marykitten's Friends

White Christmas, My BooK, Solar Plane, Computers, Funnies, Erika Schaefer

Merry Christmas! It has been snowing off and on for a week. This morning, when I got up, it was 15°F / -9.4°C, which made us at least 20 degrees colder than our familes in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

It's nice to have a white Christmas, but we are less than 200 miles / 320 km north of MEXICO, and therefore, too far south to be this cold. I hereby offiically put Mother Nature on notice -- I don't care if global warming is a myth, how about some REGIONAL warming? Thank you.

Merry Christmas
We've been having router and internet problems, and Annie's Microsoft Instant Messenger, (or wahtever they call it now) was not cooperating with the web cam. The possibility of Annie watching her two- and three-year-old grandchildren open Christmas gifts was looking slim. Then I did some researching and got everything working, and got everyone switched to Yahoo IM so they could web-cam. Smooth as silk, and we had a great time watching the kids this morning.

For the record, Yahoo IM is much kinder and gentler on the bandwidth and for ease of use than the Microsoft IM.

I had these coffee mugs made with our favorite picture of us and Cody. They are 16 oz. / .5 Liter ceramic mugs, with nice, large handles. We got a few extry to send as Christmas gifts to family and friends.

The Uranus towel is from my brother, Will. It is either a small hand-towel or large washcloth, I haven't figured out which. But really, you can't go wrong when it comes to Uranus and hygene. He got me a Mars towel, too. The "fun factual" (made in China) they have about Mars is that the grand canyon of Mars (Valles Marineris) is 13 times larger than the grand canyon on earth.

Family Strife (or, It just wouldn't be Christmas without some fucked-up bullshit from my mother.)
For previous occasions, I had mailed my card or gift directly to my mother's address. Then later, would find out she claimed she never got them. So for the past two years, I've been sending anything for Mother's to my sister, Joy, who lives nearby, and Joy hand-delivers them.

This summer, the day my cousin, Farrah Fawcett died (we share a great-grandmother), she and I made the front page of the Roswell newspaper at the same time. I was dressed in an alien costume for a wedding vows ceremony. I mailed the newspaper to my sister, and she said when she delivered it, Mother's response was, "You can't see his face."

Fine. She needs a current picture of me. So, when I had these mugs made, with our picture on them, I had an extra one made for Mother, and that's the gift I sent this year. My twin brother, Will, and his wife visited Mother for Christmas and took her the gift from me.

Will just advised me she gave him $500 for Christmas. How nice is that? Nothing for me, though. Will wasn't sure why I got nothing, except that maybe I didn't go to the party. Notwithstanding I live 1,500 miles /2400km away, and I advised him, "Well, SHE didn't have to come to MY party to get my gift for her, did she?" One has to presume, that after nearly 70 years, someone has told the woman about the U.S. Postal Service.

So at this point, my attitude toward Mother is one of hopelessness. I have reached out so many times, and She just won't acknowledge my existence. I am giving up. To paraphrase Strother Martin's Character in Cool Hand Luke:

"What we have here is... failure to communicate. Some people you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way she wants it... well, she gets it. I don't like it any more than you men."

Other than that, no hard feelings. I wish her the best.

Special note for those of you who are judging my shiddy attitude and thinking, "Well... she's STILL your mother." Yes, biologically, she is my mother, but as far as I can tell, she has no love or affection for me of any kind, and she's toxic, so I have given up trying to contact or communicate with her. Thank you very much.

My New Book
Noe Torres is a famous author and UFO Researcher. His latest book is called Ultimate Guide to the Roswell UFO Crash. It is a photo tour of the history and current landmarks and locations pertaining to the Roswell UFO crash of 1947.

When Noe called to ask if I wanted to do the photography for the book, the answer was an immediate "Absolutely!". It was a challenge to find some of the locations, but Noe did an excellent job of providing maps to the requested sites and good directions.

This book is perfect for the beginner as well as the expert. You don't have to know anything before you start, as the complete history of the crash is in the book. It is also comprehensive and detailed enough that even long-time UFO buffs will find something interesting they did not know before.

Here's the acknowledgements page, with a nice picture of yours truly, (left), along with historians Elvis Fleming and John LeMay. The bulk of the book made it hard to scan at the correct angle, so the picture was slanted, but my nephew straightened it for me. Thanks, James!

We go to press in May, 2010, and I expect the book will be available on Amazon, because his other books are.

World's First Solar Airplane
Solar Impact achieved its maiden flight December 3rd, 2009. It is still in testing and development, so the highest it got was one meter off the ground, but that qualifies. The plane has 12,000 solar cells mounted on the wings, and will have batteries for night flight. It has the wingspan of a Boeing 747, but weighs only 3,400lbs / 1,542kg. Ultimately, they plan to take it around the world.

Computer Fun
My cure for morning sickness
Does your web browser ever have morning sickness? That's what I call it when I've been downloading a bunch of stuff overnight, and discover in the morning that my browser refuses to load any pages, even though my downloads, email, and everything else is working.

I did the research on the problem and, making a long story very quick and painless, here's the deal:

First, with Windows XP, Service Pack 2, Microsoft decided to "sphincter-down" the number of tcp/ip connections you can make. Another problem is that the Firefox Browser, in order to stay complient with a tradition from the old HTTP days, limits you to two connections, when 50 would provide much better performance. Finally, downloading heavily over a period of time will upset your router, which I call "router poisoning", and what you have to do is release your IP address and get a new one. While I'm at it, I also clear the DNS cache.

Upgrading the number of allowed TCP/IP connections.
There's a patch utility that will fix this for you. When you run it, Windows acts like it's going to be the end of all life as we know it. I've been running patched for a week, and I am loving life, and there's no problem. All we are doing is changing the maximum connections from 8 to 50, whereas before Service Pack 2, it was unlimited, so this is a conservative fix. Download and run the patcher from http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads. The article about the whole crazy business is at http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1497 .
Enable pipelining in Firefox browser.
For some reason, Firefox allows two simultaneous connections to any web page, but more would be better. Even IE uses six. There's an add-on for Firefox that will enable pipelinging and change the number of connections for you. This doesn't have anything to do with morning sickness, but you will notice HUGE improvement in speed when loading pages that support pipelining, such as Google Images. Get the add-on at http://www.bitstorm.org/extensions/tweak/ .

Kris Mainieri shows you how to do it on his video, which I embed here.

This is optional, but very safe, and you can always undo it if you have any problems.
Morning Sickness. After heavy downloading, if your browser won't load a page, try these IPCONFIG commands to release and renew your IP address.
This is quick and easy, and obviates the need to power-cycle your router in this situation.
a. Click start, Run, type COMMAND, and click OK. A command line window opens.
b. Type these commands, one at a time, just as you see here (Not case-sensitive, but note there is a space before the / ), and wait several seconds for each command to complete before going to the next.
IPCONFIG /RELEASE
IPCONFIG /RENEW
IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS

I find that it takes three to four minutes to clear out the stale connections so I can browse again, but it seems kinder and gentler than power-cycling the router.

Free Bandwidth Meter

If you have Windows, then this meter works great, and is free. It shows you a graph of your bandwidth usage. The meter is completely resizable, so you can put it where you like on the screen and have it always on top or not.

Click the picture or headline link to visit the download site in a fresh window.

Funny Pictures
Male Version of Dear Abby

Redneck Fire Alarm

( Click for Erika Schaefer )

Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2010.

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