Cav's Place

Writing this now because I can’t sleep, and the reason why I can’t sleep is that what should have been the last, or next to last, antivirus switch failed. With this last trial of Kaspersky Anti-Virus expiring and seeing that it was quite heavy on resource use and made it particularly difficult to watch live streams in Firefox, I’m quite sure I’ll choose Emsisoft Anti-Malware next month, so the first plan was to try to see whether I can activate a third trial of that as well and then simply keep using it once a license will be purchased, while if that failed I meant to give F-Secure Anti-Virus a chance as well. But neither worked.
Though the previous trial started on version 10, updating to 11 when that was released during that time, Emsisoft said the trial was already used and only gave the option of activating a freeware mode that allows scanning but offers no active protection. And I guess I may yet decide to do that, but at the time I quickly moved on to F-Secure, registering for a trial and waiting for an e-mail with instructions that never arrived, the only one I got asking to verify my address, which I did with no result. So I then tried to download an installer directly, hoping there will be an option to start a trial, but there was no such thing. Then I created an account and checked what options I had, noticing that it was saying I had 29 days left on a trial for three computers and the download it offered had what looked like a serial number in the name, but entering that at the prompt the first installer threw at me didn’t work, while running that file seemed to try to install F-Secure SAFE, which said it was going to uninstall Comodo Firewall if I proceed. Not a suggestion, not an option, but that it will do it, so I closed it and then uninstalled, as it was showing up as installed already.
So now I’m rather up in the air. I can install Emsisoft in that freeware mode and make do with it in order to not have to switch again, I can try one of the other products I was considering but discarded, or I can install one of the free ones that exist, but at the moment I’m waiting for some reply from F-Secure, since I sent a support message and also posted on the boards. Of course, considering the holidays and the weekend, that reply is not likely to be quick, and if it comes it may say that the simple Anti-Virus isn’t available anymore, since it seems relegated to less visible parts of the site and on the Romanian version it’s not even listed at all, or it may say that the installer will force uninstalling other security products anyway, in which case it’s obviously not an option. But I can probably give them a few days, though I’ll be quite worried and more than a little scared during that time, no matter how careful I usually am.

But at least I managed to finish Heiress of Magic on Wednesday, and then also reviewed it last evening. Actually started writing that on Thursday, and it’s in good part based on messages I had sent while reading, but that didn’t make it less difficult to write and the timing didn’t help either. It was already 11:45 PM when I finished reading it again for a few final changes, so I cut it very close, needing to immediately get to uninstalling Kaspersky after that, as the trial was expiring at midnight, and then to the rest of the mess mentioned above.

Otherwise, had a cold last week, so I delayed running until Sunday, when I took it slowly. The target was still 10% above the record and I was closer to actually being that slow that time, but it still went well, the time being 22:04, with intermediate times of 4:52, 10:31 and 17:06, respectively. Then this week’s run was Tuesday, when I pushed just a little more in the middle portion after losing a few seconds when I had to run back and grab the keys which had fallen out of my pocket shortly after starting. You can see that in the times, with 21:52 at the end while the intermediate times were 5:00, 10:33 and 16:52, respectively. And then I ran again Thursday as well, since it was as much as 15°C outside and I wanted to make sure I get the 40th proper run in by the end of the year. Breathing was better, though I still had to breathe out through my mouth almost since the beginning to avoid pretty much blowing my nose whenever I tried to breathe out normally, so the result was 21:27, just missing out on being only 5% slower than the record. Intermediate times were 4:40, 10:13 and 16:35, respectively.