It has been a hell of a week here, at the “old fart” house.  Here, in southeastern Wisconsin, we had the pleasure of the coldest temperatures yet this winter.  One might think this would be good for gaming.  After all, with temperatures plummeting to as low as -10 degrees F (-23 degrees C), you would expect gamers to be huddled around the warm glow of their Xbox 360 power supplies or swinging Wii nunchucks just to stay warm.  I know I was huddled around my PC’s power supply working on my resume and playing games, so much so I was getting tired of my favorite FPS.  And since it seemed like I had memorized most of the Internet, I wanted to try a different type of game. 

Enter my search for Mahjong.  I am the type of person that likes to time slice, which is a fancy way of saying that I get bored or disinterested in what I am doing really fast.  So, when I am working on a project (like this article), I worked on it for 10 minutes, and then played a  game of FreeCell, and the cycle repeats.  The temporary distraction refreshes me, and I can then jump back into my project.  After tiring of FreeCell and Hearts, I wanted to play a game with a little more strategy - something without a complicated install and a game I could play in a window.

 I remembered playing a computer version of Mahjong years ago, and how much I enjoyed playing.  That was  it…I needed to find Mahjong.  I figured there had to be a free version of the game floating around on the Internet.

So, I fired up Google and typed in “download Mahjong” and hit enter.  Google, of course, returned about 17 gazillion results.  After sorting through a few of them, I downloaded two versions, thinking one of them would be a straight forward easy play.

What could possibly go wrong, right?  Well, it turns out that one of them had a virus or was in a virus-infected delivery package.  When I began the install, Windows asked if I it was safe to run the executable and I said “sure”.  Of course, my antivirus started to freak out, and by the time I had killed the install it had wedged itself into about six spots on my computer.  I then set about cleaning the OS of the unwanted intruder. I started several virus scans and spyware scans on my computer.  Two hours and seven scans later, it was finally clean.

I guess that the moral of this week’s story is: be careful out there kids.  There are threads of malicious code everywhere, so make sure that you know what you are downloading and the source from which you are downloading.  Otherwise, instead of spending your afternoon playing games online with the guys or balancing your checkbook you may find yourself rebuilding your computer.  The Internet is a great resource, but like all things that are “free”, you have to be careful.

Finally, I would like to thank Symantec for their free online virus scanner, and Lavasoft for their free spyware scanner.

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