07 March 2006 by Published in: in my life 7 comments

The illness is receding. I’m still prone to naps, and being suddenly cold for no good reason, and odd coughing fits, but things are improving. Thanks for all your well-wishes. I know I complain a lot about the evils of TV, but let me tell you, when you are sick, TV is just about the greatest thing ever. I just wanted you to know, for the record, that I’m not a total hater.

And with that settled, allow me to carry on with the hating. Can someone explain to me why in the past two weeks I’ve suddenly become a magnet for random icqing? I’m using Fire, and after not getting random chats in forever, I now get about one to two dozen random people icqing me per day. Why? And why now? I can autodeny icqs that come from people not already on my list, but since I’ve managed to hang on to my icq account for seven plus years and lost my lists several times, there’s always a slim possibility that someone who hasn’t spoken to me in a long time might pop up again, and I’d like them to be able to ping me. Still, this is getting ridiculous. Blech.

I’ve also got a bone to pick with the cosmetics industry. I don’t despise makeup. In fact, I wear makeup around a half dozen times a year. My problem is, I can’t seem to find makeup in a size that’s appropriate to half a dozen wearings per year. I’m forced to buy these enormous tubes of lipstick, these tremendous vats of eyeshadow, these huge tins of base. Once opened, these towering piles are good for about a year before they have to be thrown out, usually with barely a dent to give away they’ve been used at all. I resent the waste. So, why oh why, don’t makeup purveyors make trial-sized doses of their wares? Surely I’m not alone in this regard. Likely even daily makeup wearers can find a use for a travel-sized portions of their favorite cosmetics. So. Why aren’t they available? What’s the problem here? Am I just failing to look in the right places?

Take a look at this New Yorker cover that wasn’t, but should have been. Thanks, Dick.

So it looks like today is going to be the day I restart Firefox. I don’t want to restart Firefox. As I told my husband today when he suggested it, “Restarting Firefox is for the weak”, but Gmail cannot be convinced to allow me to log in, for whatever reason. At some point, I suppose, I’ll have to get to my email again. My husband seems to think, and I’m not sure why, that I should tell all of you folks why I’m so reluctant to restart Firefox, and he suggests a screenshot will explain. So here’s my current Firefox session:
Firefox Screenshot

For the record, I don’t like rebooting my machine either. I postpone updates that require restarts, usually for a month or two and not just because of the restarting Firefox issue. I’m not running Unix under the hood here so I have to reboot every five minutes, or even every five weeks! Stupid having to set -o vi again on all my shells, and then the history is all gone, and plus having to relaunch all my apps, and I was just in the middle of two ecto posts and an appleworks doc and such. Man was not meant to live this way! Restarts are lame, lame, lame. My current uptime is only 23 days, so you can forget Security Update 2006-001 for at least a couple of weeks. Well, unless I decide to restart Firefox…at which point there may be a massive restarting extravaganza. Why the hell not?

P.S. I have no idea whether you can read the screenshot or not, but the “Black Bear Bakery” listed on that page used to be the place of employment of a fellow writer from WUTA. We used to call him the “Anarchist Baker”. Actually, we still do call him that from time to time. He quit the bakery so they’d pay him. And yes, it really does work that way. They tend not to pay you, unless you quit. This appeals to me, but that’s probably because I’m not an employee. I love living in a city with an anarchist bakery.

Comments

Tue 07th Mar 2006 at 2:15 pm

One: Go to icq.com, log in, and tell it to never, ever publicize your away status on the web. This hideous feature is on by default, I think this is the source of a LOT of ICQ spam. Two: There are Firefox extensions that will recreate your tabs when you come back from restarting it. Session Saver is one, and it works great after intentional restarts, but it sucks after a crash. Crash Recovery works better for me. I restart Firefox all the time, because it eats a ton of memory. It also crashes a fair bit for me, maybe twice a week. I’m a little annoyed that you don’t mention having such problems. I’m not sure, unfortunately, whether Crash Recovery works to restore tabs after a legitimate intentional restart. But you could force-quit Firefox instead of quitting, and Crash Recovery would pop up and restore your tabs (yes, all of them).

Tue 07th Mar 2006 at 4:04 pm

I’d love to see a comment from someone. ANYONE who has this many tabs running at the same time.

Wed 08th Mar 2006 at 9:59 am

I didn’t know the tabs on Firefox did second rows, let alone third ones. But I ‘m glad to hear you have sick conquered

Rick
Wed 08th Mar 2006 at 11:59 am

If I’m browsing forums I’ll open between 15-40 tabs at once, but at least Camino is nice enough to put anything over 10 or so into a sidebar like Safari does instead of that abomination that firefox does. Why don’t you just bookmark all your tabs into one bookmark so you can re-open them the next time you launch firefox. That’s what I do if I have things I want to read, but can’t read at the time due to restarts. Congratulations on getting over your cold too. Mine is almost gone and I can finally listen to music properly and eat food WITH TASTE again. Wonderful!

jerm
Thu 09th Mar 2006 at 8:49 am

Wikipedia is hell on tabs in firefox. I cant read an article without opening one or two or twelve other articles in other tabs. Once I finish the one I’m on I can move over to the next tab, then the vicious cycle continues!

Thu 09th Mar 2006 at 10:16 pm

I’m embarrassed to admit it…I use firefox and didn’t realize what I could do with tabs. Not sure I’ll ever get that many open at once, but I’ll let you know.

Charlie
Mon 13th Mar 2006 at 7:28 am

I’ve had the 20+ tabs open before but never for any serious length of time. Either it slows the computer down or I’m too impatient when that many tabs are open so I start clicking away in agitation. Next thing you know…its a tab dance as things open and close in rapid succession :P

Glad to hear that you are feeling better.

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