TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Somewhere along the path of Firefox upgrades, my FireFTP menu item got lost.  It is no longer in the Tools menu where I expected it to be. The solution was simpler than I thought.  It got moved under Tools/Web Developer.  Why anyone thinks it belongs there is beyond me, but there it is.

Gridmove is a fabulous little utility for those of us with lots of screen real estate to manage. Having become somewhat addicted to Gridmove, I was sore to see that the default .grid files didn't support my new third monitor. Fortunately, this was easier to fix than I thought.  If you're interested in custom grids, skip the help file - it's loaded with terminology.  Just open up an existing .grid file with notepad, you'll see how it hangs together pretty fast. Here's the grid.   All I did was expand it to three monitors.  Eventually I might delete the elements I don't use, but it works well as-is.

So the neighborhood video store is now a thing of the past.  But not quite in the way that everybody expected. There never were a lot of services in my immediate neighborhood, but when my family moved in we were pleased to see a Blockbuster just down the street.  Very handy for picking up the weekend entertainment for the larger family - being the only couple with a theater room, we were the de facto nominees every weekend. About three years ago, the Blockbuster closed.  Pity, we said, it seems the grocery store next door is moving in to the space.  We ended up going to Rogers Video, only a few more minutes away, for the most part.  Occasionally a trip to the next closest Blockbuster was in order, but for the most part it worked fine. Oddly enough, the grocery never moved in.  Eventually we realized that particular Blockbuster location was an early casualty of the shrinking DVD rental business. Then BAM! - all gone.  Blockbuster is bankrupt, ...

Moving on to the last item in my little rant about the antique-ness of most emergency 'preparedness' lists: The #1 item missing?  The smartphone.  Lest ye think I'm off my rocker, let me explain. The smartphone represents many things in an emergency situation.  First, and most obviously, it's communications.  Communications are so important that emergency first responders invest millions of dollars into infrastructure-independent communication systems for their personnel, so there can be little argument that it's important for Joe Public as well. Sure, the infrastructure can fail, or be overwhelmed.  This happens pretty often during disasters in urban areas - the cellular infrastructure just can't handle the call volume.  So it's certainly not perfect. On the other hand, some people don't even have a landline any more, and many people that do have moved on from the POTS network on to IP phones or other such rigamarole.  (The author is among the...