You are essentially correct. I suffer from Chrohn's myself, and was only diagnosed about 2 years ago (I'm 27 now). I had periods of chronic flareups, including what I thought at the time were incidences of food poisoning, as far back as when I was 14. I never even saw a doctor for most of it. I ascribed it to certain foods (I suspected a lactose intolerance or possible issues with starch), and just tried to avoid stuff that 'didnt agree with me'.

When I finally saw a doctor at the ER it was because I had a flareup that didn't end for several months, and was unable to eat towards the end and keep it down. The ER gave a tentative diagnosis as Chrohn's, but I was literally moving 2 states away the next day, and at the new location it took a specialist a further 2 months to confirm for sure it was Crohn's. They basically went with a process of elimination, dropping possible causes one by one, til Crohn's was really all that was left.

It seems to be one of those conditions (of course there are many) which isn't fully understood, and theres only a slowly growing awareness about it; I see more and more stuff on it recently that wasn't around a couple years ago. Its not surprising that she went so long without a proper diagnosis given the way it behaves.

I just wish there was a more reliable way of treating it when the diagnosis is finally made, and since that girl seems to have a pretty bad case, I wish her luck. I've been on prednisone for 2 years now, and the side effects from it are most unpleasant, but its the only thing thats worked.

OT, I know, but did he actually say something like that? I tend to ignore most of his blog posts these days as it seems to be nothing but whining about football, praising Obama, or yelling at his fans because they're annoyed he doesn't seem to do any actual author-type work anymore. If he's against the used book market too...yeesh.

Semi back on topic: Also, I was under the impression that book publishers have been against the used market for years now; my wife is a librarian and I'm pretty sure she has mentioned the issue to me before. Same issue with movies and music, and cars tend to have some resale built into their price? This kind of thing is far from new or original and theres still not a huge amount of outcry from the general public, much less blood on the streets...

I don't honestly know about Chrome's behaviour there, I don't really use it (not installed on this PC) due to my reliance on blocking ads. I've just stuck with FF2/Adblock/Noscript/Flashblock for the time being, and will continue to do so as long as possible.

The issue for me is the fact that I'm tired of the Mozilla team breaking stuff that doesn't need to be broken, and changing things because they think its cool, while neglecting obvious performance issues. Not to mention the attitude I got from the devs themselves about it. If I'm forced into the change regardless, I'd rather it be somewhere that doesn't in any way support that team. Principle of the thing, etc. Useless in a real world sense, but it makes me feel better at least. And since any web browsing I do outside of work is entirely for personal entertainment, feeling good about it is desirable.

Opera's address works basically the same by default, but took me about 3 seconds to find the setting to turn it off. Opera however soaked up more memory than firefox after about 20 minutes and only a fraction of the open tabs. That was in v9.41 or something though, haven't installed 10 yet.

Had the Mozilla devs given me the option to do as Opera did, I'd have been much happier. Had they released the awesomebar as an addon as it should've been, I'd have been ecstatic. People don't need eye candy rammed down their throats, it should be optional. If I want a clean and fast web browsing experience with a simple address bar like I've had for pretty much the entire time I've been on the web, I shouldn't have to download experimental addons to just get close to it. I know user 'rights/desires' like this are a bit of a silly notion on a free product, but again that just gets back to my happiness in relation to web browsing, and in the end I'm going to go to the team that exhibits a similar view to my own.

They didn't learn anything from the Awesome Bar stuff. I took part in one of the debates on it, and the devs basically told me to shut up and love it. They saw nothing wrong with forcing those changes and leaving no option to keep what has worked for a decade available. I've refused the Firefox3 upgrades, and I'm just hoping that Chrome or some other alternative gets some ad-blocking addons before I'm absolutely forced into an upgrade away from Firefox 2. They eventually (many months later) talked of adding some options that'd let you revert the awesome bar back to a simple location bar with the old behaviour, but last I looked it didn't work right still, and I'm having a hard time supporting them as they continue to change stuff simply because its cool to them.

This situation is likely to turn out much the same way if some of those devs get ahold of it. Its so awesome to them, they're blinded by the concept and can't see that its really not something that's necessary, especially in the face of the memory and CPU hogging issues that still exist and just keep getting worse. Its really disappointing how they keep turning Firefox away from a nice browser and into IE's horrid lovechild.