i L i n d . n e t

There’s a multi-cat task force a few feet away tracking a small rat that one of them apparently brought into the house. The poor thing (the rat, that is) is hiding behind a small bookcase while Annie, Kili, Leo and Toby all circle nearby.  The bad thing is that they’ll lose interest if it hides, and then it will run loose in the house for a while until they pick up the hunt again. It’s all par for the course in a cat household.

In answer to yesterday’s question, Honolulu Community-Media Council chair Chris Conybeare confirmed yesterday that it is the council’s former coordinator, Holly Green, who was indicted this week on embezzlement charges. Green provided administrative services to the council over several years, from about 2000 through at least 2004, apparently during the same period the alleged thefts were occurring.

I’ve spent the last couple of days converting my informal web site on the George Galbraith Trust Estate to a Wordpress blog, which hopefully will encourage beneficiaries and other interested readers to comment on the outstanding issues. With some 600 current beneficiaries spread across the world from Australia to Ireland, settling this estate is going to be a complicated process.

Congratulations to talented webmaster Ryan Ozawa for the new incarnation of his Hawaii Blog. Great new look, same familiar substance.

Congratulations to Mesa Air Group’s attorneys for coming up with the most innovative excuse for the industrial strength scrubbing of several hard drives, allegedly of files that would have shown illegal use of info obtained from Hawaiian Airlines.  Mesa says its chief financial officer was just trying to delete miscellaneous porn from his company computers. And they pay these guys to make up stuff like this?

A New York Times editorial today has the right of it–the latest General Motors labor problems should serve as a wake-up call that it’s well past time to get a solution to the country’s health care crisis. American business can’t solve it, and American workers are paying the price. Detroits problems aren’t going to be solved without leadership in Washington.  We at least need to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world and provide health services to all.

I noted a couple of related stories yesterday. The Army has reportedly blocked all web sites and email accounts from Time Warner’s Roadrunner internet service. This apparently means no one using a Roadrunner account can send email to someone at an Army address. If this is true, it certainly sounds like a huge issue for families at Schofield who still have family members deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else.

And the New York Times reports that Verizon has reversed an earlier decision that would have blocked a Pro-Choice organization from utilizing its text messaging system. Verizon’s change of heart came only after its policy was reported in an earlier edition of today’s NY Times.

Not too much different from the governments of Myanmar and China using control of the Internet to limit communications and speech, or the move to give the largest telephone and cable companies discretion over access to the net.

Keep on top of some of these issues via the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, or the Save the Internet Blog, among other resources.

Oh, as predicted, the cats have all followed their short attention spans on to other things, sparing Ms. Rat, if only temporarily.