Friday, May 29, 2009

Finally removed UACINIT.DLL

I worked on my neighbor's Pc for several hours last night. It had malware or spyware called Winav using the Winav.exe and I think it is also known as Winfixer Trojan or something like that. Anyway I could not run any antivirus programs or Antimalware programs like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, they just would not start. I finally got Malwarebytes to start by renaming mbam.exe to a.exe and running that. I then updated and scanned and removed 18 things. Left over was UACINIT.DLL which Malwarebytes said it would remove with a reboot but it kept coming back. I tried manually deleting uacinit.dll but no luck as it's hidden and even my attrib tricks did not work. I finally booted to a bartpe cd and in DOS went to c:\windows\system32 and deleted all files starting with UAC I then had to do the same at c:\windows\system32\drivers as Winfixer runs as a driver. Once done I rebooted normally and my McAfee Virusscan would now run and update etc.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Texas Unemployment Rate Holds 6.7%

The unemployment rate in Texas has held a steady 6.7% since March of 2009. While under the national average of around 8% Texas Unemployment is a serious issue affecting all citizens. One of the major factors impacting employment in Texas is the lower price of oil. When oil is over $100 per barrel parts of Texas boom and employment is easy to find. When oil drops below $60 per barrel the Texas Employment Commission keeps very busy as citizens of Texas look for work anywhere they can find it. Another factor that drives increases and decreases in Texas employment figures are the large corporations that base their G&A resources in cities like Dallas and Plano Texas due to the lower cost of living. This enables them to keep corproate headquarters in more expensive locations like California or New York but keep the IT and Financial folks in Texas to keep costs low. Unfortunately these G&A positions are often elimiated when the economy slows down adding to unemployment figures.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Western State Unemployment Rates

I would have thought that western states like Montana, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming would have fairly low unemployment rates. I had figured that with less people and more space there would be more jobs than people to perform them though likley at lower wages than much of the country. In doing some research about unemployment in Montana, unemployment in Utah, unemployment in Idaho, and Unemployment in Wyoming I was surprised to learn that some of these have unemployment rates nearly the national average of 8%. Utah had one of the lowest unemployment rates at 5.2% Wyoming also comes in low at around 5%. Montana and Idaho surprised me with unemployment rates around 7%. Idaho is nearing 8% unemployment leading the group of western states.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Hydroxycut Recall But Not On Adwords

On May 1 the FDA warned users of Hydroxycut that there is now a Hydroxycut recall in effect and they should stop taking the weight loss supplement immediately. The maker of Hydroxycut volunteered to recall the supplement after one death was reported in connection with Hydroxycut and several reports of liver damage due to taking the weight loss supplement. The FDA listed about 10-15 various Hydroxycut products that were part of the recall. As of yesterday while Google would allow you to bid on the keywords Hydroxycut Recall they would not show the ad despite the quality score being labeled as "great". Could it be that Hydroxycut has told Google no bidding on these keywords? For a short time there were a few Hydroxycut lawyers running ads for those keywords but today no adwords ads are running for the keywords Hydroxycut Recall.