Congratulations to both the Kamiakin Braves Boys & Girls Track & Field team! Both teams went 7-0, undefeated in the league, and won the League Championship last week. Yesterday they dominated the Big 9 3A District meet and will be sending a number of atheletes on to the Eastern Washington Regionals next week in Spokane.

Full track results can be found on Athletic.net

PS. I took over a thousand photos of the meet and will be uploading them to my collection of 2011 Kamiakin Braves Track & Field photos on Flickr as soon as I cull out duplicates and out of focus photos.

Have always wanted to stop and get some shots of this windmill on SR-26. I like the wooden structure but wish the blades were still attached. The other windmills along the road have plain metal legs that have no character.

Was hoping to get the picture closer to sunset but we were a little too late and the sun set for quite some time. A nice long exposure got the shot but would like a little more color.

I may have to come back later in the year when there is a crop in the field and a little earlier in the evening. May also look at some of the other windmills for close-ups of their blades.

Finally processed the photos from the Columbia Basin Big Nine league meet on April 28th, 2011. This time Kamiakin & Southridge traveled to Yakima to run against West Valley at their Chuck Millard Track.

Links to all the photos can be found below, but here are my favorites from the photos I took:

• Hi-Res Photos @ Flickr: http://bit.ly/h2sNQZ
• Results @ Athletic.net: http://bit.ly/dSF5Y0
• Facebook @ http://on.fb.me/k2voHs

One of the office computers, an XP Pro system, started having problems last week locking up, usually right after starting internet explorer or bringing a running program to the foreground. We would pull up task manager and see that one of the svchost.exe processes was using nearly 100% of cpu cycles. If this process was killed then the computer would once again become usable except that killing svchost.exe has side effects. Many programs tuck their processes into svchost so killing it doesn’t just solve the problem, it will also cause other active programs to lock up when bring them to the foreground later.

I finally sat down to see if I could fix this problem. A preliminary Google search showed that Windows updater is a common cause of this problem. I tried a couple of the fixes with no luck, so started from scratch to examine the problem. The first thing I noticed is that somehow this computer is not running Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). We run MSE as our antivirus program on our XP machines. I must have missed installing it on this computer. The quick scan brings up 2 viruses right away, Rogue:Win32/FakeYak and Trojan:DOS/Alureon.A.

Rogue:Win32/FakeYak was easily removed by MSE but Trojan:DOS/Alureon.A was immune to it. A Google search had multiple sites suggesting TDSS Rootkit Removing Tool (TDSSKiller.exe) from Kaspersky Labs. Sure enough, TDSSKiller made quick work of the virus. Running MSE again found and removed a third virus, TrojanDownloader:Win32/Karagany.A.

The only remaining oddity is that internet explorer will not pull up any website, displaying the error message, “”. I ran ipconfig and noticed that there were no dns servers listed. I checked proxy servers, none. I then checked the network settings, sure enough, the box was selected to specify dns servers but none were listed. Quick fix.

Hopefully this is then end of it. And time to make sure MSE is running on all the machines.

Saw the interesting striated clouds and parallel vapor trails and had to run down to the river for some sunset photos.