05/1/2009
Shaun and a bunch of bloggers are on a trip to Kolkata, India, right now seeing the work Compassion International is doing to fight poverty and provide hope to children and families. Becky, Shaun’s wife, is on this trip with him even though she isn’t a blogger herself. This is her first trip overseas to see the work of Compassion so I have been very curious to see her reaction and hear her thoughts.
Today Shaun posted the e-mails that Becky has been writing their kids here in America while they’ve been in India. You must go read this post. Here’s an excerpt from Day 5:
The house we visited today was one of a little Compassion girl who is 11. Remember that it is only the size of your bathroom (without the bathtub, toilet, and sink) and her whole family of 5 people sleeps in there with no bed. The floor is clay and there is one window. It is painted a pretty blue color. She asked us how we liked her house. We told her that it was beautiful, and she started smiling. She said “My life is very happy,” and began to sing a song to God. You would think that she would be sad that she didn’t have more, but because she has God and knows her sponsor from Compassion loves her enough to send letters and money to take care of her, she is happy.
My wife and I are in the process of buying a house — our first house. It’s probably going to be a little bigger than a bathroom, but it might not be as big as the neighbor’s house. I only hope that we can remember to be happy because we have God who loves us and because we love each other, and not be sad because we don’t have more stuff.
Go read Letters from Mommy.
05/1/2009
I’m going to warn you up front that this is going to be a geek-only post. However, this is information that should live multiple places online so I’m going to post it right here on the ol’ blog.
I’ve been paying attention to my Activity Monitor on my Macbook Pro recently. This is mainly because I have felt like my computer has been using more memory than it should and the fans have been running a little more than I would like. I kept noticing this one process called “ajaxserver” that was always highlighted in red — meaning it was “not responding” or frozen. When I would stop it manually it would always come back and eventually turn red again.
A quick Google search later and I found the culprit and the solution. I’ve had this free app installed on my machine for a while even though I hardly use it. It’s called Hotspot Shield and it basically creates a secure internet connection wherever you are so you can feel more confident about checking your email and getting online on public WiFi hotspots. I usually keep it disabled because it slows down your connection a bit and because I don’t really know if I trust them any more than whatever hackers might be lurking around the local coffee shop.
Apparently, (according to some folks in the MacRumors Forums) Hotspot Shield is what keeps running this process called ajaxserver. When Hotspot Shield is inactive, the process stops responding. This apparently also has been making my fans run in overtime.
The solution? Either don’t run Hotspot Shield at all or keep it in its fully active state. My choice? I think I’ll just uninstall. (Note: According to this Apple Support Forum some people have had issues uninstalling it. I used AppZapper and haven’t had any issues yet.)
Hope that helps someone else down the road!
