Now I’ve complained about the Gay Mature dating ads on this site already.  Now we have another ad problem with Nancy’s Golf World.

Actually, when I think about it an ad for golf makes sense.  I mean, I golf a bit and talk about it here and there on Japa.

Really, my problem is with Nancy’s Golf World itself.

Look, I don’t mean to be a snob, but Nancy’s Golf World, at http://www.nancysgolfworld.com, is perhaps the worst website I’ve seen ever.  Viewing the site makes me think I’m back in the early 90’s.  I’m convinced that Nancy means well and she’s trying hard to make a decent living…but really, this site is horrible.

I mean, the home page is just a series of pictures stretched out of proportion, with randomly colored oversized text that sometimes overlaps other text.  It wouldn’t be fair to say the site is difficult to navigate.  It’s much worse than that.  The site is more like a link hunt and peck, with links lined up with no horizontal or vertical alignment whatsoever.

On this site Nancy sells access to instructional golf videos.  But the videos are so, so, poorly done.  They’re low resolution, and there are no controls for the videos at all.  So, you have to watch the video all the way through, with no volume controls, and you can’t stop to replay anything.

The worst video, though, is the Kinetic video.  This video consists of someone manipulating one of those artsy wood stick figure people to show examples of a good golf swing.

Not only is this not effective – I mean, who can really tell what it happening with this wood figure – it’s also kind of scary in a haunting stop-motion horror movie kind of way.

Look, I’m not doubting Nancy’s golf ability here.  In fact, from what I can tell from her low res videos she’s actually pretty good.  I’m just critiquing her choice of web designers.  Golfers should not be expected to understand web design.  I just hope Nancy just gets enough feedback to revamp her site with a real designer.

So April 1st hit and the Internet is still there.  But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not infected with the conficker worm.  In fact, April 1st proved that if you are infected with conficker, you could be in trouble.  On the 1st, the worm phoned home to update itself.  Sure, that’s not bad in itself, but the update showed that the worm is difficult to stop and incredibly versatile.

Luckily, the Conficker Working Group has an easy way to see if you’re infected or not.  How?  Do you see three logos below?  One for F-Secure, one for SecureWorks, and one for Trend Micro?

If you do, you’re in good shape.  If some or all of the logos are missing then you’re likely in trouble.

How does this test work?  Well, Conficker is designed to block internet access to the websites of anti-virus companies like F-Secure, SecureWorks and Trend Micro, so if you’re infected these logos, which are linked to the AV company’s website, will be blocked.  If you’re not infected you’ll see the logos like usual.

In any case, Conficker is turning out to be pretty scary.  The worm is able to access thousands of infected computers worldwide and turn them into…well…whatever the worm authors want.  Not only that, but Conficker is sneaky.  It’s designed to disable anti-virus software and it will only accept secure connections from its creators.

Although nothing has happened to far, Conficker can be used to wreak havoc at the whim of its creators.  Most likely the Conficker creators will sell use of the Conficker network to hackers for things like denial service attacks.

All indications are the worst is yet to come.