gwenwifar

call this sociological or psychological research....

let me start by saying that this is a sensitive question, and i'm not trying to step on any toes. it came up in a debate and i'm trying to get a sense of what people in general feel and why they feel that way. this is not intended to offend or hurt anyone.

of these two scenarios, which would you find easier to live with:

1 - a loved one was given a fair trial, convicted and executed after several appeals. he later turns out to be inocent.

2 - a loved one was murdered by a convicted killer who escaped from prison.

or i guess the question really is, what decent web page editor can i use that is free and lets me access the code?

web pages are a hobby of mine and i am at that awkward stage where i get lost if i'm looking at pure code (say in notepad) without a visual that i can quickly refer to and make changes on, but much prefer to problem solve by going straight to the code. most editors i have used didn't let me access the code, which is why i stuck with frontpage. anything similar out there?

It has recently come to my attention that someone I know (who was adopted) had the same original last name (before it was changed by his new parents) as my own. We're really close, and in fact, though as far as we know we are not related, we think of each other as family. So when I found out what his original last name was I started wondering if there was a chance we might be related after all. It is probably the power of suggestion, but sometimes I even think I see a family resemblance.

My question - would a DNA test be able to determine if we are in fact related, and how closely related? If so, how reliably? The common ancestor, if there is one, could be several generations in the past.

is there any chance that i can run outlook express with Vista? I hate the new Windows mail that won't let you have different identities, and I certainly don't want to waste the hard drive space that it would take to create different log-ons for each user of the home computer.

I've noticed that occasionally (a few times a day, but with no recognizeable pattern) things slow down considerably on my IE. I am a big fan of old time radio shows, which thankfully are all out of copyright and therefore i download a lot of them off the net. recently, i've noticed that a couple of times a day, as i'm downloading, things will be going along normally, and suddenly i can't surf the net at all. the downloads will continue normally, but IE won't load any page at all. it keeps timing out. I am fairly computer savvy, so I set out to investigate. the memory usage is always at less than 20%, there are no funny peaks in performance, no strange processes, no active processes that shouldn't be active, the dsl connection is being used at well below capacity and there is nothing that i can spot that is wrong. spyware and virus scans have come up with nothing. nothing else on the computer is slowed down at all.

my attention was drawn to the commit charge the last time it happened.

i lose internet access between about 10.30 and 11.30 am. when this happened the first time, i chalked it up to problems with the server i was trying to access. when it happened again, i blamed it on the isp. then i noticed the connection was good (at least the computer and the modem both thought the connection was good). and i noticed it happened at the same time, and resolved itself at the same time both days. i scanned for spyware, thinking there might be bug out there was particularly active around this time for some reason. then it occured to me that it might have something to do with the update. i run windows XP media and i was just wondering if someone else out there is having similar problems...

any idea what could be wrong?

(i'll be trying to figure this out as i wait for answers and will edit with further clues as i find them)

i have been trying to place it, mostly because when i saw the pirates 2 movie again a few days ago, i noticed the big world map and it seemed to me like it was too accurate for the time. which of course, got me trying to place it in time. we know there are privateers, there is a king in England, and not a queen. what other clues can you find, and where in time would you place the Pirates?

they always seem ridiculous to me. my cats only get about a third of the food the directions say to give them. though they get food of other kinds to go with it (they love deli meats and canned tuna), i'm sure their total food intake doesn't add up to the actual recommended ammounts on the packages. yet they are healthy cats, weighing, between the three of them, an average of 16 lbs. i always wonder, as i feed them, if i should follow the directions, but then i think they would probably quickly become seriously overweight if i did. so - do you follow the directions and if you do are your cats overweight?

there is now a museum in Petersburg KY where children can go to learn that dinosaurs were in Noah's Ark...

i don't know whether to see it as a problem or a challenge. if it was just the teacher and the kids, i'd call it challenge - but with parents involved, i'm afraid it's a problem.

what do you think?

i just got a message from an outraged christian who emailed me just to preach about how i'd regret it all (being an atheist, i presume) after i die. which reminded me of that great "what if" question that comes up every so often from christians about atheists finding themselves before god when they die. so here is my what if...

to all christians out there:

what if you die and find yourself before a big sign that reads "welcome to the end. the little people made up the whole god thing to keep you busy and away from their pots of gold. sorry about that. your soul will self-destruct in 5 seconds."

This is going to be a little long, but please bear with me.

I just went along as a volunteer (to help supervise the kids) on a field trip to a National Park. We were to have a picnic lunch there and we'd be hiking about 3 miles. Sounds nice, right? But here's where it gets interesting.

This is the Southwest, where temperatures are in the 90s at this time of year, and we'd be hiking at around 1 pm.

Some of the parent volunteers coming along on this trip were seriously overweight, and barely made it up the easy part of the trail. Most of the kids (about 100 of them, 5th graders) had a 16 oz. bottle of water to drink (about half gone by the end of the two hour drive). Not one of them had a hat. The trail we hiked was easy, though steep, for the first half a mile or so, but then it got rocky, sandy and challenging. Too challenging to be taken at a fast pace (we had about an hour and a half to get up the mountain and down again) at 1 pm and a temperature in the low 90s.

is there a "set up", some kind of framework, to help factor numbers or do you just list factors as you go, until you have them all?

I met this guy on the net. he was having trouble coming to terms with an identity crisis. i wanted to help put things in perspective, make him see that there is nothing wrong with who he is. i thought i had managed to make him see that since no matter what you do you can't make everyone happy, you might as well do what it takes to make you happy. provided, of course, what you do doesn't hurt you or anyone else, endanger any futures and it's not ilegal. i thought i had helped him figure out his problems and move on.

however... i started noticing that he began to ask my advice on everything, and to always follow it. in trying to help him gain control of his life, it seems what i accomplished was to make him hand over control to me. i stayed away for some time, hoping my absence would fix that. however, as soon as i re-appeared, he went back to the same old habits. except he's more aggressive now.

i am wondering how gifted students feel about acceleration...

so here it is. if you are an identified gifted student,

have you been accelerated? if you have, how do you feel about it?

do you like the idea?

I'm working on a big cat/wild cat theme. I had no trouble picking a leopard to represent stregth, a lion for team work, a tiger for individuality, cheetah for speed... but i'm stuck on endurance. anyone out there have an idea for a cat known got its endurance?

i need to make some tomorrow but am having trouble finding a good and easy recipe (time is kind of an issue for me right now). thank for the help

my uncle just called to ask me about this message. it seems when he shuts down his computer, something that his running in the background is closed and as it closes this message flashes. all he has time to read is config.hidden_window

it didn't ring any bells with me... anyone here have any idea what this could be about? i don't know what kind of security he's got, but my only guess is that it may be spyware. he's running windows XP, and it's a fairly new computer.

I am taking an English Language Acquisition class, and i've been reading all about different ESL programs and how great they are supposed to be for the average student who finds him/herself in an english speaking classroom when english is a strange language. it made me wonder. so if you are (or were) learning english as a second language, please answer:

what really helped you learn?

how old are/were you?

what did your teachers do that worked for you?

what did they do that didn't work at all?

were you in an ESL program? did you like it?

how would you change they way you are/were taught if you were teaching others in the same situation?

i'd really love to hear from someone who had experience with this, i think what you have to say can be more helpful than my textbooks.

it should take about 5 minutes. i am a huge fan, have read most of his books, and own copies of quite a few, so there's no need to quote the whole thing at me, just tell me what book it's in and whereabouts in the plot, along with the first line or so. i am so swamped i really have no time to go through my choices without help, so i appreciate your input.