Does anybody know how to get to the cookies thing in Firefox 3.6.8? Somehow all cookies have been disabled on the laptop,and so it won’t let me sign into gmail, and so I can’t get my gmail, and I can’t comment on any Blogger sites.
Tools doesn’t seem to have the option. Here’s what I get on my Tools menu:
In Firefox Tools, I get Web Search, Downloads, Add-ons, Error Console, and Page Info. Stop Private Browsing and Clear Recent History are disabled.
In Edit, no relevant options. In View > Toolbars, no way to get anything up that looks like it might be useful.
I think what’s happened here is that I installed Taco 3.0 with Abine, a souped-up privacy program that sounded like a great idea but evidently is some sort of rogue software. You can uninstall the Taco 3.0 part, but Abine gets its tentacles into the guts of your system and won’t let go. From Google searches I see I’m not the only one with this problem and also that apparently uninstalling FireFox and reinstalling it doesn’t help. Being tired & at the end of my rope, I haven’t tried that.
Has anybody had any experience with this? I’m over in Safari now but much prefer FF for navigation and general security. But now can’t make comments on Blogger sites like Frugal Scholar because I can’t get into Gmail on FF.
If Murphy’s Law can have global warming, that’s what we’ve got here.
First day of class. All my coursework is neatly online. It has, some of you may recall, taken weeks of 16-hour days to mount this stuff on BlackBoard, the courseware that ate Philadelphia.
Today I needed my students to access the site, in class, to download materials, to upload short in-class essays… Wednesday they have two assignments due in this system.
You see where we’re going here… OF COURSE the goddamned BlackBoard system is DOWN! It’s having a FRENZY OF INSTABILITY.
Is it my sweet little college that’s brought this on? Hell, no. It’s the vendor. BlackBoard. Blackboard Freaking Inc. Tina forwarded a memo from the university’s IT people saying they expect it to be nonfunctional for a week or more. GDU is activating its emergency backup system; meanwhile, it’s telling faculty to post materials somewhere else, Google Docs or wherever the hell they can figure out to get online.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
You develop an instinct for these things, after you’ve worked with BlackBoard long enough. So I created a WordPress.com site as my own fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants backup. It’s just a blog and its interactivity is limited to comments. But at least it can hold the most crucial course material, for the nonce, and I can communicate with the little things. The papers they’re doing next week will just have to be printed out. Just what I needed…to have to touch paper. The dratted stuff has acid in it, you know. Burns your fingers.
Ah, but that wasn’t all.
No. Not all. This morning the iMac’s hard drive crashed, once and for all. Down and out. Blue Screen of Death, accompanied by weird Knock of Death. That will be $260, thank you, and say goodbye to all your programs and data.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
One could do without it happening on the first day of class. But thank goodness everything of any import was backed up to an external hard drive, except for a small project I finished about 11:00 last night. Not pleased about having to do that four hours of work over, but it’s a heckuva lot better than having to do four months’ worth of work over.
And boy, am I glad I sprang for the extra coins to get the MacBook! The iMac got cloned onto this handy laptop computer, and so life goes on, with few interruptions. The 87 gerjillion passwords the iMac had memorized have to be looked up and entered into this unit. But otherwise, the system is much the same. And the repair dudes should be able to clone the MacBook back onto the new iMac hard drive.
All that notwithstanding, it’s been one hellish day.
Okay. Can anyone remember when a shave and a haircut actually cost six bits? That would be 75 cents, for those of you born in the latter third of the twentieth century.
Well, the new version is “Shave and a haircut…forty-five bucks!”
No joke, gents. Saturday, in search of a Sur la Table store, M’hijito and I paid a visit to the über-tony Kierland Commons, a fixture serving the ever-more-upscale hordes of north Scottsdale. We parked the car in front of a barber shop—barber salon may be better—whose window proudly advertised a shave and a haircut for $45.
Well, it’s a bargain, I guess: less than I paid, a few hours later, for a haircut alone.
Amazing, isn’t it, what inflation does to a currency? My father told me that when he was a young man delivering milk on a horse-drawn wagon, he earned ten dollars a month. I must have looked startled—at the time this conversation took place, ten dollars would buy a bag of groceries—because he hastened to assure me that $10 a month was a living wage then. He not only lived on it, he said, he lived decently on it.
When he retired, he figured his hard-earned life savings of $100,000 would make him set for life. Then came the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, which reduced its value by…what? two thirds? Today a nest egg of a million dollars feels a little skimpy, considering that most of us can expect to live well into our eighties and some will live into our nineties. I don’t know if the prospect of accruing $100,000 felt as daunting to my parents as a million-dollar target does to me. It never was enough to set them up in affluence, even when he first retired.
I do know that if I still had a job, I’d still be working toward a million-dollar retirement fund. And I wonder if it would be enough to allow me to run the heat in the winter and to cool the house into the comfortable range in the summer.
“Six bits,” by the way, represents inflation, too. The original ditty went
Yesterday, afteran amazingly hectic day during which I fell off the wagon big time (a glass of wine and two beers!!!), I tumbled into the sack around 10:00 p.m. Weary of awaking at 3:00 a.m., as had happened again in the wee hours of yesterday morning, I dropped an antihistamine hoping to drug myself so as to sleep through the night.
It worked. Didn’t wake up until six.
Stumbled outside to wring out the dog in the backyard, there to find…a soggy, soggy landscape.
It must have rained all night long. Eighty degrees and the air was just wet. Thick with humidity.
The dog, no fool, refuses to go out. So I have to walk out into the yard trying to coax her (unsuccessfully) to visit the doggy loo. That’s when I notice that…oh yes…
Last night after I marinated and grilled the pound of awe-inspiring prawns I’d nabbed at Costco, I left the grill lid open so the perforated pan that held the shrimp would cool enough for me to wash it. Then, in my exhaustion (not to say inebriation), I totally spaced that I’d done that.
Even when, right before bedtime, I went to let the dog out and found it sprinkling, I failed to recall that the grill was hanging open to the evening skies.
Well.
You never saw such a mess in your entire put-together! The drip pan under the burners was overflowing with rainwater and grease. The cast-iron grates, highly rustable, were dripping greasy water into the interior of the grill. Formerly burned-on grease had somehow absorbed water and swelled up into blobs, like greasy puffed wheat. The ignition knob was soaked, as was every other part of the $400 grill. You could hear the meat-eating ants singing, a little squeaky ant chorus, as they danced a jig of joy around the perimeter of Ant City, knowing all this grease was spread across the earth for them to carry home. A gift, no doubt, from the Ant Goddess.
Two hours later…sweat was dripping into my eyes and off the end of my nose, I was drenched with sweat from top to bottom, my shoes were ruined from greasy water and detergent splashing on them, my hands were a wreck (the rubber gloves having died in the last fiasco I had to deal with), and yesterday’s $50 hairstyle was a sad memory.
And the pool was still full of leaves and devil pods.
To enhance the joy of that challenge, the pool needed to be backwashed. The filter was so clogged, the pump couldn’t push water fast enough to mound the leaves and seed pods into discrete piles so they could be sucked up by the hose bonnet. No way Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner could manage all those devil pods: they would choke him to death before he could get halfway across the deep end.
And for more joy enhancement: I shock-treated the pool yesterday, turning it into a puddle of Clorox. This meant I couldn’t even dive into the water this morning to cool off from the hard labor.
Backwashed the pool into the alley, hoping the neighbors would imagine the resulting lake came from the rain. Fortunately, most people don’t go out and about in swampy weather like this.
Recharged the filter. Let the pump run while I fed the dog and…and…yes. Cleaned up the little gift she left under the table, since she wouldn’t go outside into the soggy soggy landscape. Fixed and ate breakfast (mostly coffee, annoyingly decaffeinated). Plodded back out to clean the pool.
The hose bonnet is one of the great unsung inventions of humankind. It vacuumed up about a half bushel of leaves and devil pods. Matter of fact, it cleaned the bottom so well, there was no need to put Harvey back into the pool. Which was good, because he’s allergic to hyperchlorination and shouldn’t be crawling around in there until a shock treatment has dissipated.
Jumped in the pool in spite of the no-no levels of carcinogenic chlorine guaranteed to rot away Harvey’s plastic carapace. This left the skin stinging. Stood under the hot shower for god knows how long, soaking and soaping chemicals off.
The barbecue is now so clean it’s almost good as new. The pool pump is running so efficiently it’s almost silent in its operation.
So over at the Depot I got these nifty (read “cheap”) motion-sensitive coach lights for the front of the house. Yesterday Dave the Electrician came over, hard-wired them, and got them working right. The equally cheap nifty lights I installed when I moved in here five years ago are crumbling away under the radioactive Arizona sunlight.
But more to the point, the house has been rewired by some moronic former owner so that two of the three lights in front have to be turned on from inside the garage. When the house was built, one switch next to the front door turned them all on. Why anyone would change this escapes me. I suspect it was Satan and Proserpine‘s idea. “Green” was their affectation, and one way they liked to manifest that was with few and dim lights. As long as he was dorking with the electric (for reasons unknown, Satan imagined he was a great electrical handyman) (don’t ask about the DIY 220-volt outlet!), he probably figured he could save electricity by wiring two of the lights into the garage, thereby allowing him to turn on only one light to cut down lawsuits from evening guests tripping over the threshold.
Which brings us to the day’s point: Can I get away with having the S-corporation pay for the new fixtures?
I believe I can. Here’s why:
1. The office, which has a hardened lock on a solid-core door, is now accessible by burglars only through a front window. This window is lighted solely by the front lights. The nearest street lamp is on the other side of the house, and the trees in the front yard shelter the office window from easy view. Thus at night access to the office is facilitated by darkness.
2. The only things of value in the building are inside the office, which, in my absence, is otherwise locked behind a contraption designed to break a burglar’s drill bit—or his foot, should he try to kick his way in.
• I have no jewelry of any note. My baubles by and large come from the craft store. • The sound system is an ancient stereo that no one would pay money for today. • The television is an old TV/computer monitor my son had in San Francisco, tiny and antique. At a yard sale it would bring about ten bucks. • The furniture is 50 years old. It does not qualify as “antique.” It qualifies as “used furniture.”
3. Besides the fact that the only marketable goods in the house are inside the office, the entire value of my business consists of the data stored on its computer, external hard drive, and flash drives. The very existence of the S-corp would be put at risk if someone came in the office’s window and cleaned out all the electronic gear.
4. The neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders. I can prove this by the constant stream of alerts, warnings, and reports from the police and the head of the neighborhood association.
5. Therefore, installing security lights on the front of the house is crucial to maintaining the security and integrity of the business.
These little lights, which probably will last about as long as the crumbling cheapies they replaced, are great. If anybody comes up to the front of the house, they pop on, so that I can look out a window and actually see who or what is out there.
In the previous regime, if I heard something in the night I could only turn on one light, which did not illuminate the courtyard. There’s no way I’m going to walk into the garage to turn on the other two lights, not if there’s even the remotest possibility that someone’s prowling around outside. The garage has a side door. Even though I put a security door over it, I have to go in and out that side very morning to water the plants, and half the time I forget to flip the deadbolt shut when I come back in. Sometimes I re-enter the house through the back door and forget to close the security door altogether. So, in the middle of the night, opening the door from the kitchen to the garage is an invitation for the burglar to come right in.
Lights that come on automatically if there’s anyone sneaking around out there will allow me to see the person and call 911. And they should deter burglars from breaking in the office window when I’m out.
I like these, because they’re open on the bottom, allowing me to change the bulb without having to deconstruct the whole fixture. Amazon has a cheaper motion-sensitive coach light, but you have to take it apart to change the bulb. That entails work, which goes against my principles.
Now, while it’s true that the new fixtures light the residential part of the house as well as the room devoted to the office, the fact is the only things of any value inside the house are in the office, and if those things are lost, the corporation goes bust. So, I think it’s reasonable to argue that the fixtures can be expensed through the corporation.
Little knowing what I was getting into, a while back I agreed to help with the program for the Arizona Bach Festival, a new musical series featuring internationally known classical musicians and the Grammy Award-winning Phoenix Chorale. When I said “help,” I was thinking “editorial help.” But what really happened was that I got volunteered to sell ad space for the program.
Well, of course, I don’t know the first thing about ad sales. But we just made our first sale! w00t!
In theory I’ve been offered a small commission on each sale, but in fact I plan to donate the proceeds back to the festival or to All Saints, whose music director is one of the moving forces behind this event.
Even though I’m just getting started, it’s already easy to see that I’m getting a great deal more benefit from this experience than a 15 to 25 percent commission. In fact, it’s forcing me to go out into the community and meet people—businessmen and women who can use my services and are likely to actually pay for them. How will this help The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.?
Let me count the ways:
• Renew and re-establish old business relationships • Join or rejoin trade groups I’d allowed to languish • Take time to talk with people whose friendships I’ve neglected • Remind old friends that I’m still looking for business • Find new opportunities to market my business as well as theirs
Just about any time you get out of your cave, it’s good for business. A couple of months ago, I volunteered to edit the Arizona Book Publishers Association newsletter. When the group announced on its website that I’ll be taking over with this issue, right off the bat someone e-mailed me asking if we would do editorial work for an offshore fulfillment house.
Business—that is, making money—is about getting to know people. So is volunteering. The two work hand-in-hand.
, which probably will last about as long as the crumbling cheapies they replaced, are great. If anybody comes up to the front of the house, they pop on, so that I can look out a window and actually see who or what is out there.
, but you have to take it apart to change the bulb. That entails work, which goes against my principles.