Prayer for Vetamur

For those of you who know Vetamur, I just got an email from a mutual friend informing of some tragic news. Vetamur was on a trip to east Africa and was in some sort of accident en route. He is in the hospital now with life threatening injuries and from what I am told he might not make it.

This has hit me hard on a personal level, because he is one of those rare people that remonds you that there is some good left in this world and there are people who generally care. Before last December, he was just another person online to me. After I had vented a laundry list of my problems on this forum, he literally reached out to me, of his own volition, and rekindled a spark of hope in me. He helped me so much and asked for nothing in return. So I ask all of you who know him, and even if you don't know him, to say a prayer for him and hope for a full recovery. I will post any updates as soon as I can.

New vectored art

So I was bored today and whipped this out pretty quick. First is the vectored line-art and second is the finished colored artwork. Only spent about an hour or so on it, so it's not that spectacular.

Adopted = 2nd class citizen?

So I had a long brutal discussion with my wife today which resulted in a large part of it with her crying and a feeling of low self-worth. Like many children, she was adopted by another family when she was born. Her birth mother wanted to be able to keep her but couldn't because she already had one daughter and her husband had just left her and fled back to somewhere in China. So her birth mother asked a close friend, who she knew was more than financially capable, to raise her unborn daughter. The woman agreed and then became, for all intents and purposes, my wifes mother.

Outside of the mom, the rest of her family seem to think that and proceed to treat her as if she is of low status. Like she is not entitled to any happiness in her life because she is adopted. She did not ask to be born, to be given away or adopted by another family. My wife like any other child born into this world does not have the luxury to choose who her birth parents would be and their status in life. And yet, they like to berate her at any opportunity. Her mother wanted to leave one of her homes to her when she passed away but my wifes sister-in-law would have nothing of that and demanded that if my wife wanted the house that she should pay both her brother and her 1 million baht (roughly $25k US) since they initially helped the mother buy the house. The amount of greed within this family is disgusting and would make your stomach turn to say the least.

What is it with the human condition, that many need to find fault with another to raise a sense of their own self-worth? Why bother adopting somebody if you are going to treat them like they really don't belong there and you are just doing them a favor? I look at 22's posts and know that those children she is/will be raising are far luckier than many adoptive children and will get a chance to have a higher sense of self-worth and feeling of family with unconditional love.

What is it that makes people look at a person who is a adopted and think that because they are adopted they are less of a person? I really can't figure it out. My wife just feels like she is all alone, and I tell her that she is not, but the damage has already been done by her family and all I can do now is repair some of it and reassure her. But I know she will never be whole because of them. Some family, huh?

Windows Vista

So I downloaded and installed M$'s latest OS which is in it's second beta release. I downloaded the 64-bit version, so that I could take advantage of my AMD processor. I must say for a beta release, I'm pretty impressed thus far. Most of the drivers for my hardware were already included with the OS which definitely cuts down on setup times. They seemed to have done alot of homework this time taking some pages from both and Apple OSX and Linux. There's alot tighter security measures automatically in place which significantly reduces the risk of infection. Probably the biggest step they have made, is totally re-writing a new kernel file which supports the OS as before, but has programs operate in basically a wrapper which prevents viruses and so forth access to the kernel which in past incarnations of windows would effectively destroy the OS. The thing I love most about it so far is if I have an application crash, the OS will tell me exactly why the app crashed (instead of an obscure error code) and give me options as to how to fix the error to prevent the same crash. The other nice thing it does is renders the whole desktop in 3D, which means no lag in redraw if I move one content box that is over another. I'm still exploring the OS, because it's huge and there is just soooo much there but I'm really digging it thus far. The biggest drawback I can really say about the new OS for now, is that many people will have to upgrade their machines to get the best out of the OS once it is officially launched (to run with the Aero desktop, which is by far the best mode, you will need a videocard with at least 128megs of memory).

IE7, I dare say is even better than Firefox in most respects. You can have IE run in sandbox mode, effectively cutting off mal-ware and so forth access to your OS preventing it from taking up residence and then sucking away resources. It also incorporates many of the same features as Firefox such as tab-browsing and RSS feed. The only thing that Firefox still is much better at handeling, at the moment, is CSS. Hopefully, they will fix the CSS rendering problems once it is fully launched.

My new comic website

So this is part of the reason why I had disappeared. Check it out, and you will need the flash plug-in to view the site.
http://www.otaku-comic.net