Chris encouraged me to register on an Apple Mac users' forum this morning to tell the world how I managed to solve a word processing problem through sheer, unaided, technical brilliance (aka trial and error). All because I'd wanted to reread a letter I'd written in December '98 using WordPerfect, which wouldn't "open" in my current word processor, NeoOffice. The answer, by the way, is to choose Insert -> File, and Bob's your uncle (or in my case, your dad). I wanted to find out for how many years I'd been responsible for the musical distractions at our CFUW's annual Diplomatic Hospitality Christmas Parties. The answer, as revealed by my successful research this morning, is far too many, ten years. Anyhow, the "mac community" posted my contribution to the discussion forum under the moniker "macrumors newbie," which amused me, and in case I forget it, I shall make a note here to remind myself that in case I ever feel like joining these discussions again, my user name is adhobbs (some of the others have far wittier user names, but I can't be bothered) and my password is the name of a favourite poet of mine.
I hate this current obsession with security and am afraid it will get worse before it gets better. It's a bit of a paradox that in today's world we seem prepared to reveal intimate details about ourselves as never before, in Blogs like this, on Facebook and the like, and yet we suffer from paranoia lest anyone get an inkling of what might be revealed from our multifarious "accounts". This inconsistency seems to say something about our modern values and priorities. Oh well, I suppose I ought to have a System so that there aren't so many different usernames / IDs / account numbers and passwords to remember. It got worse when banks and such started insisting on passwords of at least 8 characters long, that contained both upper case and lower case characters and numbers. What a pain.
Another pain is having to make up my mind how to vote in the Canadian General Election tomorrow. In order to help me choose my party of allegiance, Chris has just read me extracts from the manifestos of the four main political parties (as published in one of papers yesterday), without revealing which party advocates which, and got me to choose my preferences regarding their environmental policies, health care policies, support for the Arts (an all-encompassing term if ever there was one, although many people seem to equate "Arts" with "TV")... and so on. The results of my personal ballot show me to be the archetypal floating voter, which doesn't surprise me in the least: on a per policy basis, had I the choice, I'd give one vote to the Conservatives, four votes to the Liberals, four to the NDP and four to the Greens. In other words, all the exercise taught me was that I shouldn't be voting for the Conservatives tomorrow, which I wasn't intending to do in any case.
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