Don't Touch That Button! (The snowed in edition).

Seriously, I am snowed in. Its been blowing snow since mid-morning and my driveway is knee-deep in several places. I went to work today, and my car is still there, stuck in a drift about 2 feet forward of where I had originally parked. As it turns out, it doesn't matter that I got the car stuck, because the little country road I live on is impassible to anything with less than a foot or ground clearance. Luckily, a co-worker with a truck was willing to give me a lift home. The good news is that everything at the house works, so I have time to blog.

In don't touch that button (!) news, a Czech ISP pretty much broke the Internet. The details are a little over my head (I'm not that kind of an engineer), but it seems that a change in the settings on the ISPs networks caused two old Cisco router bugs to rear their ugly heads. The result was 10-fold increase in number of routing information updates, which normally allows the internet to bypass ISPs or backbone links that are down. In this case, the extra traffic and disconnection and reconnection of other ISP routers caused vast swaths of the internet to slow down for several hours. So if you think the network admin at work can make your life difficult, be happy he doesn't work for a major ISP.

Some not at all shocking news, researchers at Princeton University have discovered that men see women in bikinis as objects. Yep, someone actually funded this. More technically, an area of the brain associated with tool use lights up while a region normally associated with trying to determine another person's intentions goes dark. So yes, if a feminist tells you that men see women as objects, she's right, at least under certian circumstances.

The big tech story of last week was the release of the Amazon Kindle 2 ebook reader. Its got a better resolution screen with 16 gray levels instead of 4, a smaller 'next page' button to prevent accidental page turning, a cleaned-up look and is thinner overall. And, yes, it is still not available outside the US. So my big complaint about the original Kindle stands.

I'll take a break from complaining to do a small public service announcement. If you ponied up for a 2009 Ford Ranger 2 wheel drive, you may want get it back to dealer. Over 11 000 are being recalled for improperly manufactured front wheel spindles. Engineer-to-English translation: you could be driving down the highway minding your own business when the front wheels break off and go rolling away without you. There are a fairly large number of vehicle recalls in a typical year, but this is pretty big.

And finally, a group of online scammers defrauded the state of Utah to the tune of $2.5 million dollars. It seemed the scam revolved around obtaining a vendor number from the state (which are used to identify contracters providing maintenance, garbage collection, etc), waiting for the account to get passed to a different administrator, and then sending in a bogus invoice and hoping the new guy never noticed. Oops.

That was the WRONG button...

Due to a technical foul-up, some Comcast Cable subscribers got a surprise along with their Super Bowl commercials (which incidentally do not air in Canada due to our bizarre broadcasting rules). About 30 seconds of a porn channel, Club Jenna, were accidentally switched into the feed. That was definitely the wrong button.

HP has arrived at an interesting strategy for getting more (free) Linux installations into its netbooks, helping its bottom line while appealing to non-Linux hippies. The HP Mini 1000 MIE will ship with a build of Ubuntu which will allow newbies (sorry, I mean novice users) to easily access thier e-mail, photos, and music without really going near the OS, let alone going command line (which occurs to often in Linux for my liking). HP may also make the interface layer available for users to install on thier existing Ubuntu machines, keeping with the open-source philosophy.

Google has made its online platform more interoperable with the iPhone, which is great for those of us who use both regularly. The new features allows syncing of your Google contacts and calender with your iPhone. The setup uses much of the same process as setting up an Exchange account on the iPhone, and does save you from the $99/year for Apple's roughly equivalent MobileMe service.