Slip Sliding Away


Our house is on a school bus route, with a high priority for getting plowed, and we generally have no complaints about how quickly our road gets cleared after a major snowfall. Therefore, I was surprised by the single lane of icy ruts that comprised our road when I left the house to go vote this morning. Fortunately, I met the clearing crew as I went out: two trucks and a road grader, followed closely by the school bus. Jack didn’t have any trouble getting home in the Suburu last night, except for when he had to wait by our next door neighbor’s driveway for ten minutes for someone else who was stuck.

It pays to live in a tiny precinct: despite going to the wrong polling place and standing in line for a bit, then having to find the correct polling place two blocks away, I was done and in my car by 7:30. I took this photo on the road to our valley: snow is so pretty when you don’t have to deal with it.

FlashBlock

Under the assumption that if I find something annoying, someone else has found it annoying, I went looking for a Firefox browser plugin to block the automatic playing of Flash animations, and found FlashBlock. It puts a small button on the page where the animation would have appeared, which you can view the animation if you desire. One note: after you install the plugin, choose FlashBlock from the Tools->Extensions menu, and enable the plugin using Options before restarting the browser. It does not automatically enable itself when installed.

Snow

Snow
We seem to have about eight to twelve inches so far, but with the drifting it is hard to tell. I knew we were supposed to get a significant amount, but I wasn’t expecting a mini-blizzard.

I hope my mother is happy.

The Browser, Reloaded

I have been rebuilding my desktop after a clean install of Linux using Fedora Core 3 Release Candidate 5, which gives me my twice a year opportunity to revisit what software I use on a regular basis. This time, I am trying to see if I can forego using Privoxy. Privoxy is a proxy for web browsing, which means it puts itself between your browser and the Internet. Proxies can be used for several purposes: Privoxy screens out advertisements (including popup boxes) before the content is passed to the browser. Privoxy works extremely well, and is not all that difficult to set up, but of course setting up any proxy is beyond the comfort level of 98% of Internet users. (Privoxy is not just for Linux users: there are versions for Windows and other operating systems as well.)

However, since Firefox 1.0 is now included as a standard with RC5, I decided to see if I forego using Privoxy since Firefox has a lot of options to block annoying ads and popups. In other words, could I train Firefox quickly enough before the ads drive me crazy. (I am always appalled when I use other people’s browsers, and I am assaulted from all side by things flashing and rotating on the edges of the screen. Do I have less innate tolerance for such things, or is it simply that I have not learned to screen them out?)

So far, I am cautiously hopeful that I won’t have to install Privoxy. A few Right-Clicks to block ads got rid of the most annoying ads. I chose the option to eliminate popups, so those are gone as well. (Firefox allows you to make exceptions for sites that use popups to present content.)

In a weak moment, I downloaded and installed the Macromedia Flash plugin. (This takes an extra step or two in Linux, since the security features make it a little harder to install software.) Now I am wondering why I bothered. Is Flash used for anything but annoying ads?