Daily Archives:October 21st, 2004

Guardian Gaffs

[Original Link]

It’s not often that I’m ashamed to be British, but this is one of those times. The Guardian newspaper has the names of many thousand supposedly undecided American voters which it will give out to those Brits who sign up to send them a letter telling them which way to vote. They stopped short of actually saying that you should tell them to vote for Kerry, but nobody who knoows the Guardian would assume otherwise.

They no doubt had good intentions here. It is important for every country, and particularly America, to be aware of what the rest of the world thinks and to take that into account when voting. But such initiatives should be invited from within the country and should not be proposed from outside. As Rose said, can you imagine the uproar in the UK if it were the other way around, and large numbers of Americans started writing to individuals suggesting how they should vote?

Function keys on Powerbooks

[Original Link] Here’s a hint I found quite useful. On the Powerbook, the function keys, by default, do other things like changing the brightness of the display or turning numlock on and off. To make them operate as function keys, you have to press ‘fn’ at the same time. If, like me, you use them more as function keys (for exposé etc), you can invert this behaviour in the Keyboard section of System Preferences.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser