Today I’ve worked most of the day outside the house cleaning and tidying up a bit. Not that that would be some favorite work of me! But today I didn’t mind as for it was a mild and sunny day and after all those weeks of ugly and cold conditions, sun and fresh air outside immediately lifted my mood. You really can feel that your body and brain are suffering for that bit of a change and I reallydo hope winter will be over soon.

During this last week I also had to deal with some nasty Trojan and Spyware on my main Windows Workstation. For years now I had no trouble with that anymore and being on MAC since a while I nearly had forgotten about such things exists first. But related to my researches looking for tools for to use dumping my SMS messages from my old mobile phone I had touched the one or other questionable site and surely one of them did honor this with infecting my workstation with Virtumonde (e.q. Virtumondo, Vundo or MS Juan).

Boy I tell you that is really nasty stuff! First I’ve tried it with the ususal Antispyware tools and Virus Scanner like F-Secure, Avast, Avird, Spybot and Ad-Aware, but even they reported it … None of them was able to remove it finally!!

It is a real shame that all of this products failed and even the knowledge about is is some really clever coded Malware can not balance that. I’m glad about I’m not really depending on this system and so I had the chance to "play" with this situation for a few days running the one or other search and tool over the system … without success! But when I was nearly about to incline and give up going to reinstall the system from scratch, by coincidence I found the info about some really great and free spyware removal tool. It is called Combofix and can get downloaded from that side here: http://virus-protect.org

I used it in German version and I’m not really aware about there is an English equivalent available, but impressively it did the job within minutes while all others scanned and failed for ages. Whoever this might read desperately looking for help removing Vundo … Feel free to contact me in case you should have trouble with the German dialog. I will not mind speaking you through it. It is worth it for sure!

Getting this fixed again my mood already started to lift, but finally the info about some free and ready to use Navigation System (GPS) for the iPhone available through Cydia (http://cydia.xwaves.net), which I immediately did install and test successfully, made the difference and the weekend could start!

Sure, this xGPS is no real replacement for normal GPS, but given the case you are on the road with a rented car or desperately in need to get your direction, I’m sure about you will feel happy about having such a "light" version GPS at hand. Guess it will be hand on the motorbike as well putting the iPhone on top of the fuel tank in front of you.

Thinking about, I guess that were all of the actual news to share …. except the rather good news about: My fishes out in the pond did survive! Yeah!!! Thats Tops

Today we made it to Newport, Rhode Island. Seems to be a rather nice place but it has to wait until tomorrow to get discovered.

We did spend all the morning at some old Shaker Heritage at northern NewYork (state) and it was nice and interesting to see.
Although I’m always a bit skeptical when it come to religious stuff and people do separate because of.

Unfortunately there is not much to report besides Susi (be aware of the spelling Susi the GPS and not Suzi the bike) did again a great job. Switched to scenic route only we passed all the gorgeous landscape … all day long.

Today we did a lot of driving from Lake Placid all over to Niagara Falls … about 560km.

Being aware I would get tired I went for something keeping me happy while driving and ended up with that swet little ready to eat baby carrots. Boy I tell you that can keep you happy and you can eat them without feeling guilty like you would do with chips or chocolate.

And the best … following my grandma they are good for the eyes … :-/ 

She always told me: Boy eat carrots they are good for your eyes! Or have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?!

Now not really sure about that, they are also a great balance for standing your wife feeling bored and just for her own fun starting to argue with Susi (thats the name she gave the female voice of my GPS) about what might be the best direction to take …. :-/

It was somewhat early that year when my brother came up with the news that he had bought some reasonable priced GPS by following some info he had found on the net about this device could easily loaded with a bigger variety of all the famous navigation software packages like TomTom, Navigon or iGo.

Great I said, but didn’t really go into it as for since my time at the German Air Force (no, I wasn’t a pilot) I’m trained in finding my directions by using some good old maps.

So all the years, on all my journeys and trips I’ve never needed more than some more or less recent map about the area I was going to cruise and I never got lost. But it wouldn’t have been my brother coming back to it again and again … at that point we both a very much alike!

Hey have a look an what I have done with it again and again …. until the day he called me with the news: "I’ve ordered one for YOU!!"

Great :-/   That is my brother!  A 100 Euro for nothing I thought!

For what would I ever need a GPS for?! It came like it had to came. I did put it aside all the time, until shortly before this vacation now when my brother told me about he would have some North America Map for me.

Ok, why not I thought and did take it with me finally.

Now believe it or not. This little device does a great job … All the time I keep it navigating me so far. And besides one single issue when the info where to go wasn’t really clear – the good old map did help – I have nothing to complain about it’s route suggestions.

Guess there is a "sorry and thanks" necessary when I will be home again and being able to tell my brother about.