so, i slept all day again.

i'm out of the shower and potentially ready to get started on something i'd rather be done by now, and i can see that something is already trying to update the system, despite doing everything i possibly can to completely disable the update process. it really demonstrates the point - you don't actually have admin control over your windows machine. you can disable it a dozen different ways on the running system, you can dismantle it in a group policy and you can even delete the service outright, along with all of the services you need to run the service itself, and even delete the local files on the machine, and it still tries to update - then locks you out when it can't. you just can't turn this off...

but, i have two promising signs.

the first is a log file that is telling me that my system has been tampered with, which is true - i tampered with it. the second is a database error file in the catroot directory that is telling me that it can't compile the update files (hooray!), and giving me a general "catastrophic error" message.

these errors are both good things - it means that whatever process is trying to update the system (which is clearly against my will. and, i am the owner of this computer. i make these choice, not the government and not microsoft.) is unable to do so.

the concern is that i'm going to get another lock screen, of course.

i was able to eliminate the lock screen at one point by deleting the rpcremote file, but it just killed my keyboard functionality. maybe there's a workaround to that.

for now, i'm going to try to avoid rebooting the machine for a while to avoid dealing with it and try to do two things tonight:

1) i need to do a show review lookahead for january. i don't expect much.
2) i need to start posting for december, 2013, which should be faster than before.