http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2004/05.php
Andrew, your contest prizes are on their way. I sent them by U.S. Postal Service Express Mail
(insured). You should receive them in 3-4 business days. Please let me know when they arrive.
Many thanks to everyone who entered ComputerBob's 100,000th Visitor Contest. And congratulations to the winner, Andrew Pope from Wellington, New Zealand, whose screenshot showed my site's page counter displaying 100,021 visits. Andrew will receive a prize package from me containing:
I plan to pack all of the prizes tonight, and then tomorrow, I'll find out how much it's going
to cost to ship them to New Zealand.
After posting yesterday's Journal entry, I stayed away from visiting this site for about 6
hours, so that my visits wouldn't influence the visitor count as it neared 100,000. Last night
at 9:22 PM, EST, I finally came back to check the count, and was shocked to discover that
I was the 100,000th visitor! Oh, this is such a surprise! I haven't even
prepared a
speech! I'd like to thank my agent, my manager, my production company, my publicist, my wife,
my parents, and all of the little people who made it possible.... Let's see.... Who am I
forgetting?.... I'm going
to wait until 9:22 tonight to close my 100,000th visitor contest, and I'll announce the contest
winner tomorrow.
As I type this, this Web site has had 99,940 visitors. That means that it's going to have its 100,000th visitor in the very near future. To celebrate that important milestone, I'm going to have a little contest. No matter where in the world they live, the winner of the contest will receive a package from me, containing several fun and exciting souvenirs of The Sunshine State, including some powdery white sand from a Gulf Coast beach, a shark's tooth, some seashells, a chocolate alligator, some colorful brochures, a picture postcard, and whatever else I can think of. To enter the contest, do the following:
The winner will be the person whose screenshot shows my site's counter the closest to 100,000.
If you don't know how to take and send the screenshot, here's how to do it (in Windows):
I will announce the name of the winner right here on my home page. And yes, I know that many
of you could easily cheat by editing the digits in your screenshot, but please don't do that.
For the third time in the past several weeks, this site is running on a different
server. About a month ago, after experiencing several serious problems with my first webhosting reseller account,
I moved my account to a second webhosting provider. Even early on, there were several minor glitches in their support,
but I was relatively happy with that second provider for a few weeks. Unfortunately, something happened several days ago
that caused that second provider's support to suddenly go from good to virtually non-existent (pun intended). Several
of their clients posted messages in their support forums, complaining about lost email, services that had stopped
working, and support tickets that were being ignored. The last time I checked, the complaints had piled up for more
than a week, with no replies from that second webhosting provider. Instead of waiting for the problems to start
affecting my clients and me, I moved my reseller account to a third webhosting provider last night. That move went
surprisingly well, without any glitches. Even though this newest provider's reseller accounts cost significantly more
than similar accounts at my previous two webhosting providers, this provider's service and support have been
outstanding so far. It seems that maybe you get what you pay for. I'll have to write that down for
future reference. In the meantime, I have updated
ComputerBob's Guide To Web Hosts to provide more details of this latest
move.
Yesterday and today, I added 127 new photos to my Florida Photos section,
which now contains 292 gorgeous photos of the beautiful and unique Sunshine State.
Several weeks ago, Fred Langa, author of
The LangaList newsletter, wrote what turned
out to be a controversial article titled,
Linux's Achilles' Heel.
In it, he described how he had been unable to get any version of the
Linux operating system to completely work
on his PC. I was fascinated with Fred's article, especially since I would like to switch to Linux some day, and because
Fred's experience with it closely mirrored
my earlier experience with it. Now, Fred has written
a follow-up article
that addresses the controversy created by his original article.
Today is my parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary. Congratulations, Mom and Dad! Your marriage has beaten incredibly
high odds, and has been an object lesson in the powers of faith, patience and forgiveness. I love you both very
much.
If you haven't been convinced yet, here is another reason why you need to make sure that your computer is secured
against online intruders. Wired.com's disturbing article,
Browser Hijackers Ruining Lives,
describes how the victims of browser hijackers -- like my cousin, whose computer was recently commandeered by the CWS
trojan -- could lose their loved ones, lose their jobs, and could even end up in prison.
If you're looking for the best deal you can find in U.S.A long distance telephone rates, take a few minutes to visit
SaveOnPhone.com, a company that
analyzes and rates more than 350 different long distance plans. The long distance plan that I had been using for
years charges 4.5 cents per minute and is ranked #6 by SaveOnPhone, but I just switched to the
#1 ranked plan. From now on, I'll pay only 2.75 cents per minute, with no monthly fees or minimums, which will
reduce my long distance bills by almost 40%. If you make a lot of international calls, then one of the other plans
may be better for you, but whatever your long distance needs are, it will probably be worth your time to check out
SaveOnPhone.
If you're a regular reader of this Journal, you know that I recently spent many hours trying to rid a cousin's computer of the evil CoolWebSearch (CWS) adware/spyware trojan. If you're curious about what adware/spyware is, Wired.com has a great article that explains what it is, and includes some tips to help you protect your computer from it.
Despite its many, many domain registration features, or possibly because of them, in the past year, I have
increasingly found
RegisterFly's Web site to be
extremely slow, buggy, and user-unfriendly,
and its "Live 24/7 Support" to be either totally unavailable or disturbingly unknowledgeable and unhelpful. For example,
even after a site redesign that was supposed to speed up the whole RegisterFly site, I still had to wait 45 seconds
or longer for each RegisterFly Web page to load, and the site is organized into so many sub-levels that I had to
view a lot of other pages in order to get to the ones that I wanted. In addition, in the past month, I tried to reach
RegisterFly's "Live 24/7 Support" on 5 separate occasions, and each time, I waited almost 30 minutes for a support
person to show up before finally giving up and disconnecting. In the past year, each time I've written to
RegisterFly to complain, they've told
me that the fixes to the problems that I reported were going to be installed "next week," but months later, the
problems were still
not fixed. Finally, in the past few weeks, I repeatedly found this Web site's domain name "unlocked," even
after I repeatedly "locked" it on the RegisterFly site -- a huge security risk that could have allowed someone to
"hijack" my domain name by transferring it to a different domain registrar without my permission. As a result of all
of those problems, I no longer trust or want to do business with RegisterFly. So, even though the pre-paid WHOIS
personal information protection of my domains at RegisterFly wasn't due to expire until 2007, this morning, I took a
loss and transferred all of my domain registrations back to
NameCheap, the fast, simple, and
reliable domain registrar that I used before I switched to RegisterFly about a year ago. I will pay more for WHOIS
personal information protection at NameCheap, but it will be worth it to know that my domain names are safe.
And if I recently registered a domain name for you, don't worry -- I registered it at NameCheap.
My cousin and her husband ended up taking their computer to a local guy who formatted its hard drive, reinstalled everything, restored all of their data, and organized their files for them -- all for only $60. Such a deal. Afterward, we went through one more long-distance call to make sure that their computer is locked down tightly, to prevent a recurrence of the kind of trouble they had with it last week.
In the past few days, I made some changes to the features of my free webhosting service, registered a new domain
name and set up a new webhosting account for a couple of my relatives, and did some more troubleshooting and
system upgrades on a few people's computers. Now that things have slowed down a bit, I might find time to
add some photos to my Florida Photos section.
After trying every tool and every method I could find to remove the CoolWebSearch trojan from my cousin's computer,
it still returns after each reboot. Today, I told my cousin to try one final thing, and if that doesn't work, she
and her husband are going to use their PC's Restore CD to reformat the hard drive and re-install
Windows XP and their PC's default software applications. I hate to "give up" on a problem like this, but it has
become obvious that the particular CWS variant that we've been dealing with for the past several days is more
intelligent than the current crop of tools that are designed to get rid of it. The lesson appears to be that, if you
find yourself in the middle of a chess game with a genius madman, sometimes the best move you can make is to tip
over the table.
IMPORTANT: Now it has taken more than 30 hours in 4 days. As I suspected it might, the
CoolWebSearch trojan returned to my cousin's computer after it was shut down and restarted. It appears to be either
the newest or second-newest CWS variant, and unfortunately, none of the normal trojan removal methods work on it.
It anticipates exactly what you're going to try to do to get rid of it, and it blocks your efforts and corrupts
your removal tools. For example, the
HijackThis log doesn't display any of the signs of the MadFinder variant, but CWShredder keeps finding that variant
and removing it, only to have it return on the next reboot and immediately invite some "friends" to join it. The
Windows Task Manager doesn't show any of the CWS applications or processes running. Regedit doesn't show
any of the registry entries that are installed by any of the CWS variants, yet CWShredder keeps
finding and removing 1-9 different CWS variants each time the computer is rebooted. It must not be
completely removing them or they wouldn't keep coming back. The ZoneAlarm Pro firewall is still running,
but it has no tray icon and doesn't appear in the Windows Task Manager. The only indication that it is running is
that there are several ZoneAlarm DLLs in the Windows\System32\ZoneLabs folder that cannot be deleted because they are
in use, so it appears that CWS has corrupted ZoneAlarm Pro. Norton AntiVirus recognizes that the computer is
infected with CWS,
but it cannot do anything to remove it, despite the fact that the Norton site says that NAV has been able to remove
CWS since last March. Any attempt to even visit an antivirus site or an online scan site or a CWShredder download
site causes the browser to be redirected to a porn site. When we ran CWShredder from a locked floppy disk, we got a
message saying that CWS was attempting to corrupt CWShredder. This thing is really evil. Trying to
get rid of it is like playing a game of chess with a genius madman.