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.