Saturday, February 01, 2003



When You Just Can't Handle the Thrill-a-Minute Action of Solitaire

     For the terminally bored or enthusiasts of the popular time-killer, Jigzone has lots of online jigsaw puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty for you to while away the hours with.
A Letter from the Editor

Re: The proposed "new look" of The Ends of the Earth, mentioned in a previous post.

     Well, I really did intend to put up a new template, in fact, I worked on the thing, off and on for probably six or seven hours over the past few days. However, when it came time to put it into action, I looked at it, looked at the template I have now and just really liked this one better, so why fix what ain't broke, huh? I'm sure at some point I will be changing the look of my page, but until I come up with something that's markedly better, I'm just going to hang with the current look and perhaps give it a few tweaks here and there. In better news, I've fixed the archives, so there's no longer a Santa Claus on the older pages, nor that gimmicky snow-flake effect, which I only meant to leave up here for a week or so, back during the holidays. Also, having gotten all that crap out of the way, as well as some pressing personal problems I won't go into here, I'm now free to return you to you regularly-scheduled diet of neato links and semi-lucid rants. That is all, thank you for reading.
Beware of Xupiter, the Browser Tool from Hell

     Some evil programmers whose website resides on Hungary have created a particularly nasty little download that installs itself without your permission and hijacks your browser, periodically changing your start page to the Xupiter.com homepage. Surfers who've been unfortunate enough to have downloaded Xupiter say it's incredibly hard to get rid of. Though it does have an "uninstall" program, it either doesn't work or makes things even worse. If you happen to find yourself at it's mercy, you may have to resort to using something like Spybot Search and Destroy or, for more advanced users, editing your registry.
     Having personally dealt with a couple similiar programs that took over my browser settings, I can assure you that nothing will make you madder than connecting to the net and finding that not only has your start page changed (which would be aggravating enough in and of itself) but you can't change it back, no matter how hard you try.
     I had one awhile back - EzyCyberSearch - if I recall correctly, that was nearly as frustrating as this and my friend, Phillip, is currently dealing with another, which offers no uninstall or information on it's homepage and even changes your address bar search settings so your browser is directed to their own, utterly useless search. A search for, say, National Geographic won't turn up their website in the results, only links to speciously-related items you can buy on various e-stores. This is the internet at it's worst. I say track these scum down and hang them alongside the spammers, the bot-makers and all the rest of the slimy, sneaky opportunists on the internet and let's be quick about it, okay?


Acno's Energizer

     A neat little Flash game of the cutesy-character-who-has-to-solve-puzzles-to-get-to-the-next-level variety.