The message from the ad tech conference this year is that online advertising is alive and well. And not going anywhere anytime soon.
It's good to be back after my one year hiatus.

Posted by Lori in Chips dips and dorks , Geekdom , Mobile Uploads , Techno at 6:10 AM permalink Comments (0)

It's easy with an iPhone and the free TV.com app that plays all my favorite retro tv shows.

The only question is: Love Boat, Facts of Life, Star Trek, or Gilligan's Island?

Hmmmm.

Posted by Lori in Daily , Mobile Uploads , Techno , Television at 9:58 PM permalink Comments (2)

I am taking recommendations for cool iPhone apps.

So far the coolest and most useful app I have encountered is Google's voice search:

You just put the phone to your ear and speak anything that you want Google to find and voila...search results without typing!

e.g. I'm just leaving work, sitting in the parking lot about to take off and thinking how I totally don't feel like cooking dinner tonight and have a mean hankering for my favorite Mexican takeout but (shudder) I forgot the number and there's no time to type or go fumbling through my address book. No problem...just say the restaurant name into my phone and like magic, the number appears!

I'm not sure there could be anything cooler than this. But if you know of any good ones, please share. I need more apps like this in my life.

Posted by Lori in Daily , Techno at 9:19 PM permalink Comments (9)

I am back to hating Face book again!! I am now officially......

You know how when people you semi-know send you a friend request and you feel obligated to accept and then once you accept, these people never reach out to you or actually try to communicate? I assume they just want to be voyeuristic and look at your profile and pictures to see what you've been doing with your life.

This isn't why I'm cooked btw, just a lead-in and minor annoyance.

So yesterday one of these "friends" posted a link on my wall. I knew right away it was a virus because:

A. In a year of being on my friend list and never receiving a communication, all of the sudden she sends me a Youtube link to a Kayne West video. Highly suspicious (this was even before what he did to that poor little Taylor Swift at the VMA's).

B. I could see by hovering over the URL that the link did not go to Youtube, it went to a URL that if clicked on would give your computer a VIRUS!

I immediately hit the remove button to take the virus link off of my wall and news feed.

Then I posted a status update to let everyone know this virus is circulating around facebook and to not click the link!

About an hour later the same friend sent me an email message with another virus link.

I should point out the friend isn't doing this on purpose - she must have clicked on the virus link herself and then it spreads like a worm to everyone on her friend list automatically sending them the infected links. Anyway I immediately deleted the email from my inbox, of course I never even opened it.

Yet somehow - despite all of my not clicking.....my laptop has been completely messed up ever since! I keep getting windows explorer errors. The pages in my browsers are not loading images or scripts...and I have to hit the refresh button about 5 times to get a command to work.

Next I went to Downloads.com to dl AVG malware cleaner - but the application couldn't load and ever since then I've now been getting .DLL installation file errors and sometimes my browser will open...and other times it won't. The laptop randomly shuts down on it's own as well.

Now my computer is fried. It's cooked to well done. I will now have to strip my hard drive and reformat or take it in to get repaired.

Thanks Facebook!!!!

I am still baffled about how I could have gotten infected with the virus if I never clicked on any of the links? All I can think is the malware scripts are so vicious they are embedding directly into facebook pages and newsfeeds.

As if all this aggravation weren't enough, Facebook keeps sending me "friend suggestions" telling me that I should add ex boyfriends to my list of friends. And I can only reason that they must be sending the same suggestions to them... How annoying is that?

Yes. I believe there is such a thing as "too viral". Even for a self professed internet junkie like me.

Posted by Lori in Chips dips and dorks , Geekdom , Techno at 10:11 PM permalink Comments (2)

Some of you using Internet Explorer may have noticed my blog looking a little buggy the past couple days.

I would have been on this sooner but I NEVER use IE anymore due to the nasty viruses I get there. Mozilla looked ok.

Lesson learned and first rule of web design - check for browser compatibility after every design and or programming change you make to a site.

After weeding through my blog code with a magnifying glass for the past 20 minutes I figured out by process of elimination that when I added my new music Playlist code the other day I somehow lost a div HTML tag at the end of my code, which caused the template to misalign my sidebars and blog content.

Simple fix.

Posted by Lori in Chips dips and dorks , Geekdom , Techno at 2:55 PM permalink Comments (0)

I've been playing around with my fonts and honestly am having a hard time choosing one.

Previously I was using a Verdana extra small font that looked like this. I felt like it was too small so I've been sampling other font sizes and faces. For now I kept the Verdana font but increased the size. Now I feel like the words together formed in paragraphs are too fat. Help my blog is feeling bloated and is PMS'ing!

Seriously....I can use your help. You as the readers whose eyes need to be pleased. Which of these fonts do you prefer?

This font is Times New Roman . I use it in my word docs at work. I think this one is too corporate for my blog and not pleasing to the eye. Would you agree? This font is Times New Roman . I use it in my word docs at work. I think this one is too corporate for my blog and not pleasing to the eye.. Would you agree?

This font is Arial. I like Arial, it is clean and easy to read. Should I make Arial my blog font? This font is Arial. I like Arial, it is clean and easy to read. Should I make Arial my blog font? This font is Arial. I like Arial, it is clean and easy to read. Should I make Arial my blog font?

This font is Verdana, this is the font I currently have now. Should I leave it or choose another? This font is Verdana, this is the font I currently have now. Should I leave it or choose another? This font is Verdana, this is the font I currently have now. Should I leave it or choose another?

Trebuchet MS is one of my favorite fonts. What do you think of this one for my blog font? Trebuchet MS is one of my favorite fonts. What do you think of this one for my blog font? Trebuchet MS is one of my favorite fonts. What do you think of this one for my blog font?

Georgia is another one of my favorites. It's clean like Arial but more rounded than square edges. Do you like this one the best? Georgia is another one of my favorites. It's clean like Arial but more rounded than square edges. Do you like this one the best?

Garamond is similar to Georgia but more modern looking than classic. How about this one? Garamond is similar to Georgia but more modern looking than classic. How about this one? Garamond is similar to Georgia but more modern looking than classic. How about this one?

This font is Microsoft Sans Serif . It is kind of cool, what do we think of this one? This font is Microsoft Sans Serif . It is kind of cool, what do we think of this one? This font is Microsoft Sans Serif . It is kind of cool, what do we think of this one?

So help me out. Which of these fonts do you think looks best? Or do you have another font to suggest?

Posted by Lori in Techno at 8:46 PM permalink

Okay, I am back up online again. Phew
I knew it wasn't the modem....it was the reinstall.
I neglected to extract all of the necessary components from my Ethernet driver and that's why the modem wasn't syncing up through the modems Ethernet adapter.
Now I'm back to less than factory settings with 34.2 gigs of free space and a completely bare hard drive. It's a nice feeling to be so bare and clean, kind of like how I feel when I leave the bikini waxer.
I've reloaded Microsoft Office, resaved all of my bookmarklets, reloaded Norton (which is also cool because I was using an expired version before but upon reload I got another 90 days out of it) downloaded Ad-Aware, and AVG for anti-spyware protection and I'm only using Mozilla browser now, no more IE for me.
The trouble ticket from the cable guy was no charge and I was able to troubleshoot the rest myself so fortunately the whole incident didn't cost me a thing but a little downtime. I'm glad I opted for a hard drive reformat over spending 2k on a new system. I think I can get another year or two out of this system if I lay off all the porn and gambling sites. Just Kidding.
The one bummer in all of this is I have my Adobe Photoshop 6.0 CD to reload but it's asking me for a serial number that I can't find anywhere. Anybody know a way around that? I'd go Google searching for one myself but I'm kinda paranoid about viruses now and the sites that I surf. New versions are about $600 and used copies from Amazon or Ebay would be about $200. I tried downloading a demo version to tide me over but it's not working.

Posted by Lori in Chips dips and dorks , Geekdom , Techno at 8:47 PM permalink

So I opened my blog in internet explorer this weekend and all the images in my sidebars (Google ads, Amazon ads, Pugsplace T-shirts ads) were showing unwanted unapproved advertisements. Some were even porn. Imagine my shock when I saw boobs and asses on Pugsplace side by side with my content. The links to all these sketchy sites were coming from places like ad.creafi.com, ad.directaclick.com, zedo, and zango.

Immediately I thought the issue must be linked to an Amazon or Google affiliate who had perhaps hijaked my code and taken over my ad space with malicious intent. The first thing I did was remove Amazon links to see if that stopped the ads from appearing. Nope. Then I pulled down my Google ads to see if that would stop the unwanted ads from appearing on my site. Not. Even my own self created Pugsplace store banners were populating links to naked celebrities and adult friend finders in my local area code...

That's when it started to hit me that maybe it wasn't a case of hijaked HTML code or seedy affiliates, but some kind of spyware that's seeped into my system and is replacing all banners with viral image ads. I went into another room and booted up my old dusty CyberMax98 desktop which probably hadn't been turned on in about a year. Sure enough I pulled up Pugsplace.com and only the appropriately coded ads were appearing...

I went back to my XP laptop (where I do all of my blogging and online activities) and now I was getting unwanted pop ups with every click. Fucking virus. I ran Norton but it didn't detect anything. I tried to download the latest copy of Ad-Aware but the computer kept freezing on me or I'd get incomplete operation messages, have to reboot and start over. Either that or the machine would overheat and I'd have to wait for it to cool down before I could start over and then work in Mozilla.

Finally I got through an Ad-Aware full system scan and it detected 408 infected files. It was able to clean all but 190 of them. The critical infections found were:

Win32.Trojan.Clicker
Win32.Trojan.Agent
Win32.Backdoor.VB

After a system reboot and follow-up attempt to clean the infections I kept received error messages saying Ad-Aware has run into unexpected problems and had to shut down. My next step was to download some other spyware programs like Spy-bot, AVG, or Avast but by that point the infection must have spread too deeply into my registry files because I wasn't even able to get a browser to stay open.

Sunday afternoon now, I decided I had two options: 1.) Drive down to Circuit City or Best Buy and spend 2k on a new laptop or 2.) Dig out my original Windows XP Operating Disc from like 5 years ago and reformat the entire hard drive. I opted for the latter. Unfortunately my current system wasn't stable enough to allow me to save some files to back up so I lost a lot of things but I've had to do this once before (reformat) so it's nothing I can't live without.

My first attempt at the reinstall was to try to Repair my hard drive before totally wiping it out. But in order to do that I had to enter my oringal product key which I couldn't find, anywhere [only to later find out it was on the bottom of my laptop, all I had to do was flip it over]. Enough screwing around. I took a deep breath and clicked "D" on the "Are you sure you want to delete this Partition" question which would essentially wipe out everything on my hard drive so I'd have to start over from scratch and rebuild all my drivers, reinstall all programs, etc. F. it, I hit D.

60 minutes later I am back to the factory settings my computer came with, sans the drivers that had been preloaded and I'll have to reload. The first thing I tried to do was create my internet connection which runs through a cable modem. No luck. I went to start/run/cmd/ipconfig and it wasn't even listing an ip address, so the modem is not talking to my computer!

After 64 minutes on the phone with my ISP and having to speak with 3 different supervisors I am still without an internet connection. They insist it has something to do with my modem because the "cable" light does not stay steady on. I argued and argued with them that its not the modem because my other computer (the Cybermax 98) connection is working just fine through the router. Then they gave me the whole "We dont support Lynksys routers ma'am" the only thing we can do is open a trouble ticket.

A trouble ticket wherein a cable guy will come to my house between the hours of 3-5 (they only give you a range not a specific time) on Tuesday when I will not be there because they can't accomodate MY schedule and come after 6:00PM so I'll have to juggle Dr. appointments and work and the rest of my life only to find out that there is nothing really wrong with the modem, it's something in re-establishing the internet connection that was lost upon system wipe. I'm sure of it.

Now the Cybermax 98 isn't optimal for anything, it doesn't have excel or word or adobe. I can't even check my Gmail on it because of the way 98 formats the screen. I can't use any of my other programs that I use in daily life and it doesn't have any anti virus software on it, so it's only a matter of time before this one becomes infected too. At least it's a temporary internet connection until the other one gets fixed.

On a positive note, I stopped taking one of my medicines last week and the rash / bumps on my back are gone. Guess it's my computer's turn to be sick.

Posted by Lori in Chips dips and dorks , Geekdom , Techno at 4:50 PM permalink