A Night at the Opera...

When I returned to the world of Mac OS after a dubious, necessity imposed foray into the wonderful world of Windows, I became a user of the built in Safari web browser.  It worked well enough, but there were some web sites that were a little bit (if not a lot) quirky on Safari, and I found that I had to shift from time to time to Microsoft's Internet Explorer for the Mac in order to get something done on the web using a page that did not play nice with Safari.

Of course Microsoft stopped supporting and updating its Internet Explorer for the Mac some time ago, which is when I started using Firefox side by side with Safari.  Usually, if one browser couldn't handle a page properly, the other one could.  Safari would get updated and it would run better than Firefox.  Then Firefox would get updated and it would run better than Safari.  In the end I had really just grown accustomed to having both browsers ready to go, and I had gotten into the habit of using the two side by side so much so that I didn't think this was at all unusual or an inconvenience.

Enter Firefox 3 (genuflect here please), the latest and greatest browser to grace the internet, and a true boon to all of us Mac users.  It has received rave reviews and like most other Firefox users I did not hesitate to update the copy on my Mac.  I really did find that it lived up to all of the praise—a great evolutionary next step in the long tradition of Firefox browsers.

That is until last week, when I tried to access the e-Edition of the Chicago Tribune (another blog entry, another review, another time).  It didn't work.  Of course I reflexively switched over to Safari and, for whatever reason or reasons, I couldn't access the paper with Safari either.  Each time I would attempt to enter my login and password, they would simply disappear in both browsers and nothing would happen.  I checked with technical support at the Tribune, and they graciously reset my account login and password in the hopes that it would solve the problem.  Unfortunately, I still could not access the paper with either browser.  On a hunch, I attempted to login on one of the Windows machines at the parish and was able to do so without a glitch.  This led me to the conclusion that the Tribune web masters must have made some sort of a change to their site that meant it would no longer work on my Mac.  After a couple of days of booting into Windows on my Mac just to read the paper, I decided to experiment a little bit further.

To make a very long story short, the problem had nothing to do with my being a Mac user, (although that is what we Mac users have been trained to think in this Windows/PC dominated world), but rather was something quirky going on with BOTH Safari AND Firefox.  In the past simply switching from one to the other allowed me to access just about any web content that might be out there, but now neither one would let me read my daily paper.  And so, being home on a nice extended day off, I decided to look around and see if there might be another browser that I could try on my Mac.

Now I, like many of you, had heard about the Opera browser.  I had even tried it some years ago, but it just didn't win me over.  But that had been some years ago and, needing to find an alternative to Safari and Firefox, I decided to go out to their home page, www.opera.com.  Version 9.5?  Whoa!  It had been a few years.  I downloaded it to give it a whirl.  All I can say is, "five stars" and "two thumbs way up!"  What a beautifully designed and engineered piece of software!  It absolutely blows the socks off of every browser I have ever used.  It makes me wonder if all of the reviewers who spilled so much ink raving about the latest release of Firefox have even looked at Opera recently?  (And, of course, it allowed me to access the e-Edition of the Tribune without a single glitch, which was the original motivation behind my search for a new browser in the first place).

I have been running Opera, and ONLY Opera, through all of my usual web sites.  No problems.  Not a single one.  And Opera has so many unique features that, for the first time in a long, long time, I really feel like I am getting the most out of my experience of surfing the web.  But please don't take my word for it.  Opera is free for the asking.  Download it.  Try it for yourself.  See if you don't agree that it is the best browsing experience that you have ever had.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.  Necessity drove me to check out new browsers.  Necessity led me to try Opera.  But love at first sight has made me decide that Opera will be my one and only browser on the Mac.  What a pleasure to be able to use only one browser again after all of these years.  No more switching between Safari and Firefox to try to access web pages that would work on one and not on the other.  They all run with flying colors on Opera, thanks to its superior and truly elegant engineering.  I hope you give it a try and that you find it as awesome a browser as I have found it to be.  More importantly, I hope that if you like it you will pass the word along to your family and friends so that it can get the user base and good press that it deserves!

Mom's 90th Birthday...

If Mom were still alive, today would have been her 90^th birthday.  Celebrating Mom’s birthday was always a huge priority for our family, so the date of June 6^th is really emblazoned in my memory.  I remember once telling Mom that she was born on D-Day, and she quickly corrected me by saying, “No Ralphie, they launched D-Day on my birthday!”  And she was quite right—she was here long before D-Day.

Besides being D-Day, the 6^th of June seemed to be a magnet for special events in our family.  Mom and Dad were married on June 6^th.  My brother and I graduated on June 6^th.  It has always been a very special date on the calendar for our family.

It is hard to believe but it has already been ten years since we had the last really big birthday party for Mom.  We had surprise parties for her 70^th and her 75^th, and both of those experiences convinced us that, what with her weakening physical condition, it would definitely NOT be a good idea to have a surprise party for her on her 80^th birthday.  (At least not if we wanted her to be around for her 81^st birthday!)  And so the task became one of convincing her that we should have a party for her 80^th.  She was absolutely against it.  She did not like it at all when we made a big deal about her birthday.  All she ever really wanted was to be together with me, my brother and his wife.  On the other hand, it began to become clear that part of her really wanted to get together with a larger group of her family and her friends.  And so the negotiating began.  It wouldn’t be a party, it would be a Mass of Thanksgiving followed by a reception.  No one should be allowed to bring gifts, because the way she saw it everyone had been a gift to her throughout her life and she wanted this gathering to be a way of saying “thank you” to everyone who had filled her life with so much love and joy over the years.  And so the decision was made to go ahead with the celebration and the invitations went out—which is when the fun really started.

I still have the recordings of Mom calling me and leaving me a message every time someone called to tell her that they were going to be coming to her party.  It brought her such great joy to call me and let me know that this special cousin or that special friend was going to be coming.  She got more and more excited with each passing day.  (By the way, the reason that I still have all of those recordings is really a fluke of my geekiness.  At that time in my life my Mac was also my answering system.  Little did I realize that there was a folder filling up with archival copies of all of my phone messages.  After Mom passed away and before I began a dubious and short lived flirtation with PCs, I did some file cleaning on the Mac and found over one hundred phone messages that Mom had left me during that time, all of which I still have and treasure to this day.)

When the big day finally arrived, it was more than any of us could ever have hoped for.  Mom had such a delightful time and she really had the chance to visit with so many of the people who she loved so very much.  And something pretty special happened:  everyone knew that they were not supposed to bring presents, but a lot of people really felt like they should bring Mom at least some kind of small gift.  Knowing Mom’s great love for angels, she received about two dozen statues and figurines of angels for her birthday.  She was so happy and couldn’t wait to get home to find a special place in the house for each and every one of them.  Needless to say, we still have each and every one of those special angels as a wonderful memory of that great celebration.

After a few days had passed and I had a chance to show Mom the rather informal video that we had taken of the party, she said something pretty incredible:  “Thank God I had the chance to celebrate with all of my family and my friends while I still have my health and could still really enjoy myself.  I have a funny feeling that the next time everyone gets together it won’t be for my 85^th.”  As it turned out, our last family birthday celebration with Mom was just us for her 83^rd birthday in 2001.  Mom passed away in January of 2002, just a little over four months shy of her 84^th birthday.  And her family and friends did get together again that cold and snowy day, so far from the beauty of June 6^th.  Another kind of Mass to celebrate and give thanks for her life, and another kind of reception to thank everyone for the gift of their love and support for her and for all of us.

So now Mom is celebrating her 90^th birthday with all of her family and friends who are with her in heaven.  And now the angels are the real thing, not just statues and figurines.  One day I’ll be there at that party too.  But until then, I’m watching the video again, playing back some of those awesome phone messages, and looking at her precious angels all around her house.  Happy birthday, Mommy!  We love you, we miss you, and we will always celebrate June 6^th as a special day, a day filled with love and many, many happy memories!