Richard Simmons

I have a confession. I'm a bit of a fan of, all people, Richard Simmons. Why? Well, he's a pretty positive guy, he doesn't hold grudges (go watch any of the thousands of clips of him appearing on Letterman), he's happy about himself and he's confident enough that he doesn't mind being totally camp or make himself look a bit foolish in front of millions of people. Most of all, he seems like a fairly kind individual, and that is one of the most important aspects to anyone really.

You see, I think that when most people watch Richard Simmons they don't see a guy who has a very strong will, but I do think this. Richard Simmons is happy in his own skin (literally - *shudder*) that it really doesn't matter what mockers like Letterman think. Simmons goes out and does what he wants to do, and to hell with what others think of him. And in the process, he's actually helped out a reasonable amount of people who do feel bad about themselves.

Therefore, Richard Simmons, I salute you. You may have shocking dress sense, you may act the fool, you might show your 60+ year old legs on Letterman far too often, and you may market ridiculous steamers, but you are still an unlikely role model for our generation.

KFC nutrition

Figures.

World, meet Emily

Warning: exceedingly cute baby pictures ahead.

How To Kill Redundancy With a Redundancy

Terry Childs was a network administrator of the San Francisco FibreWAN. When I say a network admin, I really mean the network admin - given that he was the only one who looked after it. So while I'm impressed he is one of the world's few CCIEs, I do think that this is really a bit too much for anyone to take on by themselves.

So when he went rogue and wouldn't disclose the passwords to the Cisco routers and passwords he administered, I was somewhat gobsmacked. Not at Terry Childs, mind you, but at the dumb-arse morons who left a sole employee the administrator and contact for their entire critical networking infrastructure. Seriously, what would have happened if the man had expired? If he'd dropped off the mortal coil then they would not have been able to recover the passwords at all. Luckily Childs turned them over to Mayor Gavin Newsom, so a big problem was averted.

I'm sure that the San Fran network infrastructure had built-in redundancy. But it looks like they forgot the most important redundancy of all - the people to administer it.

Python takes Youtube

I notice that there is a "report background image" link down the bottom of the Monty Python YouTube channel. All hail Monty Python!

Coffee printer

On slashdot I found this awesome printer, that prints with coffee. Hmmmm... if I bought this I think my caffeine addiction would only get worse :-)

This made me look at the website where it was submitted. It was part of the Greener Gadgets design competition, which in its own right is pretty interesting. Go check it out!

On Not Getting It Redux

I thought John C. Dvorak could not have looked more ridiculous with his "my Windows XP idle process is killing my computer!" line, but I stumbled across the following article today. In it, he rails against CSS.

If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.

How on earth did this guy get to be a widely known and respected pundit on all things technology?