all uh ad bar remember a few posts ago i had a bit of a peeve on about rollover ads that popped up windows or started playing audio tracks? yeah? good. so this morning i was watching a video commemorating gagarin's historic first orbit of earth. the video was crap. but it was like being there. in the 60s. in a can. in space. with google earth showing what he would have recorded if he'd have had a 21st century camera. i so want to go. it was so pretty. and there was some nice mood music playing. and the subtitles to the staticy russian conversation. i zoomed it to full screen on the rightmost monitor. and kept working on the other two. it was that immersive. until someone started talking. in english. wtf? aw dammit. a rollover ad. and it's not even on the frontmost tabbed page. jeesum crow. so i viewed the page source. ad.doubleclick.com. fuck you. i killed it. here's how. add this line:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com

to the bottom of c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. hosts is where you computer looks to resolve a domain name from text, ad.doubleclick.com, to numbers, 12.34.56.78. if there's no entry, then your computer asks your isp to resolve it for you. so what i've done is told chrome to get ads from my computer instead of from the internet. slick huh? but wait. we just fucked with a critical piece of how your computer connects to the internet. like say your bank. isn't that a kind of security risk? why yes. yes it is. fortunately, windows is actually kinda smart. it noticed the next time i shut down the computer. i checked carefully to make sure it was freaking out about what i had done. and then i told it to allow it. voila! some web pages look kinda empty. which is fine by me. i never notice the stupid things anyway. well, not until they misbehave.  ¶ 8:00 AM