URI: 
                         More things to be thankful for
       
       I didn't intend to go this long without making a new entry here, but I 
       am glad to be back here to do so today. Circumstances have definitely 
       turned around since last fall. I got my Jeep back a couple of weeks or 
       so before Christmas and I haven't had any additional problems with it 
       since. My family and I had a very nice Christmas together and a couple 
       of my aunts and an uncle who had been sick on and off recently have 
       been feeling better lately.
       More recently, my youngest son was experiencing what we thought was a 
       rare side effect from a prescription inhaler that he had been using, 
       but it could have been caused by something more serious. My wife took 
       him to the doctor last week, and after some testing he verified that 
       the inhaler was most likely causing him to have to use the bathroom 
       very frequently. We are thankful that he probably doesn't have a more 
       serious problem going on such as diabetes.
       I received, as a Christmas present, a USB 2TB external solid state 
       hard drive that I am using with my old Toshiba Satellite laptop (but 
       it can run on any computer). It boots into a version of Debian Linux 
       and runs noticeably faster than the factory's internal spinning hard 
       disk that is still present in the machine. I also received some RAM 
       that I installed into the laptop, which upgraded it from the stock 3GB 
       to the maximum capacity of 8GB. I decided I wanted to upgrade that 
       laptop rather than buy a new one.
       Recently I have been learning to use a free and open source computer 
       operating system called Haiku OS. I installed it on my wife's old HP 
       Pavilion dv7 laptop that originally ran Windows 7. I am having a lot 
       of fun playing around with Haiku because it is very quirky and unique 
       from most others I've experienced before. I would describe it as a 
       cross of the old MacOS 9 and a Linux distribution. I don't understand 
       all of the history of Haiku OS, but I know it is an open-source 
       operation that is based on (I think mainly in appearance and 
       functionality) of a mid 1990's Be operating system called "BeOS," 
       which was produced by a company called "Be Inc." I don't recall having 
       heard of it until recently, but Be Inc. was created by a former Apple 
       executive and the operating system was intended to compete with the 
       classic Apple MacIntosh operating and Microsoft Windows operating 
       systems. I don't think BeOS ever gained a significant share of users 
       in the market, but it did remain in development until 2001. The 
       operating system that I am learning now, called Haiku, is a 
       continuation of BeOS, but doesn't directly share its coding as I 
       understand. I think it just looks and functions like it, but it's 
       actually an all-new system. It is admittedly somewhat buggy though 
       since it is still in a beta version state of development. It seems to 
       be mostly stable though, and definitely usable.
       
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