4 posts tagged “help”
I am very proud to say that when I finally felt it was appropriate to tell my daughter about a tragic incident which befell a friend of hers from a prior elementary school, my daughter took the initiative (I did not suggest it) to gather her friends and organize a lemonade and candy sale in our neighborhood with very little adult intervention, only minor guidance, to help out the Friends of Olivia Foundation. She and the neighborhood kids spent two days pulling together with little adult help to sell lemonade and candy (or at least solicit donations) at 50 cents each. Due to their diligence, they raised $100 and I was so proud of all of them!!! Leave it to children...
Olivia is a 9 year old girl, who until recently was healthy and athletic [Read our local news article from 10/31/07 here with pictures.]. Tragically, she one day started having trouble with her legs and fell. Her father and mother took her to urgent care, which suggested she be moved to a large regional medical facility. While there, her limbs went numb and over two days, she became paralyzed from the neck down. She has had many complications, is finally breathing on her own through a trach, but there are no answers to why this has happened. There is no spinal cord injury that anyone can detect and they have not been able to attribute it to any other known cause. She has been in the hospital since August 13th, 2007 and her parents are hoping to be able to raise the money, through the help of friends, neighbors and community and the kindness of strangers to bring her home where they will need a house equipped to deal with her special needs, plus the right wheel chair which can be mouth operated and outside care.
Spinal cord injuries, especially one of this magnitude are relatively uncommon in children. Please pray for Olivia, as this is unimaginably stressful for her, her family and those who know her. If you would like to contribute to the Olivia Beam Foundation in any amount the address to send a check of any amount is (Please note on the check you heard about it through Java Jane's Vox Blog):
Middletown, NY 10941
Friends of Oliva Foundation Website
A few weeks ago, I went into a well known chain of office supply stores to pick up some printer ink and some odds and ends since I have a business account, and happened to see a "special" clearance item that caught my eye. I usually don't shop at office supply chains for the best price or for anything for my computer, but again, having business account there means is a convenience and it's not directly coming out of my pocket. Anyway, they were practically giving away a discontinued or to me a "throw away" external USB [Lite-On who rebadges for many companies, including SONY] DVD-RW with Dual Layer recording technology (I happened to want an external drive with LightScribe, but the price was right on this one) for $39, including tax, so I figured, "What the heck?" and went for it. I really only need it to burn an occasional DVD and to back up larger files from my back up drive (yeah, I'm paranoid, my good stuff goes in a fire safe box) and to archive older material for which a CD is too small. (Who would have thought an external DVD-RW would be cheaper than dirt, literally, a couple years ago?)
Well I unpacked it, hooked up the power and the USB cord. Then I fired it up and XP automatically assigned drivers and we were all good, right? Launched Nero and got ready to burn baby burn. No burned disc, but I was burning. Yeah, el cheapo drive-o couldn't work that easily or flawlessly, right? Right. So due to Murphy's Law, I kept getting error messages saying the drive couldn't handle the media, even though the media was correct and other such nonsense. It wasn't the price of the drive though, it was the fact that sometimes XP has problems with external USB drives when it assigns drive letters.
I had Alcohol 120% on my machine at one point, which had assigned several virtual drives, which may not have been recovered on removing it. I don't know if XP assigned/mapped it to one of those old drives, but the drive wasn't showing up anywhere except when I went into Control Panel>System>Device Manager>DVD/CD-ROM Drives. The only way to hopefully rectify the situation was to go into XP's Disk Management by typing diskmgmt.msc at the run command prompt. If the drive shows up there, as mine did, the fix is to rename it. Mine was originally drive L. I right clicked the drive letter and highlighted "change drive letter or path". From the drop down box of available drive letters, I took the easy road and chose Z, knowing for sure it had never been used. Then I right clicked "properties" and ticked the hardware tab. I highlighted the Lite On drive and right clicked "properties" once again and then went under the "Volumes" tab and clicked the "Populate" button. After saving out of all that, I was good to go. My drive was now showing up in Explorer. I dragged and dropped the drive shortcut onto my desktop (being a USB device, it doesn't show up under "My Computer") and this time, my throw away external drive worked "like butta" and I'm still in the process of slashin' and burning the excess fat from my internal hard drives...and except that I don't have my light scribe, I'm happy as a clam.
In PC Magazine's upcoming May 8th issue they list the 10 most commonly used passwords online. IF you are using any of these, download this add-on for FireFox.
1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10. (your first name)
