Turns out it’s a social networking fish bot (not to be confused with a phish bot) which randomly connects two AIM ID’s together and gives a spurious message to both to get the conversation flowing as well as much hilarity as one accuses the other of initiating the conversation.

After much confusion and then amusement, I had a lovely chat with my random person – a 26 year old film major from San Francisco who loves The Smiths and Joy Division – about everything from the current economic climate to the fact that we both love music from the decade we were born rather than stuff that is around now and how Americans get rather confused about how Britain, the UK, England, Scotland and Wales all fit together.

It was random and totally anonymous but ultimately harmless and rather fun. It also highlighted for me that the world isn’t as big as you sometimes may think and the internet can be brilliant and surprising.

More links:
The AIM FishBot Phenomenon
Got a random IM message?
AIM Fish (not Phish) bots
Project Upsteam Screen Names
The Missing Hat

This morning I turn on GN-01 and, again, she takes a good twenty minutes to boot up. So I check the eventvwr and what do I see? Two weird entries, one for {F4524160-9145-49C9-8810-46CBC1EA0021} and one for KService.exe which has failed to load several times over. So I search the registry and discover that they are the same thing. I don’t recognise the name or the self-named directory it is sitting in. It isn’t in my Add/Remove Programs listing and I don’t recognise publisher, Kontiki, listed in the apps properties.

Like all good geeks I hit Google and what do I find? It’s peer-to-peer sharing service which most consider malware and Sky Anytime has apparantly installed it. As the Sky service is more than a little bit poo, I decided to uninstall it and see if that resolved the problem. Windows uninstalled the Sky Anytime application but not the KService itself, so with a bit more searching I found some references to KClean.exe at PC Doctor (where I downloaded a copy), the Sky website & AskJack at the Guardian and used that to clean up after KService, followed up with ensuring that it was gone by following the the manual instructions on Geoff’s Blog and checking references to the CLSID and KService.exe itself in my registry. The only thing that hadn’t been changed was the Service actually disabled, it was still set to Automatic, and the files deleted. Those done I rebooted to see what would happen and after several hours of chkdsk running again, boot-up time has once again been reduced to one minute or less.

Today, however, I started to play with the View menu for the first time and discovered some options that I didn’t even know were there. It all started when Jo announced that she wanted to get all her album’s into iTunes on her profile as she was going to purchase an 80GB iPod and iTrip so she had everything in the car. When I was mucking around with setting it all up, I found the MiniStore option in iTunes and quite liked it. As it was disabled on my profile, I had to hunt to find it and then I stumbled across something wonderful…..Album View and Cover Flow View.

For those of you who just had a WTF? reaction the same as I, here are some screenshots. The blue bit at the bottom of the screen is the MniStore in action, giving me recommendations based on what I am looking at:

The normal, default List View:

The rather cool Album View which groups the List View in a much nicer manner in my opinion:

The very gorgeous Cover Flow View in normal browser mode….

….and in full-screen mode:

In Cover Flow View, you can either use the scrollbar to move through your selection or mouse click on the album you want to scroll through it. Love the reflections and the immediate tactility of it all, much nicer than Windows MCE if you ask me. In a cannot see the woods for the trees kind of way, these are not only available from the View menu but also the three buttons immediately to the left of the search box. How on earth did I miss these up until now?

Laura: Are you two being geeky?
Justin: *winding her up* Yeah, so I think I have a terabyte of storage….
Laura: Terabyte? Is that a dinosaur?

I am still chuckling now……

For those of you who are also not aware, the IP address 127.0.0.1 is your home addres i.e. how your PC knows itself. If you try to connect to 127.0.0.1 you are trying to connect to the machine you are on.I read this and had a big grin on my face – which I had to hide as I was at work at the time. In just goes to show that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Maybe this guy should get an IT Darwin award?

Microsoft closed their un-moderated chat rooms back in October 2003 in Europe, Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia due to the high number of children using the rooms and potentially being “groomed” by adults with not very nice intentions (to put it politely). Microsoft did come under fire as many thought that their noble intentions were actually masking the fact that Microsoft could save quite a bit of cash by closing the free rooms and moving the subscription based services in the US.
Yahoo still have a huge amount of chat rooms on offer. All of them are free and many of them user created i.e. individuals create the rooms and they remain open for as long as the individual remains online. Most of the rooms that are user created, however, are adult in nature with many of them populated by “bots” which sit there advertising adult web sites and services based in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

With many businesses using either Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) it will be interesting to see how much of the home market IM share Microsoft can claw back with these changes.

Linkage: I use the fantastic Messenger Plus add-in for MSN which allows to disable many of the annoying features of MSNM and make it more user friendly – try it, you’ll like it.