Federal Liberals still begging for hand-outs without doing anything to deserve them

I got another letter from the Federal Liberal Party of Canada today, extolling the virtues for their glorious leader and how much better they would be at running the country than the current crop of scoundrels (my words). The bottom of the letter includes a little form where you can contribute to their Victory fund. Here’s what I sent back…

Response to Liberals Victory Fund solicitation

I started getting these solicitations last election when I contributed to the campaign of blogger and anti-income-trust-tax champion Brent Fullard. But I figured if I was contributing to his campaign I should contribute to my local candidate as well. I guess the Liberals figured I was sucker because no matter how many times I send back these F-U responses they still beg me for more!

Now I have no love for the Conservative party either. I admit I voted for them a couple elections ago but not only was that a waste (my riding always votes Liberal) but a disappointment too! Most disappointing was the Cons Tax un-Fairness Plan, but they’ve been pretty consistently disappointed with all their decisions.

Remember: no one, not one single politician, has any influence over the economy and what direction it’s going in. All they can do is react. Any of them that claim they are responsible for swinging the economy in one direction or another is full of it! At most the governor of the Bank of Canada has some influence since he controls interest rates, but as we saw during the latest downturn even that can be meaningless if the banks don’t play along. And besides, he’s working within the constraints of his mandate and has to cooperate with other national banks around the world.

Cross-posted on 2FatDads at Federal Liberals still begging for hand-outs without doing anything to deserve them

The new OS is in the wild – SL 64-bit on the prowl!

Since the release announcement in August I’ve been itching to get my hands on the new 64-bit version of my favourite operating system. Until now I’ve running a clunking old 32-bit OS that was getting kind of tired; the allure of 64-bit was really quite tempting.

Of course the initial challenge was making some space to install Slackware Linux on my hard drive. Windows XP Pro had been installed such that it took up the entire hard drive. Gparted to the rescue though! I went from an initial layout that had one huge Windows XP partition (with the usual Dell rescue partitions ‘cuz who bothers shipping CD’s these days!?) to hard drive that I could slice and dice any way I wanted.

Initial hard drive layout

The final layout left Windows in a primary partition but since Linux can boot from an extended partition I went with that for more flexibility. I didn’t allocate all the space to Slackware and I pushed the swap space to the end of the drive so I would room to either grow my Slackware install if necessary or setup another partition if I wanted to play with FreeBSD (perhaps in 18-years when my kids move out).

Initial hard drive layout

The installation went smooth as silk, and 64-bit really started to show as the installer flew through the packages. The only consideration is the 64-bit version (as opposed to the 32-bit version) only comes on DVD.

So far everything works great. I’m looking forward to replacing my HUGE kernel with a GENERIC one taylored to my system and perhaps even replacing XDM (if you’re not going to use KDE why bother with KDM) with SLiM and even trying out LXDE (I’m currently using Xfce).

What?! Did you think this was going to be another sycophantic Snowjob Leopard review?! Get over it fanboys – you’re all going to go blind pretty soon and then how are you going to get to the Apple store to pay for your next service pack!?

Cross-posted on 2FatDads at The new OS is in the wild – SL 64-bit on the prowl!