MicroSoft

Last week was one of the most intensely intellectual and emotional weeks I've had so far this year. It was a great week for exchanging great ideas with some of the most interesting net evangelists doing advocacy work in the United States.

Whether it was talking about impeachment in Philadelphia, describing the state of the feminist blogosphere in Barnard University, inspiring ethnic media publishers and policy advocated to turn to the blogosphere or brainstorming with the political technorati at Rootscamp; it all has been incredibly good and intellectually stimulating.

Yet this week was also marked by the emotional jolt of Lorraine's loss. The death of her boyfriend has been so overwhelming to me that I haven't been able to read her posts about it.

It's the first week though that, due to all the traveling I had to do, I really reckoned with the reality that my kids are better off now in school than with me homeschooling. I have been in denial since September about them being in school and I am just starting to grieve our separation.

So, why am I writing this? Well, I almost never get to write anything personal these days. At least that's how I feel. But also, I wanted to talk about what I do when I'm overwhelmed and grieving : I use cooking and web design to do what some people describe as work meditation, when others talk about active meditation.

Thanks for everybody who has alerted me of the problem reading this site on those incredibly crappy IE and AOL browsers. I am working on fixing the problem.

In the meantime, though, would you consider please, please pretty please, switching to Firefox?

Thanks. You're just peaches.

UPDATE!
I'll leave this post on the top of the site until we deal with all you IE users. Unfortunately, the solution is more complicated than what I had thought at first.

Earn your webangel wings. Switch to Firefox.

Via BoingBoing.

This is one very funny and smart viral marketing campaign. SEE PEOPLE HOW IT'S DONE? I like this so much that I can't decide which of the 13 reasons to switch is the best. Still, I think that #4 takes the prize for most 'truth in tongue'

4. Mozilla doesn't inflate prices and use the money to vaccinate children in Africa.
Uhh... wait a second. Maybe Microsoft's monopoly hasn't been all bad. Better donate to Oxfam. Seriously, you should.

while #5 is just plain funny.

5. If we knew web designers would hurl themselves off it, we wouldn't have put the Golden Gate bridge so close to San Francisco.

Every year, hundreds of web designers take their own lives rather than continue the hopeless struggle of making their websites IE compatible. Is that what you really want?? Dead web designers????? Cause that's what you're going to get!!!!!! See if I care!!!!!!!!!!

For all you little younglings, there was a time when putting browser sniffers on your web pages was a big web standards no-no with Zeldman's of the world frowning down on mere web design mortals who could not slap that bitch into non-tabled CSS validation.

Well, we are at war in more ways than one in this country. Open-source vs. Proprietary is turning into a huge war waged not only in technology but in politics and more so government. Look at the indictments and the impending call for impeachment of Cheney and then Bush.

Transparency, cooperation and open development are going to be huge in 2008. And people will ask the same transparency and democratic reliability with their software.

ps : You can tell I've been dealing with browser hell, can you?
ps2 : I am definitely joining in the Explorer Destroyer campaign.