Slim Chants

The latest tactic by the Harper PMO in the effort to stifle the Opposition’s efforts to get to the bottom of the Afghan detainee issue may have backfired. The so-called Document Dump strategy basically involves releasing an overwhelming number of documents in response to demands for a selected few; the idea being that the Opposition would be swamped with irrelevant information. The government surprised everyone on Thursday morning when it released two thousand six hundred pages of redacted documents the government presented two boxes containing a single copy of what it said were previously unreleased documents pertaining to the handling of Afghan detainees. It now appears they likely didn’t read them all before releasing them.

It’s only been a day and already two reports by the CBC raise concerns. The first, that a Canadian soldier had raised concerns that Afghan soldier routinely executed detainees. The second, that a soldier assigned to question an Afghan prisoner later expressed concern Afghan forces had abused the detainee before the questioning took place. Did Harper, Soudas and crew fail to consider that the press would be all over these documents? Is it possible that they haven’t bothered to dig into this themselves to see if indeed there is something to the Opposition’s allegations? Surely if you’re going to dump documents you’d take the time to read them all and ensure that they don’t contain anything that would raise more issues.

Spring has arrived a month early in these parts. With the melting of the last remnants of snow I put the battery of my FZ750 motorcycle on a trickle charge for a few days and on Wednesday of this week I installed it in the bike and fired it up. She started on the third try and after a few minutes on choke she ran smooth at idle. The clutch however, still needs work. I popped the shifter into first and she stalled. It seems as though there is no hydraulic pressure. I’m going to have to try a bleed and may have to install a master and perhaps also a slave kit. Still to do for the safety check are the brakes. I have a new front-right rotor and a machined, used rear rotor and also new pads all around. That should do for the safety but I may also replace the chain and sprockets and also the windscreen before putting her on the road. Hard to say. With this weather I’m anxious to ride.

Here’s something that came as no surprise: A recent survey of enterprise IT managers that administer both PCs and Macs finds that Macs have a lower TOC (total cost of ownership) than Windows boxes, and require less user training and help. It came as no surprise because Macs have a reputation for ease-of-use. Most business employees need a computer as a tool and they could care less what you gave them as long as it made them more productive with little effort. Virus infections and disk fragmentation are non-issues on Macs. Apple takes care of both the software AND hardware updates. As a rule they are problem free.

One wonders why it took IT so long to catch on. Likely Vista caused many IT shops to examine alternatives and if they asked their employees many would have said give me a Mac like I have at home. Little wonder they cost less to support.

I’m back to running Linux on the desktop. I took a few months hiatus due to some overheating issues that seemed to coincide with my update to Ubuntu 9.10. Others running various laptops had the same problem. The problem as it turned out was caused by an out-of-date BIOS in the laptop. Once I flashed it to the latest my fan started spinning up and down as required and my Acer notebook was useful once again.

Since the occurrence of the overheating I was using a MacBook Pro for my day to day computing. I’ve since dedicated that wonderful machine to recording studio duties specifically. (More on that in another post.) While I was dependent on the Mac I fell in love with Ecto for blog posts. It’s really a wonderful tool and today I went on a quest for an open source equivalent for my Ubuntu system. It took me awhile. Most of the available clients just don’t measure up. In the end I installed Bilbo, a KDE client which has most of the features provided by Ecto. It does not currently support addition of categories, unfortunately but it seems to be quite capable of managing posts. I’m using it to write this post. So far I’m satisfied but I will miss Ecto.

The Harper government’s recent speech from the throne came after months of shuttered parliament, a necessary break from the inconvenience of democracy required so that the government could take time for careful thought toward recalibration. Indeed, until this past Wednesday parliament has been adjourned since prior to Christmas of last year. One would have thought this to be ample time to come up with a new plan. Rex Murphy is less than impressed.