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AS OF 12/4/2008 12:08AM EST

Short Takes: IT Faces a Bizarre Month
By Systems Management News Team

August 15, 2008 — IT Stars Misaligned
July was an unusual month for IT news. First, a convicted spammer escaped a minimum security prison camp in Colorado, and was later found dead after he apparently shot his wife, daughter and himself. Meanwhile, an IT network administrator locked the City of San Francisco's FiberWAN network and refused to give up the passwords for days, holding the city’s network hostage. When he finally did, the city’s district attorney filed 150 usernames and passwords, used by various departments, in a court document to protect the city from the computer security risk posed by the IT admin. To minimize the damage caused by making these passwords public, the city is “aggressively" working to change the passwords quickly. Was July a fluke, or are the IT stars misaligned? Let’s hope our nation’s techie masterminds use their brains for good in August.

Michelle Savage

Join Us at SPTechCon
I love conferences. They’re fun to go to—as I write this, I’m making my plans for LinuxWorld. To you, of course, LinuxWorld is last week’s news. Conferences are the best place to catch up with colleagues and friends, see the newest technology and unravel the latest buzzwords. Oh, yeah, and also watch a keynote and take some technical classes. While I attend many conferences each year, a big part of my job is involved with creating new events. On page 9 of the Aug. 15 issue, you can read about our brand-new SharePoint Technology Conference, coming up Jan. 26-28 near the San Francisco airport. That’s an exciting new project being spearheaded by David Rubinstein, editor-in-chief of Systems Management News. We hope you can make it to SPTechCon. Hope to see you there!

Alan Zeichick

Lightning Wins Again

During a recent thunderstorm in Huntington, N.Y., where I live, a massive bolt of lightning struck my driveway and kicked up some very large pieces of the pavement. My car, a 2006 Ford Taurus, was right next to where the lightning struck, the rear tire literally next to the spot of contact on the driveway. Although my car wasn’t damaged, the computer in my car was apparently jolted and couldn’t recognize my key when I tried to start the car. All I got was a blinking red “theft” sign. I guess even computers in cars are vulnerable to the occasional glitch—especially those caused by a one billion-volt blast of electricity.

Jeff Feinman

Worse Than Cat Juggling

Cats don't get beer bellies. Instead, they get cat flaps: that little dangle of fuzzy skin that hangs between their rear legs. My cat has quite a flap, and as she's named Butter, we call this the Butter Flap. I sometimes wonder if she knows we're laughing at her as she runs away and it swings back and forth between her furry brown haunches. Sometimes, late at night when she's sleeping, my wife and I will wake her up by rubbing her Butter Flap. She hates this, but we don't care. If there's one thing that makes owning a cat great, it's breaking their will.

Alex Handy

Computer Lab Blues

My 18-year-old daughter is getting set to go off to college—the University of Maryland, which happens to be my alma mater. We went down for an orientation visit recently, and while much about the campus was familiar, there were many places that I didn't recognize things at all. One of these places was the computer science building, which is three times the size of what it was when I attended back in the days of punch cards and signing up for minutes in the computer lab to run your programs. Mine, of course, resulted in reams of paper spewing from the printer, with one small error command atop each of the literally hundreds of pages I would have to sift through to find where I went wrong. What's that old expression… "Those who can't, teach"? For me, it's "Those who can't, write about those who can."

David Rubinstein

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