The combination will not occur again for another 35 years (August 13, 2049).

I’ve been one of the estimated 30% who mostly stuck with Windows XP right up until the time Microsoft said it would no longer support the operating system. But it wasn’t just Microsoft who bailed on the OS: the people at WordPress who under-gird my blog don’t like that XP couldn’t upgrade to a newer browser; some Web sites I visit join on the same bandwagon; even Google is warning me that my that IE 7 has become obsolete and that they will no longer be “supporting” the old ways. Well, of course not.

Ah, the old ways. By a large margin, the biggest frustration to me has been the loss of Outlook Express–it doesn’t exist anymore in any new version, presumably because it was so damn easy to get it to interface with an Internet service provider that offered e-mail over the Web.  Express was so neat and clean and simple. The Outlook 2003 I’ve been wrestling with all day is cluttered and complicated. Worse yet, Microsoft doesn’t want you using that old product anyway and won’t help you get it running because it wants to steer you to outlook.com because Microsoft wants to compete with Google’s Gmail. These behemoths are falling over each other so that they can scan your e-mails for keywords and monetize the results to marketers. I wish they understood the old adage: you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. You don’t see me.

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The server this site resides on was recently hacked by a group claiming to be the Syrian Revolution Soldiers. My Weblog was hijacked and became the canvas for a expletive-filled rant aimed at putatively indifferent Americans.

I’m actually sympathetic to the plight of the Syrian people, but hacking in to Web sites isn’t the way to publicize the civil strife, and blaming America at random for the shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy in this region is unhelpful and off-putting. Neither the hack nor the inflammatory rhetoric of the Syrian Revolution Soldiers is going to win their cause any friends. In fact, it strikes me as counterintuitive: why not attack some Russian servers? Stick it to the Assad regime’s enablers.   At least, in my case, the blog is not a platform for commerce. The damage is not monetary. 

Roughly 175,000 people have been killed as a result of the civil strife in Syria. Two million people have been displaced from war zones. On the basis of population, the largest refugee camp in Jordan would now rank as that country’s third largest city. The World Health Organization has just identified Syria as one of the countries who have allowed polio to spread beyond its borders, declaring the situation part of an international public-health emergency.