Plumbing, Firefox and fluoride and one big hurry

View 701 Wednesday, November 16, 2011

• Taj Mahal in Guatemala
• New Firefox Not working well
• HELP I need to restore the old Firefox

THE PANIC is over. Thanks.

 

Chaos Manor is beset with plumbing problems and other interferences with our routine. Meanwhile I have a haircut appointment shortly. Tomorrow I have lunch with Niven in Beverly Hills as we look into material for our novel, which is in fact moving slowly but it is moving. It’s hard to run a country. It’s almost as hard to find a good way to tell the story. We’re doing a fable.

I have recently upgraded to Firefox 8. That seems to have been a foolish thing to do. The tool bar is gone, and I can’t find any way to control the thing. There is an introductory page that consists of a bunch of videos recited by someone with a rasping voice who talks too fast and goes past the important points quickly while praising how great this all is. I prefer to read such instructions rather than have to spend time listening to someone try to tell me.

I did the upgrade because Firefox kept crashing, I presume because I keep about 50 tabs open. Whenever I’d click on a link in mail, Firefox would start to load it, then crash. I got tired of it, and tried downloading the latest and greatest. I fear that was a big mistake. We’ll keep trying it for a while, but I suspect this will change my browsing habits just as having to move to LiveWriter has changed the very nature of this daybook, not always for the better. I used to be able to add links easily. Not I have pretty well got to insert them by hand in source code, Livewriter being for some reason unable to import bookmarks properly from Word, and having no way to put them in without my writing them in source code. That makes linking parts of my rambles rather difficult. I sure liked FrontPage better, and for that matter I liked the old Firefox pretty well, while the new one assumes I am both an idiot and a genius alternately, and that I can’t read. Why is this?

I also need to start doing new essays for BYTE and to get Chaos Manor Reviews going again. This hasn’t been a very productive summer, largely because of energy levels. I’m working on things that may restore that, but meanwhile life keeps delivering its small surprises like the plumbing problems. Ah, well. Thanks for your patience.

Topping off this morning’s difficulties, I would swear I read an editorial this morning entitled “Science Fights Flouride” by one Justin Zuckerman, and I certainly made notes this morning on something I thought was such an article, but Google doesn’t believe such an article exists. At least I think it’s Google because Firefox seems to be insisting that I use some horror called the Yahoo Tool Bar, which can’t find the article either.

[A reader has found it for me. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zimmerman-fluoride-20111116,0,7281469.story Thanks!] [Apparently I can’t spell fluoride and Google can’t remember that some people spell flouride wrong. Ah well.]

The thrust of the article was proof that Jonathan Zuckerman, whoever he is, doesn’t understand the principles of freedom. Some communities have decided to stop putting fluoride in the water, but this time it’s all right that they are doing that, because this time they are listening to economic/scientific debate and not a bunch of right wing propaganda about freedom and liberty. Zuckerman is according to my notes a professor of history and education, and he is pretty sure that fluoride it good for you, but now that some scientific people are questioning it and the debates in the cities are about science, it’s all right if a few misguided city councils decide not to put the stuff in everyone’s water. As opposed to the bad old days when only political fanatics opposed it, and it was necessary for the media and everyone else to bully everyone in the country into doing what the then scientific consensus was sure was good for you.

Here is an excerpt from Professor Zuckerman’s column:

But I’m also glad that the anti-fluoridators are resting their case on science, which provides a shared framework for dialogue and understanding. And that makes them very different from the nation’s first critics who were — to put it mildly — paranoid kooks.

Starting in the late 1940s, opponents charged that fluoridation was leading America toward socialism or communism. "Totalitarian government is not confined to forcing everyone to vote for the same dictator, or go to the same church," one wrote. "It involves also the elimination of liberty to choose your food and drink."

 

After all what is this liberty stuff? It’s a good insight into the mentality that says “We know what’s good for your children’s teeth, and we really care, so we’ll be sure you don’t forget.” It’s a good insight into one intellectual’s views. This particular intellectual is a professor of history and education, and I am sure he passes this view along to his students; if it ever occurs to him that there is a contrary view he doesn’t let that influence what he writes here.

 

Now in the real world of rational debate there are perfectly good economic reasons why one ought not put into the water system a chemical that only does good when it’s applied to the teeth. Whether or not fluorides are harmful when consumed, they certainly don’t do any good for your teeth when they are sprayed on the lawn or used to flush toilets. Giving the fluoride drops away at the firehouses, or giving kids fluoride toothpaste in the schools would be a cheaper way to see that everyone gets the benefits of fluoride – but that only goes to people who want the benefits. We can’t have that. People too stupid to listen to the consensus of the well meaning who only want to do good must of course be forced to do what’s good for them. What’s all this liberty nonsense? That’s only for extremists.

I have to run. We’ll get back to this another time. Yes, there were certainly some very irrational people and a few out and out nuts in the debates over whether this stuff ought to be put into the tap water, but there were others who questioned the economics, and a few physiologists who wondered if all that fluoride is good for you. For every “Fluorine is natural, fluoride is death” radio preacher there were others who pointed out that whatever the benefits, they came from direct application to teeth, not from drinking it, and there were more efficient ways to put that on kids’ teeth. And the “debate” never really dealt with that because everyone was so busy publicizing the most irrational arguments they could find as if they were the only arguments.

If you think I may be finding some similarities with the Climate Debate, why — well, It’s time for me to go get a haircut. See you later.

1530:  Good haircut, brisk walk to the barber. We then took Sable out for a walk around the block since she didn’t get out this morning what with the contractors coming for estimates and other distractions. Of course it was just as Carpenter Avenue school was letting out. A flood of good looking and presumably bright kids with a parent attached, each with an enormous rolling book bag, streamed forth, and Sable had to talk to each one of them, and most of the kids thought Sable was the neatest thing they’d seen all day. It seemed as if there were considerably more girls than boys, which may be meaningful  or may be related to the steepness of the hills on the other side of the school. Carpenter is at the base of where the Hollywood Hills come right down to Ventura, so if you park over there you’ll have a steep walk to get back to your car. If you park on this side of Laurel Canyon it’s all flat. Perhaps families with boys tend to park on the steep hills, and families with girls prefer the flat? I have no idea, and it’s not even a cocktail party theory. But I am sure there were more girls than boys.

And all of them wanted to pet Sable., and she wanted to talk to each and every one of them. Interestingly, girls with women tended to be more likely to stop and talk than girls with men. I have no conclusion on this. I did think we have a pretty good crop of kids, all polite, neat, lively, and sensible about approaching strange dogs who look like red wolves. Most thought Sable was a wolf. They’re also fairly trusting, because once assured that Sable is excessively friendly, they immediately wanted to pet her. But they pretty well all did ask. It’s hardly a random sample, since Carpenter is the showcase grammar school in the LA school district, but it does say that we’ve got a pretty good crop of future citizens coming. That’s reassuring.

 

The Central American Taj Mahal

Re Firefox, it seems to be behaving very nicely. I have not found the session manager tool or indeed the tools in general, but I didn’t need to: Firefox restored all my tabs including the one whose opening crashed the system. It looks good. It seems considerably faster than the version I updated it from. I like it – but I still cannot find the tools/options, and for that matter I can’t even find Help so I can go to Help/About to be sure I know the version number, which I believe is 8. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough, but I am not smart enough to guess what the programmers thought they were doing. It might be fun to play along until I find out.

One anomaly. There is a row of tab groups in the tool bar. They appear to be groups I have bookmarked and then sorted into bookmark folders, some of them long forgotten. The last one in that row is something  new to me. I’ll tell you what it is, but first let me set it up.

Almost thirty years ago Russell Seitz and I went on an expedition to Guatemala. I was there because it sounded like fun: we were involved in gathering bedrock samples from various places in Guatemala. We had credentials from the Boston Metropolitan Museum. The theoretical reason for the expedition was to get enough bedrock samples from far enough separated places to allow building a data base of trace elements. This would aid greatly in find the source of the Olmec Blue Jade. More on that another time. Russell had underestimated the effect of the sun at equatorial latitudes when at 4,000 feet – there ain’t so much air above you as you might think – when combined with some photosensitive medications, so he was feeling pretty woozy. I was driving the Land Cruiser, which had no air conditioning. We came down from the mountainous area to sea level and were headed for Puerto Barrios. It was very hot, and the humidity was high enough that there was a haze. As we drove over a bridge we saw below us a boy with half a dozen dead parrots on a stick; apparently he had been hunting them, either for their feathers or to eat, or, as Russell observed, quite probably both. I was digesting that rather bizarre information when there loomed up ahead of us, appearing in the gloom and becoming more solid and real as we drove toward it, a rather fantastic sight: the Taj Mahal.

“Does that belong in this hemisphere?” I asked. Russell just shook his head. “You see it too?”  “Yes.”  “Good."

As we got closer, this is what we saw. It’s much smaller than the real thing, of course, and it’s not a very good imitation, but I can assure you that on a hot enough day with enough gloom its appearance can be quite startling. It marks a cemetery. Across the street is Funeraria Finchey, and next to that is a pharmacy that sells a lot of stuff that would need a prescription in the United States. Now all this was long ago under a different government in Guatemala.

As to why I got a link to http://www.guate360.com/galeria/details.php?image_id=2651 which I have never seen before as a consequence of installing Firefox 8 I have no idea. Could Funeraria Finchy be buying advertisement on Firefox? I presume not, but I am out of hypotheses. I note that the site has other Guatemala fotografias, including the streets of Puerto Barrios. I don’t remember the city, which wasn’t all that large when we were there. Russell and I managed to get the Puerto Barrios Yacht Club to serve us a rather good lunch, although I don’t recall how we managed that. Possibly one of us was a member of a club they recognized. The steward was very tall and very dignified, with a strong Oxford accent, and was from Bombay. I think they still called it Bombay in those days.

I haven’t thought about that expedition in twenty years. I certainly hadn’t expected to be reminded of it by installing Firefox 8.

 

Alas

And of course I spoke too soon. Firefox 8 is mad. I need to find a way back to what I used to have. For reasons I don’t understand, Firefox now finds some unresponsive script on every tab I try to open, and takes forever. It’s unusable. And for the moment I seem to be stuck with it.

So I have made Internet Explorer the default browser because Firefox 8 seems insane on finding scripts and opening windows and doing other madnesses, and I can’t find any way to the tools or help.

But Internet Explorer, although fast and handy, has the fatal defect that there is no way to put a delete “x” in the tab, so in order to delete a tab you have to open it, and that takes a long time on some tabs when all you want to do is get rid of it. Perhaps somewhere there’s a way to set that up but I don’t know it. I was perfectly happy with Firefox 5.6 except that they kept trying to improve it until it crashed, so they came up with increasingly unstable versions.  At some point I am going to have to solve the browser problem.

I hate this. I can’t easily add internal links because LiveWriter doesn’t know how. I liked FrontPage which made things easy to do, but they had to improve things so that it doesn’t work any more to do the basic stuff I need, like inserting a bookmark and easily linking to past work. With FrontPage I could keep a local copy of anything I had posted, and open a local copy and link to its bookmarks. Now I can’t do that. Why do people think they are improving programs when they take away basic features? Now my Browser is improved to the point of uselessness.  Is there anyone left in programming who has ever heard of the concept of “user friendly”?

 

HELP

HELP CAN ANYONE TELL ME HOW TO GET BACK TO A USABLE VERSION OF FIREFOX AFTER INSTLLLING FIREFOX 8 ?

I am desperate. [LATER: THE PANIC IS OVER. I generally do not erase anything from this daybook/journal, and I’ll leave this as it was, but I no longer need help on this. I am getting control of Firefox 8. I think. Practically almost…]

 

Perhaps just a little less desperate:

Firefox toolbar

Re Firefox 8: You probably already have this from others, but the ALT key or F10 toggles the FF toolbar on and off… I had to find it by accident.

DH, Connecticut

Dana Hague

Thanks. At least I can get the toolbars back. Still doesn’t solve the problem that Firefox 8 seems to find scripts in every window I try to open, and goes made on the subject, thus taking forever. I would say I liked the new Firefox if it worked, but it doesn’t, and I don’t really have time to figure out what is wrong.

 

Well, I found HELP (use the alt key as a toggle) and then looked to see how to make Firefox the default browser. Of course it showed me the old way, under the General tab in options. It isn’t there. eventually I went back to options and tried the Advanced tab. There is was. Way to go, fellows. Nothing like learning from Microsoft how to set up a Help program.

Over time Firefox 8 is being just a little better behaved. It has stopped its mad addiction to telling me about bad scripts, although there is no reason why I might not start doing it again.  We’ll see.  It’s dinnertime now.

Meanwhile I really hate LiveWriter’s inability to insert and link to bookmarks. I can do it by writing in the code, but that seems a needless imposition. If FrontPage could do it, why can’t livewriter?  Lazy programmers who don’t actually write daybooks?

2230:  Thanks to all. I’ll write this up later. Firefox seems to have tamed down. I have some new add-ons, and for some reason it has stopped playing ugly games with questions about scripts. I now know to use the alt key as a toggle to bring up the tool bar. I have no idea why they think I want their Yahoo tool bar but not the actual tool bar for Firefox, and I’d as soon the actual toolbar was on all the time, but that’s minor. As of now it seems stable and a lot faster than the older Firefox was. We’ll see; I know, sort of, how to get back to the older version if I have to. If it starts the ‘script did not run’ craziness again I’ll have to rethink, but at the moment I’m hanging in there with Firefox 8.

It has been a very long day. It ended much better than it started. I have more than once been grateful to the USAA insurance people, and it looks as if I have reason for that again. Our house problems are under control, and there’s no need for panic. If you are eligible for USAA insurance, I can’t imagine a good reason for not having it. House and car.

And no sooner did I write that than LiveWriter stopped being able to post this stuff.  Whether that’s Firefox or LiveWriter I don’t know. This is trying to drive me nuts.

One thing is for sure. When you open Firefox, LEAVE IT ALONE until it is through. Do not interrupt it while it is restoring tabs. Don’t try to publish something while it is doing that. Whisper to it, say that you love it, and don’t disturb it until it is done. Then you can try using it. But not before.

The good news is that doesn’t take long. The bad news is that if you try to do something before it is finished with its loading it will be broken until you close it and restart.

And it’s late and I have a mail pile to do. Tomorrow is lunch with Niven and his brother as I gather material for the new novel. I’ll be late tomorrow.

 

I am off to bed but the panic is over. Firefox 8 works, so long as you make sure to let it load everything when it starts up. Do not try to publish something while the wheels are still spinning.