I just want to share with you an article written by my sister, Karen. In this article she shares her moving story, with the hope that others who are going through difficult ordeals in their lives may find strength and inspiration.

Losing Dana

by Karen Develos-Sacdalan, M.A.

August 3, 2006 at 11:45pm, my husband John handed over an envelope; a piece of paper that seemed so innocuous but in truth contained a devastating content that drastically altered our lives forever…

Early March 2006, I learned that I was almost 8 weeks pregnant. Admittedly, I couldn’t readily welcome the idea of another pregnancy because I was unprepared for it. I cried for several nights thinking of those long-haul adjustments in practically all facets of my life—physical, emotional, psychological, and mental. My first daughter, Ria, just turned one year old, and I have barely begun weaning her. The thought of devoting 24/7 to another equally demanding, helpless infant was simply nerve-wracking to say the least. On top of all these, just a month before I had started to work in a new field of church-based ministry on a full-time basis.

I’m certainly unlike other mothers who are lucky enough to breeze through their pregnancies like it was the most natural thing in the world; I guess, it just isn’t in my natural makeup. From early on my pregnancy was beset by problems. For instance, I was compelled to go on bed rest for 15 days because of a threatened abortion. This was something I had gone through before, and I dreaded the thought of being helpless and practically incapacitated again in bed, but I didn’t have a choice but go through it to ensure that the baby will not be harmed in any way. In spite of my earlier misgivings, I had come to accept the reality that I would soon be a mother of two, and I was now responsible for the life of another human being.

As my pregnancy term progressed, my anxiety gradually disappeared. In fact, it was replaced by delight and grand expectations of the new life bulging slowly inside me. Alongside, we had some major lifestyle adjustments—purposely to prepare for our growing family. We moved into a new house which had bigger space and was strategically located nearest to my workplace. We had carefully taken serious consideration of how well we could best care for the welfare of our soon-to-be newborn.

Late June 2006, we were overjoyed to learn that we were having another baby girl. This was another definite blessing, and I could barely contain my happiness at having another girl (my preference actually). By then I was sailing through a relatively easy pregnancy experience. “Been there, done that—so this one will come in easy,” as I put it.

We gave her a name — Danella, meaning ‘wise,’ which we got from a baby book of names. We also gave her a nickname, “Dana,” after Dana Reeves, wife of Christopher Reeves, who recently died after a bout with lung cancer. Dana fought courageously alongside her quadriplegic husband until his untimely demise; she herself fought valiantly against the ravages of her own body and has been a source of inspiration to citizens across the globe. We wanted Dana to grow up knowing that she had been named after a great, courageous woman.

July 20, 2006, on my 31st week, I woke up feeling unwell. My body felt very heavy and bloated. I forced myself not to dwell on the pain and managed to report to work thinking that it was just one of those early morning sickness symptoms. However, my body kept sending me whipping episodes of pain and I finally decided to pay my OB a visit.

I was escorted to the Delivery Room, had an internal examination and underwent cardio reading of our baby’s heartbeat. They also performed tocolysis, a diagnosis and treatment of premature labor contractions. I felt my body and mind fighting against these contractions; with every heave of pain I kept thinking, I want to keep my baby. I stayed focused and determined that I would be just as fine. I reminded myself over and over, all of this is ‘in His hands.’

A few minutes later, the laboratory test results came out and eased my worries away. My baby and I got an 8/8 positive biophysical ultrasound results, which is equivalent to a grade of A, had we taken an academic exam. After an overnight stay in the hospital, I was discharged. I was told to go on bed rest for another week to regain strength and to keep our baby in the best position possible.

I stayed in bed as instructed; hoping all will be well eventually. I managed to keep away for any stress-related elements and at the same time kept my mind away from idleness. I read several books, those I had promised myself to finish whenever I had more time—and I did. Even the newspapers that hardly contained anything encouraging didn’t get spared. So it seemed that everything was well again except for my roller coaster emotional battle. Oftentimes I would find myself in such distraught conditions. Maybe I was being hormonal and all that but I slowly felt so insecure, and unconfident about a lot of things. Surely, the worst part of being into bed rest is dealing with the emotional pitfalls.

August 2, 2006, the second onslaught of contractions came and this time they were more intense and agonizingly painful. Around 5:00 pm the pain became even more intense, and so I sent a text message to my husband John to hurry back home. I waited until he came home at 9:00pm —four agonizing hours of waiting seemed forever! I was rushed to the hospital and the medical staff immediately performed what I now presume to be their SOP when someone in labor is cursing the world already.

They took me to the cardio machine to hear the baby’s heartbeat. They tried to listen for about 15 minutes. Three resident doctors took turns trying to locate the heartbeat but they all failed to hear any. As they waited for my OB, who was also the chairman of the hospital, I was simply asked to wait—lying flat on my back with the stillness of waiting compounded by the excruciating pain of the frequent contractions. At that moment, the pain that was draining my energy away was coupled with fear and confusion. Why aren’t there any heartbeats? I feared the worst, but hung on to the very last tinge of hope I could find in my heart. When my OB came, he tried to explain the whole situation I was undergoing. I had to go a belly ultrasound.

Rattled, tensed, panicky, with a heaving, enormous belly anxious to be examined. While they were going about the examination, I mustered enough courage to inquire about my baby’s condition. I was in terrible pain and I deserved some clear explanation. But all that my OB could say was—“Mamaya, usap tayo.” (‘We will talk later’). My heart sunk. I somehow understood it. I tried to grasp the reality that was unfolding before me.

John was waiting outside; I suspected that he must have already been informed of the results. I prayed in my heart that I would be spared from the inevitable moment of truth—yet at the same time, I was anxious to hear the exact words.

And then the dreadful words came—“I am so sorry, but your baby is GONE. From the ultrasound results I can estimate that she’s been DEAD for almost 2 to 3 days…”

I stared numbly at him and blurted out, “Are you sure?! You said she was ok last week!” and I began crying violently while trying to understand, trying to seek the answers to my millions of ‘whys’. My OB couldn’t give me any outright answers at that moment as to why this thing happened. He could only give me the answers until after he examined the dead fetus. DEAD. The words hung in the air, but I couldn’t seem to grasp their meaning.

My OB continued to explain that based on the ultrasound findings my baby’s parietal skull bones had collapsed already and her size indicated a 27-week old reading as opposed to the 34-week old reading that she’s supposed to have.

They took me back to the Delivery Room where there were three other pregnant mothers strapped with cardio machines which seem to happily sing out their baby’s healthy heartbeats. To me every sound was like a dagger that ripped through my heart and rendered it to pieces. At that moment, those heartbeats were the most poignant sounds I could hear, similar to the sounds I heard from my own baby. My baby.

I felt insulted. I was overcome with envy and the maddening heartbeats stung my ears. I cried. It was all I could do.

Dazed. Bitter. Angry. Confused. I was swimming in all these emotions. I never thought life could give and take so fast.

The rest of the medical procedure was immediately put in order and John stayed with me the whole time, still bewildered yet encouraging in every way. We remembered our Lamaze discipline; we used our breathing techniques to ease the painful contractions. I was given labor-inducing medicines and was told to prepare for a vaginal delivery (my first daughter was delivered via Caesarian section).

We became oblivious of the passing time and it seemed, of our own existence and attendance to this horrible event. We felt removed and seemed to view things numbly as if from a distance. The intensive care unit room seemed too cold, dark and taunting too.

More agonizing hours of waiting before I heard and felt my water bag popping out with warm fluid gushing out in torrents. I panicked and held back the tears. “Stay with me… ready… one… two… (inhaling and exhaling)…” John comforted me by squeezing my hand as he helplessly watched me turn pale.

I was quickly moved to the Delivery Room where we waited for more intense labor. My OB came in to explain that the amniotic fluid they examined was termed, “tobacco stain.” It was the color of the final stage which indicated that the baby had been dead much longer than they had initially suspected. In fact, that color told them that the baby had been dead for a week already.

My last glance at the clock of the Delivery Room told me that it was already around 7:00am of August 3, 2006. I was crying out loud due to labor pains. I passed out. When I woke up, I was in the recovery room with a bag of ice placed on my belly.

My body recovered fairly well after my delivery, but inside I was wrecked. I was discharged from the hospital three days after.

It all seemed like a dream, or maybe I just wanted everything to be just a dream. The true horrors of the aborted motherhood came back to haunt me further when I finally got home. I began lactating. My chest hurt so badly and I felt feverish since I had stone-hard breasts filled with milk — nature’s way of sustaining a new life — supposedly new life. But there was just none.

It was a double-edged sword – apart from the physical pain that I have tolerate because of the inevitable lactation, I had to cope with the emotional wounds that came with the horrific reality. Each drop reminded me that there was no baby. I succumbed to painkillers and medicine to restrict the lactation and each day I struggled wondering… “Why? What happened? Who’s at fault?” As my OB tried to explain by uttering those words of consolation — “It’s nobody’s fault, it was bound to happen. It was pathological. The best way to look at it is that you survived…” By thought, I could only submit to God’s sustaining power, but by heart, it all seemed impossible to experience comfort.

And so that very night, I opened the enveloped with a small airtight plastic containing the ashes and death certificate of our baby Dana. We had her cremated on the evening of the day of our hospital discharge. With trembling fingers I examined the papers — it said that the cause of her death was IUFD (In Utero Fetal Demise) due to umbilical cord complications secondary to cord knot. John and I found ourselves cuddling and crying — trying to comfort each other and trying to make sense of all that happened. Then, out of the gloom we realized two certain things: Baby Dana loved us so much that she left us with no threatening complications whatsoever. And most of all, God’s love carried us through; the Lord truly was in charge. His love will calm the storms inside us. We have our Ria. To us, those were enough reasons to hang on.

I remember what Corrie Ten Boom wrote in her book, The Hiding Place: “Perhaps only when human effort has done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.” I was miraculously spared from blood poisoning! A near-death experience, but I have survived by God’s grace.

My sister Kathy she wrote, on the occasion of the death anniversary of our beloved Dad: “There is only one way to live again – and that is to know, to affirm, and to live with the assurance that in spite of the temporal things here on earth, there exists the ultimate hope of the life beyond. While death necessarily punctuates our existence here on earth, there is something that death cannot conquer.”

As human beings, we are not spared from sufferings, tragedies, and yes, the certainty of death. I myself have witnessed firsthand the deaths of two loved ones – my father’s and Dana’s. But does this mean that we have to stop embracing life? Does this mean that must live in dread of what the future holds? I believe that the answer is a resounding NO. This will be the lesson that I will tell my daughter and prayerfully, to the rest of my children, when the right time comes.*

About the Author

Karen Develos-Sacdalan is the Human Resources Head of Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, an evangelical church whose aim is to know Christ and make Him known (see www.gcf.org.ph and www.gcfsouth.com). She is also a part-time lecturer at Mapua Institute of Technology under the Graduate School of Engineering Management where she teaches Human Resources Management subject. She finished both Bachelor of Science and Masters of Arts in Psychology major in Industrial Psychology. She also writes for career advices in www.career-pathways.net.

I just read the following story from Inq7.net:

Toxic waste dumped in Bulacan; 60 hospitalized

By Carmela Reyes
Inquirer
Last updated 04:17am (Mla time) 11/29/2006

Published on Page A1 of the November 29, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

MARILAO, Bulacan — Farmer Carlos Clemente, 67, was awakened at 2 a.m. Tuesday by the rumbling of a truck leaving his farm. Minutes later, he and other residents of Barangay Prenza II and nearby villages were assailed by the stench of a chemical the truck had dumped in the area.

Some of them vomited, others almost fainted.

Before the morning was over, 60 people had been hospitalized, stricken with dizziness, nausea and chest pains, hundreds of others had fled their homes — and the driver of the 10-wheeler tanker and his two helpers were held in police custody.

Read the full story here.

This is horrifying. So many of those affected were children. What makes it more appaling is that it is really such a commonplace occurrence – how many times do we actually see garbage trucks dumping wastes, toxic and non-toxic, into our rivers? (FYI, I lived in Tondo for several years, so I definitely know what I’m talking about.)

Are we so out of touch, so backward, that we absolutely have no concern for environmental issues affecting this planet? Sure, let’s blame the truck drivers for their ignorance and stupidity, blame the middleman who supposedly instructed them to do it, heck, blame even the DENR; but most of all, let’s blame the source! It originated from the factory, and from my view, this incident shows its obvious lack of management concerning proper waste disposal. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is another glaring example of how Filipinos blatantly abuse nature for profit. Dumping wastes into the river is so much easier, so much cheaper than rigorously adhering to proper waste disposal techniques. Tapon nyo na lang dyan. Bahala na. When disaster strikes, the blame game begins. Do we hear anyone ever accepting responsibilities for disasters like these?

Towards the end of the article, it was written:

“…said a team from the Environmental Management Bureau of the DENR had taken samples of chemicals for tests and results would be available after three days.” (Italics are mine.)

That long? Now, wouldn’t it be faster if they just ask the management of the factory about the nature of those chemicals? Mahirap ba yun?

Love to simultaneously run any operating system – Windows, Linux, or Unix – on your PC? Then, virtual machine is for you. NO, I don’t mean the Java virtual machine which allows you to run Java applications on any operating system (OS). I mean virtual machines that can run unmodified operating systems on top of the existing one.

So what are virtual machines or VMs? According to VMware‘s website, “A virtual machine is a computer defined in a software. It is like running a PC on your PC.” For those who are interested, a more detailed definition and classification of VM can be found here.

Unlike “multibooting” (a process of installing multiple OSes on a PC and selecting the OS at startup), virtual machines let you switch between operating systems by simply tabbing between applications and without needing to reboot. Running VMs is just like running another application on your PC. In particular, you can just run the free downloadable VMware Player from VMware, which enables Windows and Linux users to run another OS (the guest OS) on top of the existing one (the host OS). What’s more, preconfigured virtual machines called virtual appliances are readily available. You can visit the virtual appliance maketplace  for a wide array of selection ranging from lightweight Linux distributions to full-pledge grid computing appliance. And a lot of stuffs are for free.

VMs are usually used by IT professionals to test applications or debug recently developed softwares. I for one am currently experimenting on the possible use of VM in deploying a program I had developed for the remote analysis of brain images obtained using magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. The program is written in the C programming language and currently runs only on Linux. Deploying the program requires some special configuration, which I think is not easy to setup for ordinary users. Moreover, most of the target users are only familiar with the Windows operating system and have very limited experience with Linux. Rewriting the program to run on Windows can make the deployment a lot easier. Unfortunately, some of the program’s components do not run under Windows. 🙁

My idea is to pre-install the program in a Linux-based virtual machine with all the needed optimization and configuration already setup. Then deploy this VM, instead of the original application, to potential Windows users. All the user needs to do is to install the VMware player. The user can then load my VM, and voila, an optimized working version of my application. Well, I have not yet successfully completed this process but there seems to be some promise :-).

Aside from this, VMs can also be used in some other ways. For ordinary users, VM can be used for safe Internet browsing. In these times when a simple visit to a malicious site can compromise your PC, surfing using VM makes a lot of sense. The idea is to use the browser installed in the VM rather than the one installed directly on your PC. If you hit a malicious site, only your VM is compromised, not the host OS. You can just reset your VM and your problem is gone. Similarly, you can use this approach to setup a VM with a child-friendly browser installed to provide a safe browsing experience for your children.   

If you are a web developer/designer, VM is also for you. You can use VMs to see how your site looks like in another browser on another operating system. For instance, you may want to know how your site behaves for users using Internet Explorer or Firefox on Linux or Windows. Instead of buying another computer to host these OSes, you can just use VMs and run them from your PC.

I think VMs are also useful for Internet cafe operators. VM can provide some kind of protection to their PCs. By confining their Internet users to work only within the VM environment, they can isolate the host OS from any threats while their users surf the Internet. They can even allow their users to install applications to the VM, and thus provide a more flexible user experience. The VM can then be configured to discard any changes to its initial state when it terminates. 

Finally, let me end by noting that there are trade-offs when running VMs. One critical issue is the effect on the system’s performance. But if you are just running simple applications on your VM such as a browser, then I think this will not be an issue. Enjoy!

If I hadn’t become a scientist, I would surely have ended up as an artist. My dad was a painter, you see. He did all the paintings that are now on display in our house. As young children, he taught us how to draw, sketch, and paint. I never did quite as good in oil painting, but I did have some successes with watercolor and pastel. Daddy had quite a collection of art books, and it was with excitement and wonder that I perused through those pages containing various works of arts. I joined several poster-making contests and won some awards, too.

But alas, an artist I did not become. Still, I’m an art lover. I still wish that I could find the time to work on a few art projects. Someday, maybe. 🙂

While browsing through the Materials Research Society website, I found this very interesting page titled, "Science as Art," a competition held during the MRS meetings in 2005. You can find the link here. Science as art, why not? I’ve been viewing a lot of structures in my microscopy observations. I realized that I’ve been looking at similar fantastic images but never really thought of them as art. By the way, the image on the right, courtesy of MRS, is an artificially colored scanning electron micrograph of cadmium sulfide.

Well, the MRS competition gave me an idea. For starters, here is an atomic force microscopy (AFM) image of a YBCO (Y-Ba-Cu-O) superconducting film, deposited using pulsed laser deposition on CeO2-buffered sapphire substrate. In this image you can find whorls upon whorls of screw-dislocation-mediated growth islands (the one at the center actually shows a nice spiral outcrop). This image is 1 square micron in area. Each step is about one YBCO lattice unit cell height, which is about 1.2 nm. Color enhancements courtesy of Photoshop, of course. 🙂 Pretty isn’t it? The amazing things you can find on the nanometer scale!

I will never look at YBCO films in the same way again. After all, if you have the will to do it, you can find art virtually ANYWHERE you look.

An article from Nature. Being a woman is not the only issue here; how does being a foreigner affect my growth as a scientist in this country?

Japan and its women

Cultural obstacles and potential damage to one’s career present major challenges to women wanting to pursue science in Japan. Some changes have occurred, but too few, and too slowly.

Why do Japanese women scientists have such a hard time of it? In their country, it seems, one is expected to wait for change to happen, not to force it, and women are supposed to gaman, or endure. Improvements in such matters as equal opportunity are thought of as gifts to be bestowed by a leader.

Some say that the Japanese prefer harmony to conflict and mediation to open courtrooms, and so do not actively pursue change. It is debatable, and hotly debated in Japan, whether this reflects a widely held cultural value or whether such norms are the result of circumstances that make contention difficult, such as a prohibitively expensive and inaccessible legal system. Is this culture of ‘harmony’ merely a tool used by government leaders, management, or whoever else might find it handy in dealing with those who make a fuss?

Continue reading here

I found this interesting interview with Katherine Ellison, the author of a new book titled “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter.” I’ve yet to read the book (oh right, I’ve to buy it first! :)), but it surely got me intrigued. Me, smarter? Now that’s something you don’t hear everyday.

When I became a mom, I wasn’t so much concerned about being smarter than I was about being less productive at work. I knew that I had to make sacrifices as I try to juggle career and parenting. Before I had Aya, I used to stay as long as my colleagues at work. When Aya was born, I had to rush home earlier than everyone else. But since I know that I had to go home earlier, I found myself carefully planning in advance how exactly I will spend the day so that I will be able to maximize my time at work. The result is that my efficiency at work has also drastically improved. Gone are the idle moments spent at the PC surfing the web, taking 15-30 minutes of coffee breaks, or friendly chitchats with friends. I got smarter in the sense that I learned how to manage my time more efficiently. I may not be 100% objective here, but the way I look at it, in terms of productivity, I certainly wasn’t performing any worse than when I didn’t have a baby to look after!

When Aya was born, I felt as helpless and inexperienced as any first-time mother – but I learned fast. There is a little life depending on me and if I didn’t smart up, she will suffer the consequences. So yes, I agree, motherhood does make you smarter. Surprisingly, we find ways to cope with the challenges and how we can best care for our children. We learn and grow.

There is another important thing that I learned from motherhood: setting your priorities straight. I can always be replaced by someone else at work, but I will always be Mom to my daughter.

To the mothers out there – how did having a baby change your lives? Do you think you’ve become smarter because of it?

Here’s the link to the article

This is a popular trick to lure users to a malicious site. Personally, I seldom make typos when entering words into my favorite search engines; but as they say, there’s always a first time for everything! Better check your inputs before hitting that search button!

More details can be found in this article from Websense:

“This lure relies upon the eventuality that a user will make a typo while entering a term into a search engine. There are an endless number of possible typographical errors for any given term, but with a few algorithms and statistics you can significantly narrow down the number of possibilities. Attackers have been doing this for years and have become very good at predicting the most common typos for each keyword.

(snip)

Someone out there is always trying to get you to visit their website and sometimes the simplest tricks work wonders. The next time you are making a search on the Internet, take an extra second to make sure you got the results you expected before you start following links. One letter can mean the difference between arriving at your online banking site or ending up with a desktop of Spyware. ”

Detail and screenshots can be found here.

By now, every Pinoy has probably heard of Manny Pacquaio’s latest victory. I browsed through several Pinoy blogs online and found different versions of how they were awed by this humble man, who has been reaping victories left and right and making our countrymen proud. And I do share their sentiments.

I don’t have to look very far when it comes to boxing. I have an uncle who used to be trained by Flash Elorde himself. He even went to Japan several times on various matches. Once I saw his photo in the newspaper when I was a child, and that made me very proud of him. I heard that he is now a boxing trainer himself.

My dad was an avid boxing fan; because he couldn’t fight himself, he trained many aspiring young men (mostly hailing from Antique, his hometown) in our own backyard. Those young men were out-of-school youths who came from very poor families. Indeed, boxing is the poor man’s sport, and for many of those young men, it was a way to lift themselves out of poverty. I think Manny Pacquiao has become immensely popular not only because he is a great boxer; the more important reason is that he is now filthy rich. He is getting richer not just from his boxing bouts, but from the numerous commercial endorsements as well. And Pinoys simply have a soft spot for rags-to-riches success stories.

It is no wonder, then, that boxing is a popular sport in the country. I have no qualms about it. The only problem I see with boxing is that it is, like billiards and bowling, an individual sport. Now why don’t we see the same brilliance when it comes to team sports? I pondered about this for a long time, until I realized that one probable reason is because Pinoys have no concept of “teamwork.” We don’t have a grasp of the concept of self-sacrifice for the common good. We would rather step on other people’s toes in order to get ahead. We emphasize individual successes instead of team victories; we are so in love with the concept of “bida” (hero). And it doesn’t even have to be confined within the field of sports. Put a group of a Filipinos together to work for any kind of project, and guess what they will end up doing. Fighting, of course. Mostly about who’s on top and who’s not on top, who’s working and who’s not working, who’s making sipsip and who’s not. In the end the project remains unfinished because of all the squabbling. We excel as individuals but we suck as a team. Need proof? Just look at how our government system works. From my point of view, it’s every man for himself; they are not working effectively as a team to solve the problems besetting the country. We want to be a rich country, but we are endlessly waiting for heroes to lift us out of our quagmire instead of us working together as a team. And thus we remain poor.

And as long as Filipinos remain poor, boxing will be the most popular sport. Pacquiao and the others who will come after him will continue to make us proud, take us on thrill rides, and make us dream of neverending wealth and fame, if only for a few euphoric moments.

After that, it’s back to gritting our teeth through our own miseries.

While I was bathing Aya one day, out of the blue she asked me, “Nanay, totoo ba yung obake (Are monsters real)?” Obake is pronounced as o-ba-ke, which means “monster” in Japanese. “Syempre naman, hindi totoo yung obake. Panakot lang yun sa mga bata. Nakakita ka na ba ng obake? (Of course, monsters are not real. They’re used only to scare kids. Have you ever seen one?),” was my reply. Aya shook her head.

What does it mean when we say something is real or not? I asked her this time. We have to see something for ourselves to know whether they are real or not, I further explained. For example, am I real? To which Aya replied, “Yes!” Are you real? I asked. Again she said, “Yes!” Eh yung obake? She then answered, “No!”

I pressed further, “Eh si Santa Claus?” Without missing a beat, she gleefully answered, “Totoo!” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I let her go at that; the reality of Santa Claus will have to wait until the next bathtime, or next Christmas perhaps. Aya has already told me what she wants Santa Claus to give her this Christmas. She didn’t ask for a new DVD, new clothes, or toys. No. All she wants is a “rake.” Not the toy rake, but a real rake, which she will use in a “hatake” (hatake means field in Japanese). Oh boy. The crazy things they put into your child’s mind at the daycare. Every year the class goes to a kamote (sweet potato) field trip, where they dig up kamoteand each child gets to take home a ration. I’ve never dug any kamote in my life; at four years of age, Aya has experienced doing that at least twice already. No wonder she wants to do farming…hehehe. 🙂

Back to Santa. Well, when I was a kid, I too believed that Santa Claus was for real. I hung up socks at our door every Christmas eve, and my parents dutifully placed goodies in them before I woke up the following morning. And I really thought that those goodies came from him!

When I grew up I eventually learned about the truth, and I really wondered why parents have to make their children believe in the fat, old man delivering presents to good kids every Christmas. And I wondered whether in my time, I would also get into the same adult conspiracy against my kid.

I find myself now in that situation. As much as I would like to tell her that there is no Santa Claus, I found her belief to be so empowering that I feel helpless. I couldn’t find the heart to break it to her – in a way, I wanted her to keep believing simply for the heck of it. Why? Because to believe is to be naive. Because she has a right to believe in something delightful as getting a free present as long as she remained good. Because one day she will grow up and find herself disbelieving and cynical of the good things in life. And most of all, because she’s a kid. She reminded me of those Christmases of long ago when I believed anything and everything.

So for now, for her sake Santa Claus will remain real. But I better find a way to make her change her Christmas wish!

The first time I encountered this problem was two weeks ago. I was using my PC when an instant message from my niece suddenly popped up. To my surprise, the message with some clickable link in it was written in Thai! Right there, I knew it didn’t come from my niece. Ignoring the message, I closed the YM window. After a few minutes, another message popped up. Then followed by another, and another, and another… Annoyed, I removed my niece from my YM’s contact list.

After a week, I received a similar instant message from my sister-in-law. This time, the message was an invitation to view some photos in some website by clicking the provided link. Since there was no other note included, I suspected that the message was not from her. My suspicion was confirmed when after a few seconds, another message was sent. Hmm, another compromised messenger account, I thought. I sent a message back and advised her to change her messenger password ASAP.

I initially thought that this was some kind of an instant messaging spam. After running a search in google, I realized that it is even worse. There seems to be two forms of attack, one is an actual virus/worm that spreads via instant messaging and the other is a phishing attack launched against YM users. For the latter, the attack usually starts with an instant message from the user’s contact list. The message usually includes a link to a Yahoo-looking site requiring visitors to login and thus revealing their yahoo id and password. The phisher then uses this information to trick other YM users in the contact list of the compromised account. Worse, the phisher also gains access to all personal information in the user’s other Yahoo accounts such as emails, photos, groups, etc.

The virus/worm version is reported to take control of your messenger, and send messages with website links to your contact list without your knowledge. When the link is clicked, the virus downloads a copy of itself to the user’s PC, disables the registry editor and task manager, hijacks Internet Explorer homepage, and leads users to sites that automatically install malicious softwares on their PCs. Moreover, there seems to be several variants of this virus/worm out there: Yh032.explr, w32.KMeth, Worm_Sohanad.B, etc.

If you are already infected, the easiest way to remove the virus/worm is to use system restore if you are using Windows XP. See Microsoft Help for details. Be sure to choose a restore point before you got the virus/worm and then scan your system for any signs of the virus/worm after the restore.  Update your PC regularly and use an up-to-date antivirus program. If this doesn’t work, you can also check this site (http://de.trendmicro-europe.com/enterprise/…) for instructions on how to remove the Sohanad.B variant.

So, the next time a friend of yours sends you an instant message with suspicious links, beware! By clicking those links, you could be opening your PC to a lot of troubles. 🙂