Bling bar

Anyone know how to turn off Firefox 3's "new improved" Wonder Blingo Address Bar But Wait There's More and make it work like it used to in Firefox 2?  I'm used to being able to recall a recent TinyURL from address bar history, edit it slightly, then load it.  As far as I can tell, in Firefox 3 you can't do it, because the "improved" bar is so damn helpful it helps you into things you didn't actually want to do.  You can't do the edit-before-loading trick because Firefox 3 always loads the URL immediately, not giving you a chance to edit it first.

Mozilla.org calls it the "Awesome Bar". I've started calling it the Bloated Pain In the Ass Bar.  I've also seen "AwfulBar" fairly widely used.

A partial solution is the oldbar extension, which at least restores the look of the old bar, but unfortunately it's just a cosmetic add-on that leaves the underlying broken new functionality broken.

Update:

wyrdling gave me a tip that helped me figure out how to do it in Firefox 3.  The key piece of information is that if you want to edit the URL before loading, you can't use the mouse to select it.  You need to use up and down arrow keys to select the URL you want to modify, then hit the left or right arrow to enter it into the URL bar without actually loading it.  At that point you can edit it freely.

Mad science milestones

Nikola Tesla, humanity's most successful and arguably most brilliant Mad Scientist to date, was born 152 years ago today (well ... OK, sometime last night, it seems no-one exactly knows whether it was July 9 or July 10) in Smiljan, Croatia.

Remember, mad science means never having to say "Hey, what's the worst that could happen?"

Ironies

As those of you who have been keeping up know, I just spent a week in hospital for bilateral knee replacement.

Most of you probably don't know that eight and a half years ago, I picked up an enterococcus infection in my left foot after surgery.  It turned out to be quite annoying.  It wasn't a multi-resistant superbug, but it was gram-negative and laughed at intravenous clindamycin, so they ended up exercising the nuclear option — a PIC line and two weeks of vancomycin.

Somewhere in the intervening eight-plus months, it appears a medical records transcription error has caused that "enterococcus treated with vancomycin" to mutate into "was infected with vancomycin-resistant staphylococcus aureus".  Or maybe MRSA rather than VRSA; there seemed to be some confusion on the point.

Anyway, both hospitals involved took swaps and did lab checks, and in the end the results came back, no resistant staph present.  But in the meantime, they had me marked for contact precautions, and no medical staff were permitted to enter my room unless gowned and gloved, to try to make sure no-one picked up æ resistant infection from me.  (Most of the folks in the ward with me were 20 years older than me and possibly getting shaky on the immune front.)  All turned out to be completely moot in the end, of course, when the labs came back negative.

So what's the irony?

Well, after all the precautions the hospitals went to in order to make sure nobody caught anything from me ... I came down with oral thrush for the first time in my life.

Bah.  And humbug.