Eagle eyed visitors might spot a couple of tiny tweaks to the site today, with the buttons at the base of the page receiving a refresh (what do you mean you never scroll down that far?), and the site stylesheet for picture links getting a teeny tweak so they behave a little less weirdly in Internet Explorer. That is all. Oh, and if you find any good games, as opposed to the kind that have been found today, please feel free to drop me a line using the
submit a link page.
Thank you very much, please come again.
G :)
To the few people that occasionally visit the
"about" page on the site, actually to be more accurate, to the smaller sub set of you that have visited it
and actually noticed that it's
immensely out of date (ho ho - no I did not move back to the UK), you'll be pleased to know that I've finally
updated it. Now you know
what it's all about again.
It's a Friday (woohoo!) after a busy week (boo!), and quite frankly I need to step away from the computer for a while... so this is going to brief...
Liekster dropped me a note (inbetween
Tim subbing
every game
ever; too much to wade thru today I'm afraid old chap) to see if I had seen
Gambit yet. My answer being 'no'... From what I can see it's 50% cute games, 50% social experiment. Could be good, could be bad, why not pop over and
take a look for yourself? And in the meantime why not also try the, slightly more random, social experiment contained within the
Lazylaces Random Game Selecta and see if a few good clicks can find you some classic p'n'c action? And if you find nothing there to cheer you up, remember that there's always
lego and/or
sweatpants... [
thanks to Liekster, Tim & Steve].
After weeks, months even, of an, as yet
still, unfruitful house hunt - viewing properties, filling out & submitting multiple financial forms (Self-employed? Tricky), missing out on our dream home, filling out & submitting yet more financial forms (Non-Citizen? Very tricky), moving loan company & finally getting approval on a home loan, filling out & submitting
even more financial forms, and even now still viewing properties regularly (and filling out more forms), it's time for a break, and we're off on our
summer holiday.
In the meantime if you are looking for new games try the folks listed to right under 'more games', or brace yourself for a historical tour, and use the new
Random Game Selecta to tinker around in the
LL archives.
That should keep you occupied until the 29th, when we'll be back from
OC. And remember -
wear sunscreen.
No updates today as I'm super busy trying to shake off a
nasty virus (that's the computer kind, not the sneezy kind). Where do these things come from? I'm up to date with Windows, AV software, firewall and Anti Spyware and I'm ultra careful, and yet still I get infected. I wasn't even doing anything when it struck. Anyway...
Currently both Windows Defender and Norton Internet Security insist that my PC is fine, yet every time I use google all the results are hijacked to direct to other sites, and every time I try to visit Microsoft or Symantec (Norton) to get any kind of useful security update I'm either blocked or redirected elsewhere again. Arrrrgh. I don't even what to know what would happen if I used a site that needed security details/credit card details etc and I can't even think about using my remote connection to my office (so work today consists of searching security bulletin boards and rebooting a PC a gazillion times, which is even less fun than usual since 9 times out of 10 it won't even boot up properly as it's clearly too busy committing evil acts upon it's own operating system and files). Hmmmmm.... *deep breath*. Anyway, so that's what I'm doing today.
UPDATE: So the latest update is that my PC seems to be fixed. Thanks to everyone who posted suggestions in the comments, or emailed with help (especially James). I was going to write up a full story of my experiences hoping that they could help someone else out there with the same problems, but to be honest with you I'm exhausted by the whole thing now and really don't even want to think about viruses, trojans and rootkits. I spent 2.5 long days going thru this. Having a break from the computer after sitting at it constantly for hours and hours on end is kind of appealing. But just a quick summary...
I had problems with
Trojan.blusod (kind of annoying) and with
Rootkit.Win32.Agent.cku (ultra annoying and pretty scary), despite generally "being careful" and keeping my operating system, firewall and security software up to date (which is the no #1 recommendation to not even having these sorts of issues in the first place).
Once infected very useful tools to sort out the problem (which I'll contine to use) were
Malwarebytes' anti-malware and
Spybot.
I did however also need a lot of help, and a tool called SDFix, to get completely 'clean'. I suggest a visit to bleepingcomputer.com for this if you find yourself in a similar situation (and I'd probably shy away from running SDFix, as excellent as it is, without the sort of help they can offer).
If you just want
some games you've waited far too long already, and you almost certainly want to skip this bit. If you are interested in where I've been though, read on...
First of all I could tell you the story of how I have been busy walking from Maine To Georgia along the
Appalachian Trail (see
the pic above Jen & I got for this very purpose), but those of you that know me well (or that can read the subtle clue in the name
lazylaces) might not believe that.
Or I could tell you that my disappearance was all part of a huge
point'n'click adventure I set up on the site and that I'm
really disappointed that no one 'got it' and managed to track me down. Although I'm sure that at least one of you pixel hunted every last piece of the site and you know that I would just be making it up (although thanks to very one who tracked me on
FB - I'm only 5 friends short of 100 now!).
Of course the truth, as usual, is far more dull. Maybe I will do that game thing one day though. Anyway... Firstly I got very busy, very quickly, with work. Then I was house sitting, and was still busy at work (but there was a pool, which made things a little easier). Then I had to travel back to the UK on business. Then I was jet-lagged. Then I went on holiday (to
Luray, VA and
Skyline Drive - where
the pic above is really from). And somewhere in there I also experienced the tail end of Hurricane Hanna (a really not very exciting tropical storm when it came thru here - as an Englishman I have seen lots of rain before, which is what it boiled down to) and went to see
Burning Spear live. And now, somehow, I'm still busy with work. Ho hum. Juggling every thing that needs to be done, and actually having some free time in between, can be a daunting task, but I'm going to try to get back on some sort of track now.
Anyway. Back to a couple of posts now for those of you itching for
games that have managed to read this far.
PS. For those of you that ask
all the time about my wedding pics, Jen says hi, and says she will be making me actually get them on-line this week...
New stuff later today once I've finished work. For now I'm going to dodge out of the way of the stampede to post "
first".
There's something distinctly weird and nerve racking about taking a driving test after you've already been driving for over 10 years, but that's exactly what I did yesterday as I passed my Maryland State Driving test, to add a Maryland driving license to my UK driving license. So I can now officially drive on both sides of the road. Just not at the same time...
We're
back from vacation at
the beach over a long
4th of July weekend (celebrating independence from the British!), meaning we've seen our fair share of fireworks, sunshine, bars, stars & stripes. Jen
photographed me on the drive home (note how happy I am about it being the end of the vacation) wearing my fetching holiday hat. It's nice to be back, but I think I would rather still be in
Seacrets sipping a
Rum Runner... I am however still wearing my hat, despite being back at work, which is nice.
Hmmm... a personal quandary...
England play USA, who do
I support? The homeland or the motherland? I'm not really sure what I'm meant to do. It certainly felt strange watching the game, and I'm not sure if I lost or won. A good game, but it weirded me out.
Well I think, stress
think, my last load of changes have thwarted the EvilSpamMonkeys hacking back into the site, so it looks like it's time to tentatively step out of my spam proof bunker and get posting again... I have one or two things (mild under-exaggeration) that have been
submitted to post for y'all.
As well as getting back to posting there are a few site changes that I have planned for this year which I'll discuss on here as I get round to doing them. First up I'm planning on an update to the "
Submit A Link" page itself. Everyone is so kind as to post new games and links through this to me so I don't have to do all the new game searching leg work myself (I still do sometimes though), but the page is becoming increasingly abused by those EvilSpamMonkeys who try every avenue to get their generic cheap drugs advertisements out to you all.
Currently for every game/link post I get from genuine Lazylacers I get somewhere between 50 & 100 spam submissions. I have been dealing with this ok, but it's very time consuming, and I'm worried now that genuine submissions are getting lost in the sea of spam (apologies if this has happened to you). So the plan is to add a "prove you are human" test to the submission page (similar to the one you may have encountered when adding comments) which should reduce the problem dramatically since EvilSpamMonkeys seem to get SpamBots to do most of their dirty work for them.
Anyway, that's what I'm up to "behind the scenes", now back to posting with a bit of a catch-up session on the things that haven't been lost in my mass spam deleting sessions....
PS: Thanks for the beers and poems whilst I've been away, you've been keeping Jen & I entertained :)
Well after a fantastic wedding (pics soon), honeymoon in Hawaii, Christmas and New Year, things were due to return to normal here on Lazylaces (with a few New Year's resolutions thrown in for good measure), but as you may have seen whilst dropping by we've had more than our fair share of anti-social attacks on the site.
EvilSpamMonkeys have found there way into the posting system (twice now) resulting in lots of posts about cheap generic pharmaceuticals rather than cool new games. Round one of the site changes to stop this only kept them bamboozled for a few days though, and they soon returned, and now a lot more changes have been made to stop them returning again. Please let us know immediately by e-mail (link at the bottom of every page) if you see any evidence that they have returned once more, as we'll need to dig out our best thinking hats to come up with another solution - for now we think we've plugged every gap an EvilSpamMonkey might squeeze though - but you never know, they are tenacious little devils.
On top of that some little hacking idiots thought it would be good idea to divert further time and resources by messing totally with the comments system. Now you'll find that virtually all HTML tags are disabled in comments - this probably won't bother everyone, but if you've ever found them useful in the past, we apologise, but they've become more trouble than they're worth. Regular text comments, hint tags and spoilers still all work though.
Anyway, for now posting is on hold until we're a bit more certain we've defeated any further hacking attempts - there's a good chance that if the ESMs get back in that we'll need to restore the current back-up of the site, losing anything new that has been added, and backing the whole thing up for every new post is just
way too time consuming. So for now, we're still on hold, but if we stay EvilSpamMonkey free for a few more days we'll start to post again and hopefully get things back to normal.
