On Monday I headed home in the rain just ahead of Typhoon Wipha and found out that Taipei residents should stay home and weather out the storm. I was thrilled that I didn't have to go in to the office, but unfortunately I got a pretty solid case of tonsillitus to accompany me through the storm. I basically slept through the entire day, although I did manage to stay awake long enough to watch a movie in bed on my OQO. Wednesday I woke up feeling worse and determined that a trip to the doctor was necessary. I haven't had very good experiences at the doctor's office here in Taipei, so I was a bit apprehensive, but as soon as they took my temperature (39.3° C) they took my illness a bit more seriously and I got out of there with the proper medication and care instructions.

After a fairly restless night I am back at the office, gave a presentation in a very quiet voice and zapped a nasty trojan off of my colleagues USB drive. She got infected via USB stick last week, reinstalled her system, and today she was about to get reinfected by a different USB drive. Word to the wise folks, don't share USB sticks. I know, you need a 30MB file from your colleague two seats away, but your safest solution is to use Skype to send that file. Skype is smart in that it knows if someone is on the same network as you and will use the fastest route to send files. So if your colleague is sitting two seats away, chances are that Skyping that file to them will actually be faster than walking over to them, putting your thumb drive in their computer, copying the file to it, and walking back to your desk. That and you won't get infected by that same virus that's been making them complain that their computer is slow.