Carping about Windows Vista.doc

If Bill Gates built cars, they’d break down more often after a major overhaul. I spent more than half a day last week installing Vista Service Pack 1 and although I didn’t notice any immediate differences it’s thrown me a few curves since. This weekend for the first time in over a year I encountered a Blue Screen of Death—just why I’m not entirely sure and later the computer just plain stopped working. Today for the first time since I owned it my laptop came close to freezing up completely. I managed to invoke a reboot but the process took nearly 15 minutes. Since I discovered the joys of using two screens I’ve had problems getting Windows to remember where to keep my taskbar, my sidebar, my calendar, or decide where it wants to display my various programs. Now, however it can’t seem to remember my settings or even the order of the elements on my sidebar. During the update process it also forgot most of the settings for Quicken my financial software. I wonder why people resist Windows updates.

Spring arrived last week? Not! This evening we’re getting treated to the dog’s breakfast. For the last hour in an absolutely schizophrenic mix of weather we’ve enjoyed a switch from ice pellets to driving rain to wet snow, then white-out conditions, followed by rain and more ice pellets. Could the maestro just make up his mind? The snows of winter are slowly melting and the snow banks are releasing a six-month accumulation of garbage carelessly thrown. Snow plough operators are loathe to get out of their warm cozy cabs hence the thirty-foot high mountains pushed up in mall parking lots are starting to release their archived collection of twisted shopping carts carelessly left behind by shoppers. I suppose we’ll be thankful if those are the only corpses that emerge.

A Commentary on Canadian Race Riots

When our neighbours to the south fought their battle of Independence our British forebears offered freedom to any slaves who would turn on their masters and when the Americans won boatloads of those freemen were transported to the southern tip of Nova Scotia and the Halifax area. For over two hundred years those ‘freemen’ worked as railway porters, domestics and menial laborers. Just over 50 years ago when it was decided a bridge was needed between Halifax and Dartmouth an entire neighbourhood was bulldozed to make room for the Halifax end of the Angus L MacDonald Bridge. That loss still ripples through the Afro-Canadian Population.

There are still bars in Halifax where you’re not welcome if your skin is the wrong colour. Transport that sentiment to a suburban ghetto plagued by unemployment, alcohol, drugs, and boredom and you get Cole Harbour where yesterday fights broke out yet again in the local high school. These people aren’t recent immigrants; their ancestry goes back almost to the founding of Canada as a nation. Changing attitudes it seems though, takes even longer; and prejudice breeds strongest among the uneducated and disadvantaged. The sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons.