’t think I’d use that much. But then I had a look at T-Mobile’s prepaid plan. I think I saw someone mention it on a Windows Mobile forum or something, because up to that point I had the general impression that prepaid was a way of extorting people who didn’t have good enough credit to get a “real” plan.

It turns out that T-Mobile’s plan is really not bad. Unlike other carriers’ prepaid plans (cough AT&T cough) where, on top of actual minutes used, they ding you a dollar for any day that you push the green button, with T-Mobile, you just pay for minutes.  If you pay $100, you get your minutes for something like 10 cents each, and you have a year to use them up. If you’re the type of person who does casual math, you might be saying, “A hundred bucks for 1000 minutes!?! What a rip! I get three bajillion minutes a month for only sixty bucks!” You probably also talk a lot.

For me, it’s a great deal. I’m coming up on my one year anniversary on this plan, and I still have… hang on while I check… 25 minutes of my original 1000 left. That means that over the course of the year, I’ve paid an average of $8.30 a month for cell service.

I use my cell phone whenever it’s convenient, but if I’m at home, I use my land-line instead. I did need to make one adjustment mid-year when the minutes trajectory changed drastically: when I changed jobs, my wife didn’t have easy access to my new work number and called my cell instead. It just took putting my new work number on the home speed-dial to fix that, though.

Now if there were just an affordable way to get a data plan…

Author’s Note: I don’t work for T-Mobile, don’t personally know anyone who does, and didn’t get anything for writing this posting.

As part of the company internal celebration, there was a video contest with fairly liberal rules: One minute in length or less, something to do with mice.

Here is my prize-winning entry:

Watch the Video

Unfortunately, the Essential features are on or off — there’s no way to just dip a toe into “advanced” features. If you venture into such financial rocket-science as splitting a transaction across categories or adding a memo to a transaction, you have to surrender the streamlined UI and switch completely to the Advanced Register. Some Essential features are just broken, like credit card payments not counting as expenses in reports (since the credit card transactions already account for those expenses). The documentation explains it exactly how it should work, but apparently someone forgot to tell the developers. So while the Essential UI showed promise, it was ultimately just disappointing.

After some guilty months of ignoring my finances, I thought, “Heck, I’m a software engineer. I’ll just write my own application.” How hard could it be? With a database and a grid control I’d be halfway there. Of course, there’s the critical part about downloading transactions… There’s probably some standard protocols for that somewhere. Then I noticed line at the bottom of the account register in Money:

Account information provided by Yodlee, Inc. or your financial institution’s online services.

What’s Yodlee?

A quick Google search led me Yodlee and Mint.com, both online applications for personal finance. The consensus seemed to be:

• Yodlee: More powerful
• Mint.com: Built on Yodlee services, better UI

I went straight for Mint.com.

These are the things that I’ve come to like about Mint.com:

• It does have a pretty nice, AJAX UI.
• I was able to connect it to all my financial institutions, including things like PayPal, my mortgage and 529 savings accounts, which I could never figure out with MS Money.
• Since the application is running on a server, it knows what’s going on without me having to download transactions (or even boot my home machine), and can send me alerts about potentially interesting things like large transactions, budget overruns, etc.
• It sends a nice financial summary each week to both me and my wife.
• It’s free.

What about concerns?

Security is a pretty important consideration, but they seem to have done a reasonable job being at least as secure as your bank.

Their business model is around making sponsored recommendations based on your financial situation. For example, if you’ve got a high-interest credit card, they’ll recommend a lower interest alternative. Hopefully that model is sustainable.

There are still some bugs in the system. One of my accounts won’t update (I’ve got an open ticket on that one), and my budget disappeared for a little while.

Despite these, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ve found a superior alternative to Quicken and Money.