I finally did it! The last straw was this stupid WinFixer spyware that infested my home PC. I usually ignore crawlers and popups and my anti-virus normally catches these buggers, but this dang WinFixer is persistent and incredibly annoying! So I did it.

I switched to Mozilla Firefox.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of applications at work that only work on IE. So I'm in mixed mode at work, but careful to set my default browser to Firefox so I can't get anything unwelcome from external sources.

My only problem with Firefox is that sometimes, I want to print out only a part of the content in the browser. I did this in IE a lot - select the text I want to print, right-click, then print just the selection. I can't figure out how to do this with Firefox. Does anybody know? Appreciate your help!

I haven't explored all the Mozilla plug-ins and I'm excited to. I also found out that my site looks bad in Firefox (sorry!). I'm not going to fix this now since I'm planning to convert to WordPress, hopefully really soon (please bear with me).

Vangie Fuhrman got cold on 9.26.2005 11:26 AM. |

Twice a month, I serve as a lector at our church. A lector is the person who reads the first and second readings, as well as joins the priest and altar servers in the opening procession. Last Sunday, however, I was assigned as a commentator. Due to the hurricane Katrina tragedy, there was an unusually long list of petitions, plus an equally long list of announcements at the end of the mass. I didn't mind this at all. In fact, I like the practice, to get me more and more comfortable speaking in front of a large audience.

At the end of the mass, I asked my husband how I did. He said very well, I enunciated clearly, paused at the right times, made eye-contact with the audience. Everything was great except for one thing...

"What?" I asked.

"Well, there's this word you mispronounced, and unfortunately, it was in almost every line of the petitions."

Of course this bothered me, and I asked him what word it was.

He answered. "Reconciliation. You kept saying reCONciliation, when it should be REconciliation. The first time's okay, but after the seventh time, I started to cringe."

I was so embarrassed. I did say 'reconciliation' many times, because the petitions were all about it. I just hope 'hippopotamus' will never be in the readings in the future.

On a brighter note, last Friday was my brother's birthday. Yesterday, I asked him to pick up a package for our mom which I sent through a colleague of mine who went home to the Philippines. He goes to our Philippine plant, meet my colleague, who hands him this:



On his way to work, he calls me up, and says "I got the package. Is this really for Mama?"

I just say "Happy birthday!"

He loves it! He said he was just drooling over one at a mall during the weekend. I'm so happy he's happy!

Vangie Fuhrman got cold on 9.20.2005 7:19 PM. |

Yesterday, I attended a Coaching and Teambuilding for Managers seminar conducted by Skillpath with a colleague from work.

I must be getting jaded from all these seminars but I found this particular one to be a big waste of time. It was actually a never-ending sales pitch for their books and CD-roms camouflaged in a lot of hooey talk about leadership and silly pointless exercises. Since my company paid good money for it, I still wholeheartedly participated and contributed to the discussions. I was even a sucker since I ended up buying one of the books, The Leadership Challenge, but only because it was written by Barry Posner, the Dean of the Leavey School of Business in Santa Clara University where I got my MBA. Barry is the type of dean who was friends with everyone, engaging in chit-chat down the corridors and even having lunch with students every now and then. I was curious to see his writing style, which I haven't been an audience to beyond his newletters.

There is this one seminar (actually a six-month or year-long series of seminars) that I truly learned a lot from and has definitely influenced me. It's the Women Unlimited, a truly unique program that molds and mentors women managers into confident, self-assured and mature executives. If your company supports these types of programs I highly encourage you to pursue this opportunity, it will be a very positive experience in both your professional and personal life. A plus is the vast network of women I gained from the experience, whom I am still in touch with to this day.

In any case, I will avoid any seminar from Skillpath from now on. The one cool thing about yesterday - the hotel had a whiz-bang vending machine that had all kinds of cool stuff - including an iPod! So I purchased a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies with my credit card, fervently hoping that the electronic arm will mistakenly grab the iPod instead.

It's pretty sad when the highlight of your seminar is the venue's vending machine.

Vangie Fuhrman got cold on 9.14.2005 4:12 PM. |

When I logged into Gmail today, one of my new emails is a reply to an entry of mine in 43things. Although I've been neglecting it lately (like this blog), I love that site and welcome all the emails I receive from it. Usually it's a request to send a Gmail invite, which I would gladly grant, but sometimes it's a comment or reply to an entry of mine which I always looked forward to.

With a smile I open the email and see that someone replied to my entry on my goal of watching a Raiders game live. I quickly read his reply:

Have sex with vangie
--------------------
i would like to meetup with her and have sex alnite.

Great. Why does a creep with too much time on his hands have to ruin an otherwise wonderful site like 43things? I know most popular sites will eventually fall victim to spammers and weirdos, and I've been seeing some adult content on 43things, but I was kinda hoping 43things will remain the encouraging, inspiring and innocent site that it was when I first signed up you know?

What's disturbing is when I clicked on this guy's account, he only has 1 thing he likes to do:

have sex with vangie that posted here 24 weeks ago

Sorry dude. Go get your kicks somewhere else.

Vangie Fuhrman got cold on 9.07.2005 6:27 PM. |