I was getting hijacked everytime I clicked on a google search. I would go to some bad page I didn’t want to.

often BLINX……

How I fixed it ( we have macs).

It wasn’t a virus in any of the computers, if anything was infected it was our router. It had DNS setting point to some 213.xxx.xxx.xxx place

i never saw those numbers before, I told the router to “fetch the DNS settings from the provider”

suddenly they were point to numbers that started with 68.xxx.xxx.xxx which I’m used to seeing.

After that the redirects stopped. Completely.

WARNING WARNING

I STRONGLY believe got infected by having “weak” router and wireless passwords

1234567890

(or my roommate did)

If you do this, I STRONGLY suggest you change the wireless password and router password (from admin, password) to something MUCH stronger.

This worked for me, it may work for you. Please feel free to comment.

I would say more but I have to get back to playing!

Read the article for yourself

http://linux.com/community/blogs/Bing-is-not-Google-but-it-is-a-spin-engine.-14904.html

It claims that bing supresss suggestions that are negative to microsoft. And they provide some compelling examples.

BOYCOTT BING

Sins of the solar empire is a very addictive real time strategy (RTS) game.  It’s also called a 4x game which means eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.
It’s very much other RTS games I play like Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and even Age of Empires. It seems to be the lastest and greatest game of this genra. I enjoy it greatly.

The game has 3 “races”, “TEC” which seems humanoid,  Advent which all seem to be female and have physic powers, and Vasari which are all slurping lizards. I like to play as the vassari the most because they are the quickest to get up to speed militarly. You can get a big rush on a close by opponent with Vasari, and it’s usually fatal to the opponent.

The game has many different ship type, which can be broken into 3 categories. Capital ships, the biggest of the ships which all have special abilities. Cruisers which are medium size ships that add strength and support to a fleet, and frigates, the smallest ships which fill out the rest of  a fleet.

One of my favorite capital ships is the Vasari Jarrasul Evacuator, otherwise known as the egg.
Here is a picture of it.

The ege has a very powerful weapon call “Nano dissambler” which eats away at your opponents ship quickly, whilc also reducing it’s armor. A good strategy to use with this ship is to use the nano dissabmler and the have all your other ships including the egg, fire the ship with the weakened armor. Melts ships faster than an frying pan melts butter.

Click on the images to see bigger ones.

These are some of my pictures I took.

These are my kitties. The big gray one is Sir Grayson. The little peach colored one is Peaches.

These are picture I took in a local grave yard in lowell.

And these were taken in Wellesley

Tags: the sun,

I used to really love playing wargames back in the seventies. I had many SPI, Avalon Hill and other games. I also played games like hack and rogue on BSD Unix systems. Later there was a computer game called Stars!. I have a copy of this still. It was excellent. You would capture neighaboring star systems, gather resources and build fleets of ships. Eventually you would meet up with others and fight for dominance.

One of the excellent aspects of Stars! was that you could design your own ships. You had weapons, hull types, engines, sensors, shields, armor and more. You would “design” your ship by dragging appropriate “systems” (weapons or armor etc) to your “naked” ship hull. Different ship hulls could hold different amounts of these systems, and different types. Some slots would be “General Purpose” so anything. Others would be weapons, so any of the weapon systems would fit, torpedos or lasers. Some might be sheilds and some might be armor. There would be a number of systems allowed in that particular slot too.

This way you could create a fleet of super destroyers, that lack sensors, in favor of an additional weapon. You might then make special viewer destroyers (with the same hull) that had almost no weapons, but lots of long range sensors.  Mixing and maxing fleets like this allowed you to “get the most” out of your fleets. It also gave endless amounts of replay time. Trying to make a ship that would beat an opponent favorite ship type.

This was a game that came out when the internet wasn’t well known and the web less so. It came out before there ever was an MSNBC (I remember this because where I did see the game first was on MEU (Mind Extension University) which was replace by MSNBC.

This was a turn based game that I think (if I remember) allowed people to all do their turns at the same time, then see the results. It allowed for turns based upon, get this, email. So that’s how old it is.

Stars! was ahead of it’s time, and the developers were convinced that good game play was more important than flashy graphics and other multi-media additions. So the games comes off as very simple. It’s far from that though. It may not be open-gl driven and allow you to zoom in and out like todays games like Sins of a Solar Empire (which I love). But it was a very fun and interesting game. I still play it today.

Here are the links I could find for Stars! today

http://support.empireinteractive.com/default.aspx?MID=60568495217F&PID=7B550F5D-2BED-4D5A-8ADE-78B9D6528995

is the only link I can find that has the last patch…

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/stars/review.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gssummary&tag=summary;read-review

Other Stars! resources

http://www.myhreweb.com/todd/games/stars.html

http://aaedesigns.com/stars/index.php

http://starsautohost.org/stars.htm

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. George Bernard Shaw

This is my “Green Cheese” theme for wordpress. I hope you like it. I stole many of the ideas from vistered little.

I got the cheese icons from http://www.iconarchive.com/icon/food/cheese_by_snakyreports/index.html

David