It's election night here in Canada. Not much of a surprise. Another minority government, only this time the Conservatives are the party in power. I use the term "power" loosely because it looks like a fairly slim majority. In fact, it looks like in order to pass any laws they are going to need the support of at least one other major party.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that our first past the pole electoral system bites. As I look at many of the ridings, I notice that very few candidates win with more than 50% of the vote. I think it would be hard to "represent" my constituents when more than half of them didn't vote for me. I certainly would be hesitant about towing the party line. It could come back and bite you. Especially as our political system seems to becoming more polarized you really have to walk a fine line. Maybe you don't. Maybe once you get to Ottawa you completely forget how you got there...until the next election. Which will probably be sooner than later.
For the second time in a year my iMac crashed in a non-recoverable state. It's the second time I've had to do a complete re-install after reformatting my hard drive. Luckily, I'm pretty diligent with backing my stuff up but it's still freakin' annoying. I dread kernal panic. I'm not sure why it seems to hose my hard drive beyond recognition but I'm starting to wonder if it's a hardware issue. I'll admit I was trying out some third-party software that I downloaded and perhaps that was the problem but I should just be able to turn off my computer and restart. For some reason it unmounts my hard disk a screws up the directory so my Mac can't find the boot volume.
This time I managed to salvage most of my data by installing the OS on my external drive and trying to repair the disk but it didn't repair it enough to boot off of but at least it would mount.
So now I'm stuck with the labourious task of reconfiguring my system back to the way it was. This is an annoying procedure because I always afraid I'll throw away the wrong file or screw up some library or something. Plus in the meantime I can't really back up anything else because my system's not really the way it's supposed to be. Last time it took me a week to get back into a comfort zone.
Oh well. Must remember to purchase my Apple Care before the year is up.