Status Asthmaticus

Just got word that my Great Aunt Pauline has passed away. She was 92. Of the 11 children of Charles and Mary Taylor (Khalil Tayar and Zsa Zsa Darwish), now only my Great Aunt Elaine is left.

The obit:

Skaff, Pauline Miriam (Taylor), 92, passed away on Saturday, November 28, 2009 in Wichita, KS. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she married the love of her life, Alfred, on Feb. 16, 1947. Pauline was devoted to her family and her Catholic faith. She was a homemaker, a cook, a baker and the host of countless family dinners. She also was a career woman, working for her brother's real estate developments. Pauline was preceded in death by parents, Charles and Mary Taylor; husband, Alfred George Skaff and siblings, Katherine Abraham, Harry Taylor, Florence Farris, Franklin Taylor, Joseph Taylor, Julia Kline, Leona Chapman, Mai Herman and Woodrow Taylor. She is survived by her sister, Elaine Otwell; her children, Barbara (Gary) Carson, Melissa (Steven) Cohlmia, Paul Skaff, Carol Skaff, Vincent Skaff, all of Wichita, and Gregory Skaff of New York City; grandchildren, Devin, Christopher and David Frambers, Pete and Leigh Cohlmia, Lisa, Jordan, Marie and Andrew Skaff, all of Wichita, and Yasmine Drayton Skaff of New York City; great-grandchildren, Christopher, Vanessa and Ava Pauline Frambers, William Starks Frambers, Natalie Frambers, Jackson Cohlmia; and numerous nieces and nephews. Rosary, 7 p.m., Tuesday, December 1 and Mass of Christian Burial, Wednesday, December 2 at 1 p.m., both at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church.

(Florence Farris was my grandma.)

Requiescat in Pace

It's 6:26 am and here I am again, just finishing up a paper that's due in three hours, going on no sleep, and there won't be any tonight, since I have to leave in about 90 minutes. I am surviving by the grace of two pots of coffee with a third to come.

Why do I punish myself like this? I've done it every single semester since my sophomore year in college, with almost every paper I write. I didn't even start the bulk of the research on this one until late last night. That might even beat the time I wrote that big naval history paper in three days while doing all the research on the fly!

I guess I like living on the edge. The Sleepless Wonder rides again!

I am really sick of hearing about the White House gate crashers and, frankly, I think they ought to throw them in jail and bring charges. If some average Joe Blow citizen had proverbially hopped the fence uninvited to schmooze with the pres and co., does anyone think the Secret Service wouldn't have had them kneeling on the ground in handcuffs as soon as they found out? Not me, not in this age of terrorism. So why should two spoiled-brat celebrities get special treatment? It's not like they did it at the Easter Egg Hunt, either...it was a state dinner.

Hello? It's called trespassing! Throw the bums out, please!

Lords of Kobal, it's just wonderful to be able to actually cook again. *happy sigh* Thanksgiving this year consists of yakhnit loubieh (green bean stew) and sfiha (meat pies). I did everything except get the pies out of the oven (since I am cordially terrified of ovens). Penny also made cookies!

Thus:



Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks to my m4d sk1llz Penny is now online. Only took me two damned weeks for me to figure out what was wrong with her computer.

Ye gods, but I hate Micro$oft.

Lots of political anger right now. Might post more later. Might not.

I saw my first honest-to-God truck balls today. I feel more complete as a human being now.

(Funniest thing was...it was in the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics, which is not a place I'd normally associate with idiot macho rednecks.)

...Happy One Year Anniversary to us.

My trusty old Norelco Reflex Plus electric shaver is going out. I think it must be the blades...I've had it for almost four years and haven't ever gotten new blades, and until now it was working great. But this week it's started yanking out whiskers, which is not pleasant.

Thing is, getting new blades is almost as expensive as buying a new shaver altogether. So, I have three options.

1. Buy new blades.
2. Buy new shaver.
3. Go back to the old fashioned way.

No. 3 I dunno about because my skin gets more sensitive as the years wear on. So...thoughts?

I finally figured out what was wrong. Over the weekend I had done what good little Windows users do and installed the new security updates for Vista. Unbeknowst to me, the updates (or something) turned Windows' own firewall back on. I don't know why it was acting up...maybe it was conflicting with my own firewall, or something else, but all I know is that half the Internet wasn't working for me.

As soon as I found this and turned Windows Firewall back off, everything worked fine.

So thanks, again, for nothing, Micro$oft. You gave me two days of stress I really didn't need.

I'm about to give up, seriously. I can't get into "normal" LJ at all, being reduced to using the mobile version on Firefox. A few other sites (such as CNN) also refuse to load. I don't what the hell is wrong...I've tried all the suggestions I've found, and nothing works. LJ et al don't work on IE or Opera, either, so I know it's not just Firefox. But speaking of which, I was finally forced to uninstall FF 3.5 and go back to 2.0, because 3 was giving me no end in problems. That was after I uninstalled COMODO's firewall and switched to PCTools, because, again, Comodo was giving me no end of trouble. And I still can't get Penny's computer online in spite of everything I try.

It's been a frustrating computer weekend, and I don't have time for this shit. I have finals to study for, outlines to write, and research to do.

Why can't anything ever be easy?

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

...not to turn off email notifications. Jeez!

SO sick of hearing about Call of Duty 2. Stupid games. Don't people read anymore?

GAH! Grouchy today.

Here's a fascinating blast from the past, a PC World article from way back in 1995, called "Why Johnny Can't Geek."

These days, it's sometimes hard to remember what life was like during the Internet's infancy, a time when most people still used DOS and AOL and other access providers still controlled content for most users. Back then, in the fall of 1995, I was a student library aide at my high school. I was put in charge of running the building's sole Internet-connected computer, as we were the first school in the district with access. Our goal was to evaluate the use of the 'Net so that, come the spring semester, we could begin granting access to the students at large. I tell you, running Netscape (what the article calls the "Porsche of browsers") on a Windows 3.1 machine with a blazing-fast 14.4 external modem, that was the height of excitement.

I'm not kidding...it felt great, to be on the very cutting edge of school computing. At the time, the Heights library had exactly three computers available for general student use (i.e. I'm not counting the three old boxes that were solely used for the district's library catalog): two ancient, original Apple Macintosh machines and a beat-up IBM PC. When writing the very rare paper for which typing was required, most of us still used typewriters (and God how I loved the Selectric in the librarian's office).

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

...but I'm losing my faith in Firefox.

I've been a Firefox devotee ever since I started using version 0.8 back in early 2004. I became a zealous militant that year, attempting to convert my coworkers at KBTI away from the biting horror that was IE6. Sadly, the stranglehold of Microsoft was too strongly affixed upon them, and only myself and Todd the IT Guy held true to the Firefox faith. (Full disclosure: I did keep using IE, as well as Opera, but only so I could test the company website in them.)

Back then, Firefox really was light-years ahead of IE in many ways: compatibility, standards compliance, security, and perhaps most glowingly, user customization. With IE you got...IE, and that was it. With Firefox, the ways you could customize the interface and bookmarks seemed endless, and soon I had my own little system down that I still use today. Tabbed browsing made for a clean taskbar and better navigation.

I'm rather fanatical about having clean taskbars and desktops; I put everything I regularly need in the quick launch bar and in custom toolbars. People who stick buttloads of icons on the desktop, or are happy with sixteen open IE windows (or worse, use the default style taskbar and start menu in XP and Vista...BLECH!!), just drive me nuts. This is what Windows should look like, people!! (Alright, I know, every user has their own style...that's fine. I'm just real anal about mine, and a little defensive. It comes from working for more than six years in an office where the employees routinely demonstrated a lack of mutual respect by changing one another's settings, styles, and even deleting programs. It didn't matter how many times I told them not to, too often I'd come to work to find someone had used my computer again and screwed up my taskbar or deleted some program for whatever idiotic reason. Bah.) Anyway....

I kept that enthusiasm alive through versions 1 and 2, and all was right with the browsing world. Then last year, version 3 came out. I decided that, well, I had better update to the new version. I regretted it almost immediately, as my tried and true system was suddenly not supported; all of my preffered themes weren't supported by 3.0, and none of them ever were. I had massive trouble importing my bookmarks and it took several frustrating days to fiddle with 3.0 to get things back to what I considered normal. Once that was done, and once I had chosen a decent theme (Littlefox, if anyone's interested), it got better, but things were still not perfect. Firefox 3, I noticed, was interacting oddly with some websites I frequented; sometimes it would freeze and crash as soon as they began to load. It was frustrating, having to kill Firefox and reload when this happened, sometimes losing information or work in the process.

Then, Firefox automatically updated to version 3.5, even though I had changed the settings (at least twice) so it would not do this. Immediately, the problems mounted. Even more sites didn't work right, and by this point Firefox crashes at least once a day. Worse, Firefox is still trying to update automatically, even though I keep changing that setting, and for the last three weeks or so, every update is downloaded but refuses to run, resulting in an annoying error message and associated delay whenever I start the program. Browsing is slower than it has ever been on this browser, and I know it's not the network. Uninstall/reinstall doesn't make a dent.

So...although I'll never go back to IE except for testing purposes, and although I understand why some people are resistant to using different browsers (Firefox can be intimidating for newbies, and from experience at KBTI I realize that not everyone has need of a fancy rig...I design websites, though, and Firefox suits that quite well, which IE never did), Firefox has been eroding my enthusiasm.

Waiting for the next crash....

...and counting.

I miss my daddy.

...is Rep. Joseph Cao.

And now on to the Senate.

News Media: please, please, please, please, PLEASE!! stop beginning your news headlines with the words "...a devout Muslim." Do you people know what this does to Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent? What it does to the people who already hate us, despise us, are suspicious of us, think we're not "real Americans" because our blood or religion are bad?

Jesus, I am about this close from quitting the news altogether, and y'all must realize how painful that idea is to me.

Is it bad that the first thing I thought of when I heard the Ft. Hood shooter's name is, "oh great, another backlash against Muslims and Middle Easterners is imminent?"

Just waiting for the "let's purge all Muslims, and especially converts, from the military!!" comments on conservative blogs.