Paranoid?

Am I paranoid, or are they really out to get me? Maybe I’ve been a Pollyanna for too long. I’ve long taught in my government classes that our elected officials occasionally are corrupt, venal, stupid and petty. But the huge majority of those who seek elected office at all levels in this grand experiment in democracy are honest people trying to give something back to their communities and maybe to build a better life for their posterity. The good ones don’t get the headlines.

Now, we’ve got Blago and Duke and Foley and Craig, not to mention the vacant suit who seeks welfare housing in Washington DC to tide him over until his government sponsored digs become available. Already Booked And, don’t get me started on Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and Nancy Pelosi. Maybe I’ve been too optimistic about democracy.

Similarly, I’ve often disagreed with the folks who characterize Microsoft as an evil empire sucking the life out of computing and commandeering the hard work of entrepreneurial programmers who otherwise would succeed. I’ve touted the fact that their OS prevailed, even when giant IBM was in the game. They ruled over Mac to the point that Apple only succeeded when they went into the cellphone and music player business. They entered the word processing market as an underdog and simply offered a better product that made Word Perfect a distant memory. Ditto for Lotus 1-2-3 in spreadsheets and Netscape in browsers. They competed, I said, and prevailed in the marketplace.

But, that was then. Now I’m getting paranoid. And, it may be because there is skullduggery afoot. I’m talking the fascinating behavior before my eyes of Firefox. Yep, the wunderkind of browsers that is more than eroding Internet Explorer’s hold on that niche is apparently being targeted by the Redmond behemoth.

I tried Firefox about six months ago when version 3.0 came out and noted in these pages that they finally got it right for me. I liked it and over a period of about ten days found myself launching it more often than IE. Eventually I saw a heavy layer of dust on the IE icon in the task bar. It had been at least six weeks since I’d clicked on it. I made Firefox my default browser and simply loved it. I almost forget usernames and passwords after I became dependent on Sxipper’s add-on which autofilled them for me. I got research dependent upon the in-depth results of searches augmented by Surf Canyon. I loved my FF.

Of course, it is the nature of Vista that it continually morphs. The hard drive spins incessantly at random times when no demands are being made on the system as the lords of Microsoft keep trying to get it right in the background. Once a week a popup tells me that “critical” updates are ready to install. I gave up looking at the explanations. They seldom tell me much beyond the fact that they are “plugging a security leak” or correcting some obscure function with a cryptic name that leaves me clueless. I accept the recommendation like a docile sheep and click “Install.”

Which, of course, fuels my paranoia when Firefox now simply won’t load my default homepage tabs. I’ve only got five, but the major ones like Fox News and Drudge simply spin the busy icon for a minute and then the browser quits. Restarts don’t help, virus scans don’t help, remove/reinstall doesn’t help, adware removal doesn’t help. The clear conclusion is that there seems to this paranoia that the last fifteen or so critical updates from MS have included a poison pill for the competitor. Firing up Internet Explorer gives me a browser that doesn’t crash.

Am I neurotic in this belief?