Walk in the night

I have come back home a couple of hours ago. I was at Cafe with some friends about 5 or away from my home. I went back home on foot. I have gone back home through this route many times before but from different locations other than the cafe. I decided to change the streets which I take. I had this strange feeling while walking through streets. The weather was a bit chilly and misty. The mist was creating a blurred halo around the lights coming out of the street lamps. May be I was a bit tired and I was seeing an illusion. I had a feeling similar to that when i was walking in one of the streets in a cold London evening last year. There was a new modern looking restaurant opening in the second street. I continued walking in unusually clean streets free of rubbish till I found an old deserted Villa changed into a company that revamped it and restored the small green lawn, not turning it into a new garage or not replacing the villa with one of those high rise buildings. At the following intersection I found an ugly looking shop turned into a better looking casual store clothes. There were almost no people in the street. Wow! I should have been dreaming!!!

Pop! Suddenly, I broke the plastic cup that I was holding in my hand, in which I was having a drink few moments ago. I continued walking with the broken cup in my hand, fiddling with it, until I reached the street that intersects with another street that is parallel to the one I live in. I then found a spot between two parked cars in front of a garage with some few rubbish, and plastic bags. I couldn't resist the urge to throw the cup at that spot. The nice feeling I had few moments ago had gone away. I could have continued walking and thrown it in one of the big garbage bins placed by that "Spanish" cleaning company that is contracted by the municipality to collect the garbage and has its employees who sweep the streets wearing that orange uniform. Hang on, the contract is canceled and these bins are removed. Their fees are no longer paid with the electricity bill. But why have I done so? I could have continued walking and threw it in even one of these barrels that "Bawabs", porter guys, use to reserve a parking space for tenants of their buildings, then. Am I not a civilized educated citizen who wishes to bring change to his society? Am I not used to keep this unneeded scraps of papers, that would go unnoticed if it is thrown in a clean street or flow by the wind, in my hand till I went home to throw it at the trash bin? There is a 5% chance of finding a garbage during my few remaining steps back home but I didn't want to. I found none by the way. Have I done the right thing? If yes, then wouldn't that mean that what I used to do before, which is taking the cup with me home, if I don't find a "proper" place to throw, which almost is always the case, was the right thing? I was trying to do some sort of change. But no one would care. No one would feel the difference. If I say so to anyone they would reply the streets are already a big garbage dump. But still there is a small chance of finding at least a barrel to throw the trash away. I lost hope in the 5% chance of finding such container to hold my rubbish. It seems that change refuses to take place, and if it made, it would be to the worse. Is there a real chance for change? Would people be able to change? People have a lot of concerns and necessities "more important" than change. Shall I take the hard step to continue to change myself and then the society? Naah. Drop it.

Firefox 2 crashed!!

After less than 3 weeks of being installed on my computer, Firefox 2 crashed. I was only working with 4 tabs. Two of these tabs were unreached pages, the third being a Google search page and the 4th was an online football text game which uses an extension. I was also using 2 other extensions, one of them being the great Adblock. This is a bad omen, I am not sure if it for me or for Mozilla. I shall send screen shots of the returned addresses could be this a potential buffer overflow problem or just a random crash.




Bare in mind that I have been using Firefox for more than 2 years during which it crashed 3 times and mostly because It was working under very extreme conditions, on a pentium 3 PC with more than 14 tabs on one occasion and on another was loading 4 videos from YouTube.com.



Now let's recap on my last year's usage pattern. Since my last post, I started devoting more time to Linux. By the end of last year or specifically beginning of 2006, Firefox became my main browser with the exception for the few websites that don't support Firefox. By the summer, I gave up with the features that need IE and Firefox became the only browser I use. Also my usage of Linux soared after I installed Ubuntu and got a new PC. I also started SSHing to my computer from university. Firefox never crashed on Linux at all whether on Fedora Core 3 or on Ubuntu. I think I will be publishing a post about Ubuntu soon, My most favourite Linux distro, and the 4th that I've tried!!