I realized recently that I haven’t uploaded any photos to our online photo album in almost a year. So I went to the site, and I don’t love it; I don’t love the look or the structure. Time for an overhaul. Rather than upgrade the existing site, I just decided to delete and rebuild. When I told Paul what I was doing, he mentioned that he would like to overhaul the main page too - sounds great to me. Coming soon: new Dopkins.net pages.
And all made up news events where people who believe they should be the center of attention at all times actually decide to celebrate themselves even more, and news outlets pretend that this is an important current event.
We are finally getting our spare room in shape. It is a wonderful room, home to so many hobbies- photography, sewing, video editing, software collecting, and exercise equipment storage.
Needless to say, it’s a pit! And it’s a large room with a wonderful window. Today I am dragging everything but the big stuff downstairs. We then plan to actually arrange the treadmill, exercise bike, hand weights and stair stepper into a useable formation. Knowing all of us, I bet we will go get a TV tonight. We are all way more likely to use this stuff while watching TV (Sports for Paul, trashy hits like “the girls next door” for me & Hannah.)
The plan is this: once we get the equipment in place, we will move the sewing table and lazy boy into the best spots and then go to IKEA for the necessary bookcases to move the hobby crap back in and put it away nicely. Gonna be well worth the work and money, and in the long run, waaay cheaper than a gym membership. We have some great equipment here
About a month ago, Dave Gunnlaugsson alerted me to a quirk on his internet browser- he was getting “hijacked” every time he would try to check his webmail, and other strange seemingly random times; he would end up on a Google or dell page populated with pay-per click ads.
At the time, I did all I knew how to do- the standard spyware sweep and computer clean up. I never heard if that actually fixed his issue, but the computer that runs weekend worship services started doing the same thing when Michelle Arndt was trying to access her webmail, and to me as I browsed sermonspice.com. So I set about to find more info on how to fix this.
A common thread, I found, is when I type “sermonspice.com” instead of www.sermonspice.com or if any webpage has a link or redirect without the full http://www.
This shouldn’t be a problem; modern browsers are more forgiving with different versions of URL’s than the legacy browsers were - if you didn’t type the URL including the http://www you ended up with an error page. I think this had to do with how web servers and the DNS system used to be set up.
So, what, in this day and age, was the trouble? AUUGH.
The answer turns out to be some vicious little programs with benign names like “URL helper” and “Browser Address Error Redirector” How these got into our computers I do not know- but going into Add/remove programs and removing these turned out to be the answer.
If you are having the same issue, look for these programs to remove:
URL helper
URL Assistant
Browser Address Error Redirector
GoogleAFE
