openLangley

If you use an Odin contract machine  you might have noticed that your Firefox home page is now permanently and possibly irrevocably set to @larc.

I tried manually setting my preferred pages, such as my TWO daily time sheets (I’m a contractor, on a sub-contract), and to these blog pages which are legitimately things I ought to look at every day, but no dice.  I tried uninstalling firefox and manually re-installing an older version.  Only the very oldest, no longer supported, buggy, insecure and unsafe version will allow me to control what I see when I fire up Firefox.  I’m tempted to use it anyway but it is likely to get my machine in trouble eventually if I do that.

I uninstalled Firefox (am professional system geek), instead.  Oh, I could set the Open on a Blank Page option but I have a fatal character flaw.  I resent the hell out of having my preferences changed against my preference, without notice and without any way to know who said my preference would change and how they thought they knew and…well it goes on.  I get very angry about this, and I seethe with righteous resentment and so on.  And I throw the baby out with the bathwater.  I don’t look at @larc every day.  It is a resource, a place for me to go when *I* need something.  Not someplace I want to wake up every morning any more than I want to wake up in a hospital or at Manhattan Bagels.  I want to go there by choice.

My choice is now not to go there at all. Not because @larc is bad, but because I’m being @larc super-sized and I resent it. I know I work for the government, I know I have no electronic expectation of privacy, and I do not mind that. I do resent having my routines and conveniences willfully disrupted, making it harder for me to get to all the things I do every day because someone thought emailing @larc headlines was insufficient to the task and that more extreme measures were necessary to insure adequate @larc-age for all.

PS. The Odin guy in my building told me which files to remove to recover control of my starting pages. On a mac it is *your user*/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*foo*.default/user.js – I removed the entire profile instead, since that didn’t work the first time around. Super Odin Guy! My Hero!