thanks for trying to help, but apparently the feature I'm missing has been "improved" out of the settings.

No matter which setting you choose, you can't restore the Firefox 3 behavior that worked so well for me.

Worth noting that some posters on the bug thought it worked well the old way - as I do.

to get the Close [X] gadget back on the last tab? Firefox 3.5 is KILLING ME with this...

I've actually tried to peel tape in a vacuum, but I couldn't get the bag to seal around my wrists. Too dusty - cat dander and hairs and stuff. Got all over everything.

Dunno about OP, but I'll post non-anon: Mensa meet-and-greets would indeed be a good place to meet other geeks of both genders.

I almost never fess up to being a member because of dim-witted reactions like that of parent. Isn't parent being a "pretentious windbag" by judging others as a group?

I joined because I wanted to see if I could get in, pure and simple. I don't lord it over anyone.

At the occasional meeting I attend, I don't see people who think "the less-intelligent aren't good enough for me" - instead I often see people who have a hard time fitting in with most of the folks in the world, and who are looking for friends to whom they can relate. Occasionally I see some very smart AND very social Mensan who does a great job of making every outsider feel welcome. That's a great reason to join.

Mensa "First Friday" is open to members and non-members (at least in my area), if you want to get a feel for the folks you'll meet.

Also: I met my geeky wife NOT through Mensa (she'd dated another Mensan, but is not a member. Mensa didn't figure at all), but through a circle of casual friends.

My advice is this: Find some people to hang with. Almost any will do to begin with. Strike up a conversation with the smartest person in the room, and that may lead you to other geeks one circle of friends at a time.

Gotta get out of your comfort zone if you wanna change your life...

Your front-line contact with technology users gives you insight into what's troubling them, and your tech knowledge may help you translate user needs for geeks. If you're a good communicator (and can manage not to think of your customers as lUsers), you can work on the solution side: making things easier to use.

Look for a local chapter of the UPA (Usability Professionals Association), IxDA (Interaction Designers Association), CHI (the CHI sig of SIGGRAPH), or get on Twitter and start to follow UX professionals, information architects, usability researchers to get connected.

Follow Jakob Nielsen's alertbox columns at www.useit.com, read Boxes and Arrows regularly for a taste of the work that's out there to do.

Read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, if you read no other usability book.

HTH

It's a cheat, 'cause I don't have 'em any longer, but around the time I built my first computer (with a soldering iron...you kids...) a Sinclair ZX-81, I went looking for a printer.

At the time, printers were maybe $1-2,000, and $1-2000 was a hell of a lot more money than it is now.

I found 2 Baudot-code teletypes at the SC School for the Deaf, and they wanted something like $50 for the pair. I borrowed the van from the A/V company where I worked and lugged them back home, to the great disdain of my soon-to-be ex-wife.

They were amazing pieces of gear - way ovebuilt, a lot of machined cast metal, huge synchronous motors, and a current-loop interface that I never did get around to interfacing with the ZX-81 (though I did get 'em to talk to each other).

They were huge (think of large heavy desks full of dusty gear about 4-1/2 feet tall), and I dragged them around for a few years. A couple years after my divorce, I moved out of my parents' home and eventually they told me to get the things out of there. I called museums, couldn't get any takers, and though it broke my heart, I had to let the trashmen drag 'em off. Really a pity.

I know someone would want them today. And I could interface them today (but for my very young child - takes all my time). And I still have the ZX-81.

And Baudot, for those who don't know, is what you had before you had EBCDIC or ASCII. it was a 5-bit character code, with a control character that shifted the character set up, and shifted it back down to extend the characters it could communicate (think of the shift key on your keyboard as "push-on, push-again-off". Very, very steampunk...

Have had this discussion with Clear already. You can roam anywhere on their networks - as long as you're in Atlanta or Portland Oregon, the two cities where they have a presence.

Was thinking about WiMax as a solution to mobile connectivity for my laptop, until I realized I'd have to set up different service in the different cities where I want to work (and would have to wait until some of those cities have WiMax in place). FAIL.

Not like I want to pay for 3G, either.

I figure in 10 years, a lot of this gets sorted out. I'll put the MacBook Pro on standby 'till then, k?

Why are critical systems not protected by a one inch air gap between the NIC and cable from remote exploit?

Won't help. The 12AX7s the air traffic control system ENIAC runs on are microphonic. Brings a whole new meaning to the term "ping" ;)

Yes, I'm old. You will be too - if you're lucky.

The experience designer, IA and IxD do the most to make a site not suck, and their work begins long before web designers OR front end developers get started. The front-end dev is often just an implementer, but crucial (and crucially, great with HTML) nonetheless.

You hire a Web Front-End developer because no matter how hot your Java/.NET/Python/PHP backend guys think they are, everything the end-user sees and interacts with on the browser is conveyed through the HTML and its styling.

There is such a thing as a "Web Designer" but calling a Front-End Dev a "Web Designer" is pejorative. It implies typical software developer usability-blindness.

The big back-end guns think that all they have to do is make something that functions for developers. They never think about the delivery layer at all, nor the semantic structure of the delivered page, nor about the people that have to use it, the accessibility for folks on screen readers, the appearance of an app or content on a mobile device or the ability for Google to make sense out of the garbage that comes out of back-end apps so your customers can find it over all the noise.

These are the waters in which the Front-End Developer, the Interaction Designer, the Usability Practitioner, the UX Lead (now starting to be called "Experience Designer") and the Information Architect swim. We all do a certain amount of HTML and CSS to meet our ends.

If you (and I'm using the royal "you" here parent and grandparent...) think that HTML and CSS are just graphical frosting on your beautiful server-side creation, you're irredeemably clueless.

Whole different thing. Yes, I read it on the day I posted, and have been back between now and then.

The difference is that I don't read Slashdot obsessively any longer, don't often get past the front page or the article summary, have looked for other content sources to fill the void.

I'll come by and graze once in a while, but I seldom post, never moderate, just use the site less in general because it's a bit** to do so now.