Goodbye GeoCities. You gave me my first online presence by hosting my site when I was in college. I slowly learned how to type HTML by hand and created a small site, just for fun.
I largely forgot about you until I saw stories about your demise. So, I dug out my old college files and found the backups of my site. Those brought back memories. So thank you GeoCities, for helping me and many other people have a home on the web back in the late 1990s.
Recently, I have gotten great news. The boy with leukemia that I donated cells to has made a full recovery. It has been over a year since I made the donation, so I am so happy to learn, that the boy has returned to being an active child.
I wish to thank the Marrow Donor Program of Central & South Texas for making my donation as easy as possible and answering all of my questions.
I suggest anyone who can, join the Be The Match Registry and help the many people who are waiting for a donation. You will only feel some discomfort for a few days, but you can help save someone’s life.
I love using AVG Free. It is a free antivirus that works. Yet when version 8.0 came out, a new service was added called LinkScanner. LinkScanner will try to identify sites that contain malware for you before you visit them. I did not need this service since I use Firefox, which has this service build in. So, as the type of person who tries to keep unnecessary services turned off, I disabled LinkScanner. If you do this you get a warning saying that you may not be fully protected. Another side effect is that the icon in the system tray turns grey and has an exclamation point.
Well this icon started to annoy me. Even though I was up to date on all my virus definitions and software patches, the icon was alerting me to turn on LinkScanner. I searched for weeks trying to find a solution for this. Finally, I found out a way to get rid of the grey icon with exclamation point and return it to a normal state.
Open AVG and goto:
Tools-> Advanced Settings-> Ignore default conditions
Select LinkScanner
Press OK
Within a few days everything changes. Instead of January 30, my donation is now scheduled for February 5. Now I will be undergoing a PBSC donation instead of a marrow donation. It has been a wild few days. Two more weeks to go…
Wednesday, January 30
I have passed the physical exam and the doctor has signed off for me to donate. All of the forms have been signed. Now the countdown starts. One thing left to do before the donation. I have to donate one pint of whole blood for myself to be used during the surgery. That will be done next week.
19 days to go…