This is something new in political discourse. First the 9/11 Commission report, and now the Iraq Study Group report, have been made available on the web as soon as they were released. Once upon a time, you had to write to the Government Printing Office, or at least visit a Federal Depository Library, in order to get hold of reports like this.

These two reports are spectacular and well-publicized examples, but actually most government documents are published on the web these days, from economic reports to court rulings, and online news coverage often links to the original sources for stories about them. It's easier to be an informed citizen than it's ever been. Here's hoping the citizenry takes advantage.

More tips for platform switchers... You know all those Office macros and templates you've accumulated over the years? Leave them behind. Or at least test them with noncritical documents first. It can be quite unnerving when Word (for the Mac) announces that your brand new hard disk is full and it can't save the file you've been working on for most of the day.

(Every other program on the computer thought I had hundreds of gigabytes free. Problem solved by saving as an RTF file, which loses macros and styles, but keeps the text and most formatting.)

Despite that, I do now have the system stable enough to get real work done. Yay! I'll do a post on useful tools sometime this week.