Did Yahoo Hijack Your Search Engine on Firefox?

I don't often go into the nuts and bolts operation of computers even though I was in the terms of buzz word people, an "early adopter" of computers. My foray started back in the eighties when I was looking for ways to electronically storing all of my articles, stories and first drafts of screenplays. I went to Bob, my trusted friend, and asked him how many pages would a computer hold. He looked at me and said that it depended on the size of my hard drive, which at the time was about 20 megabytes. I said, yes, but how many pages and he said about 20 megabytes worth and I asked how many pages that was and he said about 20 megabytes worth. This went on for about 10 large draft beers until we really didn't care anymore and I bought a computer off him. Wonderful marketing scheme, I think. My point is that I am not a neophyte when it comes to computer technology or applications, but I was stymied a while back when one day I noticed on my Firefox browser that a Yahoo tab had appeared and subsequently when I went to search for something by opening a new window, the default search engine was Yahoo and not my normal Google. I tried everything I could think of to change this back. I disabled the Yahoo toolbar, I reset my default search engine, but still the tab was on my Firefox toolbar and the search engine kept defaulting to Yahoo. After a few months of frustration, I resorted to a solution I usually tell everyone who encounters a problem on their computer. Do a search online and see who else has the same problem and see if anyone has solved their problem. I guess I should listen to my own advice. After a pretty exhaustive search I found one page that detailed a solution. Apparently, Yahoo has taken to adding an invisible add-on to Firefox's add-ons. You cannot detect it using the standard procedure of looking for it. Smart people that Yahoo group. What you must do is go into the Help of Firefox and select, "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". This brings up a text box in which you select, "Disable all Add-ons" and then restart. Once opened again, you can go to Tools, then "Add-on" and select which of the add-ons you really want back on. Just don't go near any Yahoo ones that are still there. The link to this original page is http://medicine-opera.com/2010/03/how-to-disable-yahoos-theft-of-firefoxs-open-a-new-tab/ . While I am pontificating about little irritating things on Firefox, if you happen to get a text box message stating that something is trying to fake a security update on Firefox, that is a Google updater trying to update. To get rid of that message box, go to add-ons and disable the updater. Simple as that.

Class over, smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Here's the Ying, Now Where's the Yang

I certainly don’t need to preach that we live in a very complex and very complicated world right now. Situations seem to be boiling over in all parts of the world, all at the same time. I am sure this happened before in the history of the planet, but in those days we were not as globally aware of everything that was occurring. The phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” certainly would have described that mind-set. Things that we would never be exposed to come into our house on a voluntary basis or as an intrusion almost every day of the week. To be honest, I don’t need a daily phone call just when I am sitting down to dinner with my family to let me in on a great deal from my bank, your bank, or anybody elses’ bank for that matter. It is nice they think of me and all, but a letter that I could ignore would have the same effect.

I don’t know if it was out of a morbid sense of curiosity or whether there was a inner demon working at the time, but a few years ago I did a few clicks on my computer and watched the execution of Saddam Hussein when it was making its’ rounds on virtually every web page on Earth. At first, I kept thinking, “Okay, here is a very bad man, getting what he deserves”. I don’t think anyone on this Earth would ever be able to tally how many lives this particular man destroyed as he plundered, raped and invaded countries. But still as I watched this video, all I could see was a poor, pitiful, broken old man being hung. I really did have to shake myself and remind myself what this person did to millions of people. Anyone who allows his son to torture the national soccer team because they lost a game really is not quite fit to roam the surface of this planet in my books. But then that does raise the question. Does anyone, no matter what they have done, deserve to die? That is an argument that has been debated for a lot longer than I have been around and I am sure will continue a lot longer after I am gone.

Still that image and thought has stayed with me for quite a while as I thought about very bad things that happen to very bad people. I don’t know anybody who was directly or indirectly affected by Saddam’s life, so it is hard to say. From a global perceptive there are two points of view, one is that he was a maniacal tyrant who deserved everything he got (the US point of view) and the other was that he was a merciless dictator who held together the tenuous relationship of tribal factions in an area that didn’t respect democratically made borders or treaties. A delicate balance of order and terror which kept the lid on the country, and something which was greatly disturbed when he was removed from the picture. Chaos ensued in a vacuum of organized brutality.

The scales seem to swing wildly, back and forth between extremes, one would think that there has to be a balance somewhere, a Ying and Yang of the world. For every bad thing out there, I am sure there are very good things out there that happen to very good people, we just don’t hear about them all the time. Our media prefers to dwell on the bad things as it makes for better press and better sales. But every once in a while we hear of someone, a nice, hardworking someone, who is down on their luck and things are looking as bleak as they can possibly be and then using their last two dollars, they buy a lottery ticket and find themselves the following morning richer than they ever dreamed. Good things that happen to good people.

But even though we are often happy, if not out-right pleased when bad things happen to bad people, unfortunately sometimes very bad things happen to very good people. It is at times like this that I look to the sky and implore, “ What the Hell are you thinking about?”

I find myself exposed to this more and more in my life as my friends and family age. A friend of mine died shortly before Christmas a few years ago. This definitely fell into the realm of very bad things. He was younger and in better shape than I and certainly deserved to stay around a lot longer. As I sat one evening thinking about how delicate everything is in this world was and thinking how horrible the timing was for this disease to claim him. I heard the most heartwarming thing I have heard in many, many years. Just before he died, he had ordered Christmas presents for his family and had them delivered to his home shortly before the 25th . I am sure his spirit was in the room as they unwrapped their presents on Christmas morning. He gave them what was truly an almost impossible present, a wonderful time in what would have been the darkest Christmas of their lives. He took the shadow out of that very bad thing and was able to shine a little light for all of us to see and maybe restore a little balance in the world.

Tilting at Windmills

I stood at the gas bar the other day just watching the numbers go flashing by on the pump. It was mesmerizing in a curious way, the rhythm of the cents counting upwards to the regular changing of the dollar amount. Maybe that is how they get us to buy more gas. They lull us with a sense of rhythm. It is fortunate that we aren’t still in the old analog days of meter reading with a bell dinging at the turn of every dollar. If that were the case, the pump would sound off like a school bell ringing as the dollar amounts wracked up at mind dizzying speeds.

I have been dealing with the economic downturn as well as the next guy, although as a writer the economic rewards do not roll in with any regularity to be all that concerned. My financial management skills consists mostly of checking my pockets for anything with a silver sheen and making sure I don’t loose the Lotto 649 tickets from one draw date to the next. The Lottery Retirement Plan, which is the linchpin in my long term financial strategy is also the vehicle of choice amongst many of my friends and family, even though it was not mentioned as a viable option when I took the Canadian Securities Course. I guess they better update that program to reflect the realities of today.

Like many other people, I have been counting my pennies and looking for ways to stretch what ever bucks happen to come my way. There are plenty of things to do in this area for cheap entertainment. We have many museums and art galleries to see, the local landscape north of the city is ideal for picnicking, the small quaint villages and towns around us gives us the opportunity to step back in time a bit and enjoy their rustic charm. The waterfront, the city’s pride and joy, is a perfect place to lie on the grass and watch the clouds drift by. It used to be just letting my eyes wander over our opposite shoreline would lull me to a state of nirvana, but now whenever I look over at Wolfe Island and see the towering windmills, I instantly flash to those lumbering alien machines that strolled through the countryside blasting apart the world as we knew it in the original movie, “War of the Worlds.” The mental image of mayhem, havoc and devastation on Wolfe Island kind of disrupts any zen state I may have achieved.

The recent economic woes have certainly impacted all levels of society, from the wealthiest to the ones who depend up the generosity of others. However, the frenetic and frantic wheeling and dealing of how to stimulate the economy that was deemed so critical in January and February has morphed into a more casual response. The buzz word of projects that were shovel ready and were ripe for an instantaneous injection of readily shoveled federal money has become sort of ...meh. Not that important anymore.

Don’t misunderstand me, the economy is still in a lousy state. But it is a little confusing when you go from a sky-is-falling, panic inducing, end of the world scenario into a kind of blase feeling in a matter of months. It is understandable if you get a little discouraged after all, look what happened to Chicken Little. It is not as though this was solely a media created problem, the economy really has taken a hit and while some believe this is a correction that has been a long time coming, that is small comfort to all those who have lost their jobs, their savings or more.

I would bet one of my few remaining loonies that if you ever got two thousand economists in the same room with one problem you would most likely emerge with two thousand solutions, if not closer to three thousand. Or better yet, two or three thousand recommendations for solutions, no use going out on a limb with a real solution. Even the ultimate question of do we throw money at an economic problem or not will not get you a black and white response. The best that can be brought forth is a definite maybe or maybe not. No one has quite figured out which is correct and we won’t ever know the solution as there really doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer to this. In reality, there is a lot of middle ground that is awash in a sea of grey. Each side gleefully hold up examples of the teachings of Friedman or Galbraith or any other economist ‘du jour’ as quintessential models of economies at work while not fully understanding any of them.

My hometown has fared better than some other urban centers and this is all part of our master plan to not overly exceed on anything but then again we never really under exceed either. There are some examples locally of business growth but most companies are part of a larger umbrella of companies of which we are just a cog. Our real estate values did not go through the roof as happened in cities like Toronto or Vancouver to the chagrin of some people. But then, our crash did not take 20% off the prices of real estate to the enormous relief of others.

Throughout history, we have seen that sometimes the best solution to surviving a crisis is to hunker down and weather the storm. I am sure many of our citizens have been through much worse and some may feel that our present problems are a creation of the forces who would benefit from them. That would not surprise me in the least. Tilting at windmills has always been a favorite maneuver of the press and politicians. Now if they want to take up this quixotic battle all they have to do is sit on our shoreline and gaze over at the wind farm scattered across Wolfe Island. Don Quixote only thought he was facing thirty or forty of them, we have eighty six, more than enough for everyone to tilt at willwith.

The Arrogance of Stupidity

We had a mass murder here in Kingston almost a month ago on June 30. A 50 year old woman and three teen aged girls were found dead in a car which was submerged in one of the waterway locks that connects Kingston to the Rideau Canal. The lock in question is at Kingston Mills which is part of a waterway system that eventually unites Kingston with our national capital of Ottawa about 100 miles northeast of us. What is particularly mind-boggling about this murder is that the three family members (father, mother and son) accused of this heinous act, actually thought no one would notice. They must have figured that it would be a crime that would be easily disregarded with some simple-minded explanation of their demise. That might have been the case in their native Afghanistan, but not over here.

Their official story was that sometime after midnight, after driving from Niagara Falls, they stopped at a motel off the 401 highway to spend the night. They didn’t remember which hotel they stayed at, just that it was off the 401. Then sometime after settling into their rooms, the oldest daughter (19 years old) took one of the cars to go out for a drive even though she didn’t have a license. Not happy just going alone, they said she took her two sisters and her aunt (who turns out not to be an aunt after all, but the first wife of the father who is accused of this murder). Then they somehow navigated the car through a park-like setting, between barriers and as a result of a freak accident, ended up in the canal.

The police didn’t need a mind-reader like the Amazing Kreskin to start to see the holes in this story. Even I, whose only experience at cracking murders come from the TV set, could ask questions that would cause a suspect to shift uncomfortably in a chair. But this is not an analysis of the murder, it is more an analysis of how can people be so stupid to think they could get away with it.

We have seen this time and time again from all classes of people and all from all social statuses. From the absolute dumb-ass criminals on shows like the First 48 and Cops to the more intelligent, but no less stupid, politicians. The only rational I can come up with is what can only be called the arrogance of stupidity. These people believe that they are first and foremost, smarter than they think. Which really on the scale of how they measure up against normal people, it turns out that they are still pretty stupid.

I remember a murder case in California in 2004, a kid named Skylar Deleon who passed himself of as a former TV star (actually just a bit part in one episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series) murdered Tom and Jackie Hawks who owned a 55 foot yacht. The couple had the boat for sale and Skylar, in his own little world, believed he could kill the couple and take their boat by claiming he paid them cash for the boat and that the couple then subsequently disappeared into Mexico with the money. It should be mentioned that the Hawks had a family and friends. How this kid with a gift of the gab actually thought he might get away with this is beyond the comprehension of the average person. But still he went ahead with his plan and as would be expected, was arrested and has been given the death penalty for the crime. Just to top things off, it was reported he tried to cut his penis off with a razor blade while he was in prison (insert your own joke here).

We have repeatedly seen politicians who, when found with their hand buried so far in the cookie jar, have come up with what they believe are rational explanations for their behavior. I guess in that moment of sheer panic when they get caught, their sense of what is rational must have been severely compromised. American Senator Larry Craig whose homosexual encounter in an airport washroom was uncovered by security personnel, tried explained that he was simply tying his shoelace when he was caught soliciting some non-governmental sanctioned fun under a stall. Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney when caught receiving a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash in an envelope explained that this money was a retainer for legal services he had not yet provided and therefore he didn’t report the income to the Canada Revenue Agency. He apparently felt it was unearned income at the time. If there was ever a case where income was unearned, this would have been it. I mean, besides a few babies born at the local hospital, the majority of us weren’t born yesterday.

It would be easy to go on and on about stories of this level of stupidity. The world is certainly not in short supply of examples. The tougher point to crystallize is why these people think they are smarter than the rest of us when quite evidently they are not. Why do they think that they can get away with something that even to the simplest of people, doesn’t seem remotely feasible. The only common denominator that links the lowest knuckle dragging criminal to the smoothest of smooth political operatives is their own arrogance. It is this arrogance that will bring them down, it always does. As I have said previously, the moment you start to think you are smarter than the other guy, is the moment you start to fail.

Stand and Deliver!!!

“Stand and Deliver!! I want you to hand over all the lupins you've got”.
“What do you mean,lupins?”
“You mean the bloody flower,lupin?”

Perhaps some of you will recognize the “Dennis Moore” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus where the highwayman steals from the rich to give to the poor but instead of riches, he steals lupins. But how many are familiar with the fact that this could be based on true story? The Tulip craze in the Netherlands in the 1630's reduced this country’s economy into a shambles as aristocrats as well as peasants were caught up in an orgy of trading, buying and selling of tulip bulbs. Yes, that is right, the flower.

In those days the tulip was a very rare commodity, originally imported from Turkey only for the very rich and affluent. If the tulip had stayed within the reaches of that minority, the devastation that it caused would never have been as wide spread as it was. But when the Smiths’ chase the Joneses as they have throughout history, the status symbols of the rich become all too alluring for the general public. To own a tulip became the status symbol to have, it showed that you had “arrived.” Bling for the 17th Century, as it were.

Tulips were cross-bred, cross-pollinated and interbred in almost any manner to produce a more unique display of color or colors. Stripes, meaning a tulip with two colors, were the most desired but even the single colored ones were still highly collected by the masses. The mere owning of a tulip bulb was important for one’s social standing. What used to be available only from horticulturalists and estate gardeners in major cities now had traveling salesmen roaming the countryside hawking their bulbs. What even added to the temptation to get into the tulip market was that the flowers reproduced themselves allowing growers to then sell the offsets to the drooling public who demanded them.

Historically, the physical bulb was what had always been traded, a “you bought it and now you plant it” approach and this was usually all done within the appropriate season for planting or growing. But due to the demand people began to “sell” future offsets of their plants. This would give a buyer a commitment to take delivery of a tulip bulb before it had been grown, thereby creating a “futures” market for the plant. This lead to the creation of a marketplace where the futures of the plant were traded and not the physical bulb. Sometimes this option to buy a bulb would be traded for profit before taking delivery of the bulb. That is, it created a marketplace where “negotiable piece of paper with a notional delivery date” ruled.

Trading became a mania with prices for a single bulb reportedly exceeding 200 times the price of a pig. This national obsession then started to affect other industries as the citizens focused all their energy and capital into the tulip market ignoring basic farming and industry. That in itself would have a lingering effect of the economy for years following. As demand outstripped supply, the prices for tulips were reaching an ever increasing level and no one gave a moments thought to the inevitable price ceiling.

The end came in February of 1637 when the major growers and the professional speculators, as opposed to the inexperienced traders, realized that prices could no longer continue to rise and began a major sell off of their holdings. Within days the price had fallen through the floor and any paper stock was virtually worthless. Recriminations were thrown back and forth between the government and the speculators who were blamed for the collapse of the market. Thousands of people who had previously enjoyed a rapid rise in fortune were suddenly facing financial ruin. The growers blamed the masses for their reckless greed and turned to the government for financial recompense. They claimed the horticultural industry would not survive without some financial aid. So in 1638 the government of the day awarded the growers compensation equaling approximately 5% of the paper commitments made to them in 1636.

At the end of this economic boom and bust, lives and fortunes were ruined. The get rich scheme that propelled many to dabble in the stock market and lead them to more wealth than they had ever experienced before also brought them crashing back to earth in many cases costing them their homes, businesses and security. Many people put all they had into this, more than they should have ever invested. Almost to a person they broke the cardinal rule of thumb of investing in any stock market, never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Sounds terrifyingly similar to today, doesn’t it?

State of the Economy - Messy

Unbridled greed has been targeted as one of the main reason’s for the global economic situation we are in. Both Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland recently blamed the United States pursuit of profit as the main reason for this economic downturn. That in itself is a simplistic response but there is some truth in that accusation. Over the past decade or so proponents and critics of Wall St. have quoted the fictional character Gordon Gecko as saying, “Greed is good” as some sort of mantra that this is the way things are meant to be. But what he actually said was “Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good.” (Italics are mine). An ocean of difference in my opinion. But was greed what drove the economic engine to grind to a halt? It certainly was a factor, the pursuit of money at all costs is an intoxicating beverage. Even if you take the relative penny ante of most investors, the scent of earning more and more money can cloud the better judgment of all involved and that includes investors who wanted a higher and higher rate of return on their investment without considering the corresponding risk.

There is an element of moral responsibility when dealing in the financial industry whether this is balancing the needs of the client to the needs of generating revenue right down to having a sense of “doing the right thing”. An example of moral responsibility gone AWOL could be Richard Arens, a mercantile trader for a one man brokerage company named ABS on the New York Mercantile Exchange. This was the man who everyone ought to hate. On January 2 2008 it was he who was alleged to have been the first to make a trade for a barrel of oil which broke the $100.00 barrier. He bought the minimum 1,000 barrels at a cost of .47 more per barrel than what was currently being traded on the floor. He did end up the day with a loss of 600.00 and made the trade so he would be able to tell his grandchildren that he was the first to pay 100.00 for a barrel of oil. Some kind of legacy. On the basis of accounting for every barrel of oil that was bought, sold, produced or shipped at that time, which numbers about 85, 000,000 barrels a day in the US, that single action increased the value of oil by more than $40,000,000. All this done with an investment of a margin deposit of $6,750. Within 7 months the price of crude rose to a high of 147.27 before settling back down. Was this the case of supply and demand which is the usual cornerstone of pricing or the result of targeted speculation? Considering how a simple $6,750 investment increased the value of oil by $40,000,000 is it too hard to imagine how prices would be affected by people with even deeper pockets?

It is difficult to lay all our problems at the feet of speculators, however enticing it may be. There were other factors all coming together, all interrelated, all commingled on the same messy economic plate. Sub-prime mortgages are a place to start, but they were rather an offspring of some behind the bushes derivative shenanigans. Papers were packaged and repackaged so often and frequently that even their mothers wouldn’t recognize them. Hedge funds? What started out as an investment tool to “hedge” your bets against risk, soon became the depository of high risk/high yield investments. It is rumored that a group of hedge fund managers were the wizards behind the levers which pulled Bear Stearns down, a company that had 8 Billion dollars in cash reserves before rumors of liquidity problems began circulating through the industry. At this point it appeared that the world was not enough to feed the appetite of some traders, they started to eat their own.

This situation is unfortunately not easily solved either domestically or internationally. The markets have become global in nature and with the complex weave of papers flying around the world, it is difficult to unravel what this mess has become. Many companies are now blaming a “broken model of business” as a source of their woes. The auto sector is particularly fond of this expression. It is as though they were following a rule book as to how to operate a business and when the nature of the marketplace changed and went beyond the circumstances described in their business model, all hell broke loose. Forgive me for intimating this but someone who earns a few million dollars a year for their business acumen should be able to do more than follow a recipe.

The list of reasons for this situation are as endless as they are complicating, but the end result is the same, we are in a hell of a mess economically. The solutions are as varied and diametrically opposed as their ideologies. Whether to take a Conservative/Republican point of view that less government involvement the better or the Liberal/Democratic slant that governmental intervention is the be all and end all can be argued up and down until the pundits are blue in the face. But one thing is certain, one of them will win out over the other and history will show if it was the right choice.