I loves me some add-ons!

Most of you know by now about my recently deceased computer.  *insert moment of silence here*  And you also know how loving and gracious my Beloved has been in letting me share his computer, and create my own profile on it.  That means my own Firefox.  And you know I’m add-on crazy because I love the personalization Firefox allows … but since this isn’t my computer I am trying to keep the add-ons to a minimum and haven’t put on all the ones I used to have.

Well, I found an add-on that kind of kills 2 birds with one stone.  It’s called Integrated GMail 2.0.0.  What this does is pretty cool, I think.  How many Google Apps do you use at any given time?  I seem to have a few open in tabs and I bounce back and forth between them – my Reader, my Gmail, maybe my Calendar, maybe look up an address in Maps … you get the idea.  How about an add-on that has all your Google Apps open on a single page, where you can minimize or maximize the App depending on if you’re using it?  You can add Apps from the options list and pick and choose the ones you use most, or take off the ones you don’t use.  (So far, the only App I can’t seem to get is Docs.)  Everything all in one place, one tab – neat, clean, easy-peasy!  AND your Google Chat/Gmail sidebar is still there for all the Apps too, so you don’t have to bounce around tabs for that either.  Or not – there’s a little green arrow on the bottom left so that you can open or close the sidebar.  I mean come on, how cool is that?

Check it out and let me know what you think. 

 

~~Ness~~  

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Bits and pieces

As is pretty typical, it was an uneventful weekend here at The Darc House.  Ran a couple of errands, watched a few movies, talked a lot.  That’s what Darc and I do, we talk.  We basically never shut up.  Amazing how after all these years together we still don’t run out of things to say.  What’s kind of interesting – to me anyway – is that we mostly agree with each other.  I used to hear that in a marriage, you wanted a spouse who disagreed with you on lots of things, so that you’d always have something to “talk” about.  I found that kind of talk mostly leads to arguments and eventually divorce.  So if I were handing out advice, and when am I not? I’d tell people, “Find someone who agrees with you about almost everything.  You will always have an ally.”  That’s my 2¢.

Anyway, Darc was watching some program on what would happen to the earth if there were no longer any people on it while I was going through my Reader.  Out of the corner of my ear, I heard the narrator say, “And the eighty thousand miles of roads in Texas could circle the globe five times!”  Something short-circuited in my brain and I said, “Wait a minute …”

Darc responded, “Wait … that’s not right!”

And then we were off and running about how stupid must a show be to think that 80k miles of roads could go around the earth 5 times.  Then we got off on a tangent about “Environmentalists” and actually came up with a game show I just might propose to ABC.   

Later on, we caught part of a show on “ghostly places” or something to that effect.  Someone on that show made the comment about how ghosts are attached to old places.  That spurred Darc to ponder, “At what age does a building become eligible for a ghost resident?  Is there like a minimum age requirement and does it need ID?  And what do they mean by “attached"?  Is the ghost screaming, ‘I’m stuck!  I’m stuck!  Guys, you go on without me, this building’s like quicksand!  Save yourselves!’” 

After that I wandered around the house for maybe an hour muttering, “I’m stuck!” and holding my sides in from laughing so hard.  Seriously, I almost did a spit-take the 1st time he said it.  About spewed my coffee everywhere. 

Today we return some movies to the library.  I have to tell you, those of you who like Depp, don’t EVER rent his Dead Man movie.  It sucked. 

And how was your weekend?

A picture of our place ended up on lolcats – not sure how that happened … 

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~~Ness~~

My special look

JUST for YOU! Aren’t you glad?

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Even Stevens

I dunno, I think I’m extremely even, and I don’t shy away from that. 

Your Birthday’s Wisdom is Balance

You have learned to live a life balance and moderation. You believe that there can be too much of a good thing, and you act accordingly. You try to put equal emphasis on work and play. You also divide your focus between yourself and others. You believe that evening everything out is the key to life. You shy away from extremes.

What’s Your Birthday’s Wisdom?

In Sympathy

Goodbye, and thanks for the memories.

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It has been a strange Hollywood week.  Ed McMahon was elderly and apparently in ill health.  Farrah was in intensive care and her family had been called in to say their last goodbyes the night before her death.  Michael Jackson caught everyone off guard.  Three celebrity icons gone.  It seems odd, like the end of some kind of era.  But eras never really “end” do they?  They sort of overlap one another and just … evolve somehow.  The people who died this week haven’t really been in the public eye in a while, and Hollywood will go on to the next “biggest and brightest” star story tomorrow, like it always does.  News is only news until the next story comes along. 

Still, I enjoyed Michael’s music, I envied Farrah’s beauty, and Ed’s straight-man to Johnny brought me a few laughs.  I’m glad I got to witness part of their lives, at least. 

Do they wish to be remembered fondly, with smiles?  Or with tears?  I don’t know.  I do think that laughter can be the best medicine sometimes, and while I certainly mean no disrespect to the families of those who have passed, I did hear a joke that made me smile despite my shock and sadness at the loss of these three this week. 

“Heeeeeere’s Farrah! … Heeeeeere’s Michael!”

And God said, “Doggone it Ed, knock it off!” 

I pray they found peace in Christ before they passed, and that they are now indeed resting with Him.  My sincere condolences to the families of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.  May God comfort you during your sorrow.

In one ear

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc)

Being a parent is hard, as the above video shows.  Fortunately, that’s not MY kid throwing a fit up there.  And my sympathies do go out to his parents.  Of course, I laughed my butt off, too.    This video became an excellent teaching tool, as I made my son watch it twice. 

I want to make sure that it’s NEVER my kid on a video like that.  And see, my son has been behaving like a spoiled rotten 17 year old lately.  Complete with the back-talk, the smart-ass comments, the eye-rolling, the fits (although not on this level, thankfully).  Problem is, my boy is 7, not 17.  It’s always hard to know what’s just part of a normal phase of growing up, and what’s not.  So his father and I have been having a long series of talks with the boy, trying to get him to understand that his behavior has been unreasonable and unacceptable. 

The other night, we paused Hang ‘em High to have a chat with our son.  He was upset and angry that we were watching TV and he couldn’t play the Wii, and his sister was playing on their shared computer, and he had nothing, NOTHING to do.  (yeah, those 9 gazillion other toys he has constituted “nothing”)  And he wanted us and the world to know just how angry and upset he was.

It was a long talk, during which we stressed the importance of family, being a team, taking turns, sharing, behaving like a civilized human being and not a snit-fit throwing brat, not taking out our frustrations on other people, finding other things to do, pitching in and helping around the house.  He seemed like he was finally “getting it”, nodding in agreement at times.  He’d calmed down and seemed to really understand what we were trying to get through to him.  I was pleased when, at the end of the talk, he stood up and went to hug his father and said, “Can I ask you a question, daddy?”

“Of course, son, you can ask me anything, you know that.”

Here it comes – can I have my own chores around the house … will you teach me how to wash dishes … what can I do besides throwing a fit when I’m angry …

What came out of his mouth was, “Will you teach me how to ride a horse?”

*sigh*

~~Ness~~ 

In a few years …

… I’ve changed.  A lot.  Case in point – the way I view movies.

Remember A.I.?  Yeah, that one with The Sixth Sense kid as a robot who loves his mother.  Darc saw it when we were at the library and I commented that I’d like to see it again.  I watched it when it first came out on video, back in ‘02.  What I remembered of it – and remember, I have a Swiss cheese memory when it comes to movies – was that it was a heartwarming story about a boy robot who loved his human mother and that it had really cool robots. 

The movie I watched earlier was not the same as I recalled.

Oh, the scenes were the same, don’t misunderstand.  It was the same movie.  It was my response to it that was different.  The movie I saw tonight was disturbing to me on a few levels and I didn’t come away with anything remotely like “heartwarming” as I did before.  And I know it’s because I’m different.

First off, I had to scoff at the opening scenes wherein the narrator described a world that had been destroyed by flooding caused by glacier melt caused by global warming.  I also felt a bit nostalgic seeing the World Trade Towers in the scenes of New York – which had been flooded up to the torch that the Statue of Liberty holds.  It went through my head that, “Terrorists were apparently stronger than ‘global warming’ and ‘global flooding’ and ‘two thousand years of freezing’ ever was.”  But what really bothered me was the portrayal of this little robot boy’s “feelings” as anything remotely resembling love, and anything like the child/parent relationship.

See, love is a choice, an act of will, it’s not a “feeling.”  And it’s about putting the needs of someone else ahead of your own.  Not once did robot boy ever do anything like that.  And while the feeling a child has for a parent often tends to be more selfish than that of a parent towards a child, there wasn’t anything loving in this “child’s” behavior.  It was 2 hours of him obsessing over his mother.  He was jealous at his mother’s biological son coming back home to live, he destroyed another robot who looked like him because he wanted to be sure that he himself was “the only one” for his mother.  (“She’s MINE!” he screamed at his robot “twin.”)  He obsessed about finding his mother again, and making her love him.  It was kind of stalker-ish in a weird way.  That was his mission, his goal in life – to become a real boy and make his mother love him.  And at the end, when the skinny advanced future robots “resurrected” his mother from a lock of her hair, he spent a day with her – making her coffee, playing games, just the 2 of them without the “distractions” of her husband and son, and then he curled up in bed with her when she fell asleep, holding her hand like a lover.  It was creepy.  It was all about him and what he wanted, which was to “make my mother love me.”  Purely selfishness, not love. 

And what’s with the “making robots to replace our lost children” thing anyway?  That’s sort of sick.  In case you forgot, the robot’s creator made the child robot to be a replica of his son who’d died, and the mother in the story agreed to have a boy robot because she’d been told her son, who was on life support, would never recover.  And when her real son did get better, instead of having the robot destroyed, she just dumped him in the woods somewhere and left him to fend for himself.  Oh yeah, that’s real maternal and loving.  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world!” were her last words as she drove away.

Is this what passes for love in Hollywood?  Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.  It’s a pretty sad state of affairs.  How many people define love that way?  Obsessive, controlling, selfish, “what will you do for me?”  I don’t know if that’s “life reflecting art” or “art reflecting life” or however you want to arrange it.  I just know it’s wrong, and that makes me really sad. 

I noticed that the commenter over on ImDb loved the movie and raved on and on about it.  I might have felt sort of like that the 1st time I saw the movie too.  Not to the same degree as s/he did, but at one time I could have related.  So not the case anymore. 

What a difference a few years makes, no?  I probably shouldn’t watch any more movies I still retain any fondness for.  

~~Ness~~