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.