One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Monday, 1 November 2004

.< 7:37:32 PM >
MSNBC - Three Days in Ohio
My first assignment is to call newly registered voters to tell them what to expect on Tuesday. This is no small matter. The Ohio Republican Party has challenged 35,000 new registrations and plans to put poll-watchers at hundreds of voting precincts. The goal is legitimate[~]the GOP is merely trying to ensure that all votes are valid. But the party's tactics are loathsome: their challengers are being stationed almost entirely in African-American polling places. The strategy could lead to such long lines that some black voters won't bother to vote[~]or that their votes are cast on provisional ballots that would be counted, or not counted, afterwards. Sound familiar? No wonder there's a Miami in Ohio, too.

.< 7:13:27 PM >
Super-tough coating for cellphones and discs
In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.

The only person to have succeeded in damaging the disc had undertaken a determined attack with a Swiss army knife, according to TDK, the company that has developed the coating.

.< 4:14:05 PM >
US-Iraq bioweapons report by independent UK academic

Cory Doctorow: David sez, "Geoff Holland of the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex (UK), has recently submitted a report to all Members of the UK Parliament with the aim that the US supply of biological materials to Iraq will at last be properly investigated. The report can be read or downloaded from this site. It sets out further evidence of misleading Government statements in relation to the Iraq conflict, considering specifically the Government’s response to the previously overlooked finding of the US Senate ‘Riegle Report’— that in the 1980s the United States supplied Iraq with materials for its biological weapons programme in breach of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention"

428K MSFT Word Link

(Thanks, David!)
[Via Boing Boing]

.< 3:59:23 PM >
Report: iMac G5
Jordan Meek replaces the back plane on his iMac and reduces fan noise
[Via MacInTouch]
'One interesting thing I found was that before I started the mid-plane replacement I noticed that the metal bar over the suspect fan was not fully seated. I pushed it down and it made a click as if I just properly seated the fan. I then put the computer back together and ran it for several hours. It seams that seating the bar made the fan much quieter at idle CPU load, but I still had loud noise at high CPU loud.

Replacing the mid-plane did make the difference at high load.'

.< 3:54:22 PM >
Canadians consider pay-radio
Update: Text of speech by CRTC chair this morning at opening of hearings.

Three groups are before the Canadian federal broadcast regulator today with proposals for subscription radio services, two of them satellite based. The two proposals for satellite services come from Canadians partnering with U.S. service providers already in business:

• Canadian Satellite Radio Inc., headed by Toronto businessman John Bitove, in partnership with XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., the largest U.S. satellite radio firm.
  
  
• The CBC, Standard Radio Inc., and U.S. firm Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.

< 3:52:21 PM >

"I wonder how many of those 1,100 dead American soldiers would be alive today? I wonder how many of the thousands of dead Iraqi civilians would be alive today? It is the responsibility of the press to go in like a bulldog and question those in power and then to come out and tell us the truth. They did not do that before the war."

Mr Moore rallied the crowd - largely made up of university students - urging them to vote. "This race is very, very close, and a great deal is at stake for our country and for the entire world," he said.

.< 3:28:20 PM >
'Like sleeping with an insomniac elephant'
Ottawa dispatch: Canadians see the US election as more important than their own, says Anne McIlroy.
[Via Guardian Unlimited]
'In an interview, Mr Graves said the new survey showed Canadians were "apoplectic" about the possibility that Mr Bush would win again, believing that a victory for him would be a blow to world peace and stability.

Not all Canadians feel this way, but a strong majority do. The survey found that 64% want to see Mr Kerry triumph, while only 19% would prefer to see Mr Bush remaining in office.

The strong opposition to the US president appears to be due to his swaggering, sometimes sneering, style, and the "ham-fisted way" in which he has handled the conflict in Iraq. Canadians opposed the US-led invasion, and supported their own government's decision not to join US-led forces - a stance that has grown stronger as time has gone on.'

.< 3:22:48 PM >
U.S. presidential campaign spending triples
The 2004 race for the White House has produced the most expensive U.S. presidential advertising campaign in history, tripling the amount spent four years ago. FULL STORY
[Via CBC News]

.< 3:20:49 PM >
Afghan Villagers See Saintly Side of Al Qaeda (Reuters)

Reuters - A headscarf hid the young woman's face as she passed by, but her message for a stranger asking why people would congregate at the graves of al Qaeda fighters was clear.
[Via Yahoo! News - World]

.< 3:18:35 PM >
Gunmen seize six hostages in Iraq

A US citizen is among six people reported kidnapped at their office in the Mansour district of Baghdad.
[Via BBC News | World | UK Edition]

.< 3:17:31 PM >
Answer to a news junkie's prayers
Online: Web feeds offer an easy way to keep up with the news, reports Bobbie Johnson.
[Via Guardian Unlimited]
'It's been setting geeky hearts aflutter for some time now, but syndication is finally starting to take hold on the internet. Net technologies called RSS and Atom, or to give them the more user-friendly and generic tag of "web feeds", take the hassle out of keeping up with the news. Once you've taken the plunge, you'll never want to go back.'

.< 3:16:09 PM >
Wary Colorado prepares for no confidence vote

Swing states: A rash of problems over election rules has left Coloradans unsure whether their votes will count, writes Sarah Left.
[Via Guardian Unlimited]

.< 3:11:45 PM >
Latin America Leans Further to the Left

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (Reuters) - The left made more inroads into Latin America in four elections this weekend as crisis-weary voters tired of decades of U.S-backed market reforms warmed to pragmatic platforms of economic growth with better distribution of wealth.
[Via Reuters: World]

.< 3:09:44 PM >
Humor: Florida to Vote by Show of Hands

The state has lost the instruction manual for Electronic Voting Machines
[Via MSNBC.com: Newsweek]

.< 11:31:20 AM >
Transcontinental Newsnet
Rukavina said he has friends in the United States who say they would seriously consider moving to Canada if Bush is re-elected.

[base "]I think they just don[base ']t feel they can stay in a country that Bush represents,[base '][base '] he said.

.< 11:28:35 AM >
Jim Day and Weblogs
[snip]In other words, if you remove bloggers themselves, along with their immediate family and friends, from the readership, there are far fewer "civilians" left over than we all assume. We are, by and large, talking to ourselves.

That doesn't bother me, and I don't think it invalidates the medium at all. But it is important to remember, especially when we get irrational heady thoughts about our blogs as the new media's new media, that we're more like monks illuminating manuscripts for the church than scrappy New Journalists shouting out to the general public.
[Via ruk.ca from peter rukavina]

.< 12:36:04 AM >
Kidnapped UN workers shown in video...
Three United Nations hostages kidnapped in Afghanistan appeared in a videotape broadcast Sunday by al-Jazeera television. FULL STORY
[Via CBC News]

I'm glad Manijeh decided not to return this year.

< 12:31:14 AM >

< 12:26:26 AM >

< 12:25:33 AM >