Month: April 2013

I’ve been having problems lately on my laptop with it freezing up while I am surfing. Usually if I wait a long time, it will return to normal, but it can take a few minutes. Usually when it is stalled the status bar in Firefox will say waiting on some other website, typically with cdn in the name. I don’t know if it is hanging on that particular site or a different one, but I have thought about blocking all of these third-party websites that aren’t related to the page I’m actually visiting. For instance, if you visit CNN, you might spend a while downloading stuff from akamai.net. I’m thinking usually it is ads because content should be on the web sites own server and is pretty basic.

Sometimes I think the problem is with different scipts that are loading from those sites (often it is just a video ad that is taking forever to download, but Firefox is a zombie until the thing finishes). I disabled javascript in my browser, which seemed to really help, but it caused problems on a lot of sites that I go to, including my bank and AdSense, which wouldn’t work at all without javascript.

Next I found an extension called YesScript which would disable javascript except for a few websites that you identify as being okay. This was kind of the opposite of another extension it mentioned called NoScript which would let you disable scripts of your choosing. YesScript didn’t do what I want, so I wound up trying out NoScript. It brings up a little toolbar that lets you control the scripts you want to see. For instance, I went to FlashlightWiki and there were 4 scripts, all blocked by default. I enabled flashlightwiki scripts which are served up by the wiki itself (I think for the search box). But I also have a Google Translator tool, so I enabled Google and Google Syndication (third party scripts, but useful ones) and the AdSense ads were being blocked as well, so I enabled googleapis. I did not enable doubleclick.net which just tracks your surfing across a lot of different websites that all use doubleclick.

I went to ajc.com to read up on the news and there were 71 different scripts, and as far as I could tell, I didn’t need any of them. And now the site downloads a lot faster too.

It is much more flexible than just enabling or disabling javascript. Even on Bank of America’s site, I enabled Bank of America scripts so I could log in, but was able to disable doubleclick.

So it’s kind of a pain to use, but a lot of my surfing is to the same sites, so I can customize all of those the way I want. And for the rest of the internet, I just block most of the scripts. It isn’t my intention to block ads, at least unobtrusive ones, but most of the ads are getting blocked. Oh well.

Yesterday I was in Athens for Easter. I brought my rocket and pen cam in case we had time to shoot it off. Michael brought his rocket over to Gramalie’s as well, so we got his put together and ready to launch. After lunch we all went over to the school nearby to launch. We had done this before and made 3 successful launches of my rocket. But it was a little windy. Michael had some C rocket engines, but I thought it would be better to try a B engine which goes about half as high until we could figure out the wind direction. The rocket, an Estes “Flash,” shot up really high even with the smaller engine. It went straight up and the parachute ejected perfectly, but then it started drifting with the wind on the way down. Grant started running to recover it, worried that it was headed for the street. He kept running but the rocket came down in some tree branches right above the street and got stuck about 30 feet up. There was no way we were going to get it down, but Grant talked to the owner of a store nearby and they said they would keep an eye out for it.

Today Fiona was sick and had to miss school, so she wasn’t in the car when Grant took Michael to school. When he got home he told her that there was a lot of traffic at the school because a couple of cars had an accident. When they worked their way past the accident site, they noticed the policeman was holding Michael’s rocket. Michael said out the window “That’s my rocket!” The policeman walked over and said to him “This rocket came down out of the tree this morning and caused this accident!” Grant told the police officer that Michael was mistaken and he actually lost a different rocket. Then he told Fiona: April Fools.