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Recently I have Chris has moved this website away from my old free hosting over to his own paid for hosting because he was keen for it to look more professional (i.e. lose the big advertising banner across the top of the page) and for my RSS feed to work (which for some reason didn’t with the free hosting). The nice little plugin that had the thumbnails pop up in their own window had stopped working and it seems it may have something to do with the dodgy bodged-together theme I have been using.

Chris (my personal blog fairy) has been experimenting with new themes, hence the new look. It is by no means a permanent thing as it still looks bodgy and needs a lot of work doing to it, but the picture viewer now seems to be working.

Please bear with it for a while until I find the time and acquire the expertise to find and customise a theme I feel happy with. It may be that I swap to a simple and plain one for a time, just so that I know everything will work and it will all sit properly on the page without any dodgy misalignments etc etc.

In the mean time, a big thank you to Chris for all his hard work in the wee small hours, especially as he now has the added responsibility of helping Irina look after their five month old baby, Anna, now

I have just been having a play with my website, attempting to create a favicon.ico (i.e. a customised icon that will appear next to my url in the browser’s address bar). After testing it in my usual browser, Firefox, and finding it not working I had a look with Internet Explorer to see if this recognised my icon.

The result was “hooray” IE did recognise it but disaster – my latest post embedding a youtube video of my goanna stalking has a big blank patch where the video should be.

Oh crikey, I really don’t know what I am going to do about this. When it comes to techie stuff I am a complete blagger, I am playing around with things I really don’t understand here and know nothing about programming. It probably doesn’t help that my theme for my blog was bodged in the first place. Maybe I just need to start afresh with a new theme that is nice and clean and enlist the help of my very dear friend the blog fairy (aka Chris M), when he is back from his birthday trip to Amsterdam of course… in fact make that a good while after his return from Amsterdam to ensure full recovery

Anyway, short term answer to the video problem is – I will post a link to my video on youtube in addition to the embedding for those that insist on using IE. For those of you open to change, for a better brighter future, download Firefox here and use instead!

Since I have got back from holiday I have been getting a pop up from my Virgin Media PCguard saying it has found Pigeon PP spyware on my PC but is unable to delete it. I’m not quite sure how it got there as I didn’t see it before I went away. My dad was using my pc while I was away to update his PC and contatc job agencies but being the extra cautious person that he is I very much doubt he would have done anything untoward.

So yesterday i decided it was about time I had a look into it and after typing Pigeon PP into google I came across cableforum.co.uk that showed a lot of other people with the same problem. There were lots of suggestions on how to try and get rid of it. I opted for downloading a free version of Ad-Aware 2007 and then running the scan in safe mode, even though one person had said he’d tried this with no success.

On first scan it picked up three different things, one being Win32.Backdoor.Hupigon which I can only presume was what I was looking for. It had three files and four registry entries whereas the other two just had one registry entry each. I deleted all the offending items and proceeded to do another scan to see if it had removed them all.

The second scan showed that there was one Hupigon thing left so I deleted it again and did another scan, the results of which showed nothing to be found. I’d like to think that I have got rid of the thing, the pop ups from Virgin Media PCguard have certainly stopped appearing, but having read the forum again I have discovered a lot more posts that make me have doubts.

One guy posted “This is not spyware as reported by pcguard ntlguard etc it IS a backdoor trojan so spyware wont remove it”. Another person has said it could be linking itself to “system restore” so that it is impossible to remove and to get rid of it you need to disable system restore. Then boot your PC in safe mode and run your antivirus and antispyware so that without the protection of system restore the virus can be identified and deleted.
Another person said they’d tried running Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot Search & Destroy both in safe mode and it hadn’t been able to get rid of it.

Well, I don’t know about all that. All I know is that for now my PC seems ok. I’m just a bit worried it’s still virused but now just looks healthy. Time will tell I suppose, I will just have to keep a beady eye on my bank and credit card statements!

• pigeon pp (10)
• avg backdoor hupigon unable to remove (1)
• how to remove pigeon pp (1)
• http://www dryadmusings com/2007/07/15/pigeon-pp-spyware-problem/ (1)
• w32 hupigon boo removal (1)

I have now got my blog up and running and installed essential plugins etc.
As I have been testing it along the way I have been using Firefox and it works fine as far as I can see… however, having just opened it in Internet Explorer I have discovered a few hitches with visuals. There is a minor defect on the homepage but it then goes a little squiffy if you click on a particular post.

Apologies for this. My limited (next to nil to be more precise) knowledge has me mystified at the moment but I am hoping to enlist the help of someone more experienced in the near future to rectify these problems. No doubt it has something to do with the way me and Chris bodged the original template during the customisation process.