Canadian Musings

The current (May 22, 2006) issue of Forbes magazine includes an article ("On My Mind", by Raymond Fisman of the Columbia Business School; page 40) discussing moral behaviour of diplomats as correlated with the perceived behavioural norms (measured by the "Corruption Perceptions Index" developed by Transparency International) of their country of origin.

A study was done related to unpaid parking tickets accumulated by UN diplomats, from a time when those diplomats had immunity from prosecution for those tickets.

It found a strong correlation between the Corruption Index and the number of unpaid parking fines, with Scandinavian diplomats accumulating very few tickets (and representing among the least corrupt nations) and certain others (the article cites Chad and Bangladesh) as shirking orders of magnitude more tickets and representing among the most corrupt nations.

Find and read the article. It's only one page. But it carries a message.

This study suggests a very strong message for Canadians: that we cannot afford to simply be neutral when it comes to encouraging moral behaviours. That neutrality equates with permissiveness towards corruption, and that those with a strong moral code may be taken advantage of as they have to pay for the misdeeds of others.

That is a sure route to the decay of Canadian civilization as we know it. And it must not be allowed to happen.

We must take a moral stand, and while morality is different from legality, we must not accept immoral behaviours as equally valid with moral behaviours.

Many folks use the long weekend to open up the cottage for the summer. Others take it easy.

I'm using the time to relax at home, catch up on some laundry and house cleaning, and generally enjoy the cold, wet weather from the comfort of my couch.

Next weekend, though, looks to be a nice one, indeed!

Once again the question is asked whether Canada is willing to do any lifting (not even the heavy lifting) of stabilizing Afghanistan. And once again the NDP show how ignorant they are.

Ms. McDonough just read a letter which I find deeply disturbing, in which a soldier's mother claims that her son's life is worth more than any number of lives in Afghanistan. How terribly racist the former NDP leader sounds as she supports that sentiment. Shame on her.

Then she has the gall to suggest that the role of the military should be to support ongoing negotiations with the Taliban.

No fewer than three NDP members have strongly suggested that the only way to know if we have enough information to consider ourselves informed enough to vote would be to publish all of our plans to the Taliban, and if they agree with them, then we can agree with them.

Infuriating. Disgusting.

One of the many sites I visit on a frequent basis reminded me today of an article which has circulated for a few years now. The article discusses competence and self-assessment, and suggests that those who have not achieved a certain level of competence in a field are typically unable to assess their own capabilities in that field.

Or as some might say, you don't know what it is that you don't know. And if you know that you don't know, well, you've achieved something significant there. Somewhere in between one finds ignorance and misconceptions about seemingly simple facts. (At least, simple to those in the know.)

It's raining outside tonight. And it's supposed to be rainy for the next several days, turning colder just in time for the long weekend.

But I think I'm winning against the ants. And I just finished a low-voltage wiring project (and can now move on to the next step of the project). The number of emails being sent by some spammer using my domain seems to be on the decline (since I finally published SPF records, so their reject rate should have gone up significantly).

All in all, a good day, I think. Here's hoping it all holds.

I've just spent the last several hours sorting through a number of spam messages which were sent using forged "from" addresses of a domain which I own, and sent to mail servers which "bounce" failed emails back to those "from" addresses.

Some of the bounces identify the email headers which came in with the email, and using those headers I can identify the ISP which was allocated the IP address of the apparent originator of the email. Many of those ISPs identify an "abuse" email address (in their "whois" data), to which such reports should be sent, and I have been able to forward a number of such reports.

It would seem that this latest batch of spam has been sent using a global network of servers, located in Israel, Poland, Russia, Korea, and elsewhere. I can only hope that the ISPs do investigate further and take action to help reduce this scourge.

Some days you win, some days you lose. So the saying goes.

I'm not losing. But I don't feel like I'm winning many these days, either.

I've been fighting the spiders for my house, vaccuuming up an average of about one a day these days. Nobody's going to win that one.

I've been fighting the ants for my kitchen. Fortunately, they seem more interested in the area around my sink than around where I keep my drygoods, and a week after first setting out the ant poison, I've only seen one today. Maybe that's a slow win for me, although it's kept me out of my kitchen for the past week.

The spammers have been annoying me lately, stealing my good name and sending out their junk using my domain name. Annoying.

I've been trying to string some wires through the walls in my house, but that's been going less than perfectly. It's almost done, but I won't be happy until it's done.

I upgraded some software on my PC (running Debian Linux), and now some other things have stopped working quite right. That's what happens when you want the latest and greatest features: you're going to get the latest and greatest bugs, too, that haven't had time to be ironed out yet.

I tried to post this entry, and my DSL connection is failing. Talk about reminding me of other problems. Dropped again in the middle of posting, so we'll see if this shows up twice. Now that I think about it, my Rogers box still has trouble picking up any of the US network channels (NBC, ABC, FOX), and often loses TSN.

There's been some other stuff, too, that I won't get into here.

Other than all that, though, things seem to be going well. Let's call it a draw.

We're in the midst of the regular Canadian Census. And never has StatsCan looked worse.

First, we have CTV News reporting that your personal information will be available until 2098, rather than after 2098 and only with your permission.

Then we have the Census website itself. They advertise "census2006.ca" but then decide that site should only masquerade for another StatsCan website, which would normally be okay, but not when you're trying to claim you're secure. (By contrast, the Canada Revenue online filing website does a number of redirections with links after you enter whatever address they advertise. It's an important distinction.)

The website wants the latest version of various software, for no valid reason (since what they actually do is fully available in older versions). They want you to permit their software to have completely unfettered access to your computer, without ever telling you about this fact. They claim to use added security based on Public Key Infrastructure, but do so improperly. They put cookies on your computer without listing that in their basic requirements.

All in all, I'd recommend never hiring anyone who was in charge of this project. They may be able to manipulate technology, but cannot do so properly.

There was a time, not so many years ago, when people who sold software also wrote documentation describing how to use the software. Reference manuals capturing all its capabilities.

Apparently Microsoft doesn't believe any of that documentation is important. Shame on them. The list of Windows keyboard shortcuts should be a simple link into the definitive Microsoft documentation, not a home-built list begging for input for any ones which might have been missed.

If you're interested, via the Fosfor Gadgets website, we find a list of Windows Keyboard Shortcuts on the IntelliAdmin website.