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For a couple of days now, I've been unable to edit or update my existing blog posts, or to create new ones.  When searching through Blogger.com to see if others were also having problems, I learned that they just recently tightened up browser requirements, hence the title and the top line.

If you are having problems, try Google Chrome. 

That is their recommendation.  Blogger.com is a part of Google, and they recommend using Google Chrome as a fix.  How about that?

It's vaguely reminiscent of Jimmy Breslin's Watergate book wherein he describes Nixon campaign fundraiser Herbert Kalmbach telling businessmen, "You do a lot of work with the government. You should be in with the right people".
 In other places, other men, better men than Kalmbach, tell you, "Pay, -- or die!"
    (~Jimmy Breslin - How The Good Guys Finally Won)

I've been usimg Firefox 3.03 for years now, because it's not so much of a resource hog as other browsers I've worked with.

Now, it looks as if I'm gonna have to use something else.

I'm using an HP computer that I got at the end of 2003, with Windows XP and 256 MB of RAM.

Get a new one?  Right!!!
 "I'll just walk out in back where the money tree grows.
  Grab me a handful and off to the store I'll go."
 (Slight rephrasing of an old Roger Miller song).

I've had several people recommend Chrome to me even though it comes from the evil empire of Google (as opposed, of course, to the evil empire of Microsoft :-)

Truly, a choice of evils. :(

Well, I've downloaded Chrome and am using it (this post is proof that I changed to something else, as my version of Firefox wont help me any longer.)

Biggest irritant of course is getting used to the changes in layout of some things (although, thankfully, the bookmarks menu imported from Firefox retains its general appearance even if it is on the wrong side of the page.

But I can adapt, even to changes that I truly think may have resulted from boredom on someone's part.

The early part of my engineering career was in the slide-rule days. Give one of those to modern day engineers, and I'll bet you some would be trying to figure out, "How do you turn it on?"  ("With a really interesting problem.", I would respond. :-)

That particular career (before I moved into IT) was from 1964 to 1984, and during nearly half of it, the most modern tool we had was an electric adding machine.  I truly kid you not; we had one engineer who used an abacus (and was damned good with it).

It was the late 1960's before someone tried to interest us in a four-function electronic calculator, about the size and shape of an IBM Selectric typewriter, using a bank of tubes showing 7-segment numbers for the display and costing about $600.00 (at a time when that was one third the price of a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle).  We passed on the deal, at that time.

A couple of years later, I bought a Miida calculator (still only four-function) for about $170.00 from Sears, Roebuck, making me the first in the company to have one.  It got popular very quickly.  I even worked out a three-step method of averaging to get very precise square roots from it (we used those a lot in electrical calculations) and felt pretty damned good about that (although slide-rule accuracy was actually more than sufficient for our purposes -- it was an ego thing for me, I suppose).

Of course, another year or so, and the same amount of money bought an 80-function calculator.  Since then, prices of those things have dropped so much that the only thing keeping them from becoming Cracker Jack prizes is fear of lawsuits if a kid swallows one.

Through all my careers, I have become self-taught on slide-rule, logarithms, computers and programming.

If I can figure those things out, I reckon I can somehow manage the transition from Firefox to Chrome.

I think.

(Pray for me).
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