I posted something previously on blocking social ads in facebook with greasemonkey, where I came to the conclusion incorrectly it could not be done with css. I apparently remembered what “! important” did in userContent.css and userChrome.css; I read “! important” as “not important,” but it aparently means the opposite, and overrides any webpages css. I corrected my post on userContent.css and userChrome.css customization as well. Stupid logic. Anyway, if you add the following block into your userContent.css file, you should be able to block most annoying stuff on both the new facebook design and old.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.new.facebook.com/) {
.sponsor, .invitefriends, .findfriends, .gifts_received, .pymk, .social_ad, .adcolumn{
display: none ! important;
}
}

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.facebook.com/) {
.sponsor, .invitefriends, .findfriends, .gifts_received, .pymk, .social_ad, .adcolumn{
display: none ! important;
}
}

There may be a way to combine these two, but I don’t know the more mozilla-internal css well enough to know. If you use facebook, most of these should be clear. I blocked gifts, as I find them annoying, and I am glad to just not be aware of them. I also blocked the person finding features like “people you may know” (’.pmyk’) or the email search things. I also blocked ads of course. Facebook seems to have to idea that everyone will love ads if they are more specifically targeted at you, based on data they have on file. I can’t stop them from doing that (other than by closing and deleting my account), but I shouldn’t have to see ads if I don’t want to IMHO. Also notice that the new facebook design and the old one use the same css classes for everything; the redesign isn’t that extensive apparently.

Last night, the block my apartment is on lost power. It was during a pretty harsh thunderstorm, so I didn’t think much of it until I realized that our power lines are underground. My neighborhood in Oak Ridge has above ground lines with lots of trees, so I am used to the power going out during storms. The storm last night was also one of the harshest I have seen in Chicago; the Ryerson weather station reported a high wind of 56mph around midnight and around 2 inches of rainfall in an hour. Anyway, the power was incredibly screwed up for the rest of the night. We unplugged everything after I saw the TV sort of flicker on (it was off before) when lightening struck really close by. Hopefully are surge protectors didn’t get the full 1.21 gigawatts of power. For a while, we got an extremely low amount of power; enough for some lights to barely glow. It was strange. At some point, a firetruck came by, which one of my roommates and I watched from the porch while clearing the drain, so we could watch a whirlpool form (entertainment options for a bunch of computer geeks is severly limited sometimes without power); A cop watched us and pulled off as soon as we went inside, which was pretty funny. As far as I know, the power is still out; hopefully we will get it back soon. We heard some strange, almost explosion-like sounds throughout the night, so hopefully the damage is not that bad.

The other side of the street wasn’t affected, but all of the streetlights and even the university police boxes were all off and all of the buildings next to ours were off, which made for about the darkest I have ever seen Chicago. I am used to being able to see around, even if all of the lights are off. There is so much background light, that it is easy to forget it is even there. It made for an interesting evening.