Happy National Nothing Day! Who knew, right? It actually works out pretty well, as we’re having our “non-denominational holiday mixer” tomorrow night. People always ask why we have it in January, and that stems from Jim Millican’s hockey schedule, back when he was coaching at Ignatius. As it worked out, MLK weekend was usually easiest for him to fit a holiday party in, and we’ve been doing it for 10+ years that way. Even though he’s not coaching this year (he claims to be retired, but I still don’t believe it), the weekend has stuck. It probably doesn’t hurt in keeping costs down and giving people something to do on a cold and snowy January night (and no, we’re really not as crazy as the video would have you believe).
Anyway, while you’re doing nothing this afternoon and evening, you can read more about gritters, copper mines, beating deepfakes, and more. Enjoy.
Something about ...
Beating Deepfakes
For any of my famous readers, you might make note that copyrighting your smiling face may now be a good way to prevent it from being used in deepfakes. If you’re not famous, however, you can still read about Matthew McConaughey and his efforts to prevent his face from being used by AI.
Security Updates
It’s been awhile since I’ve reminded you to make sure that your systems are properly patched for security issues. This is a solution that should be handled by either your internal IT resource or outsourced partner, and for the purpose of efficiency and security, it should be automated. If your IT person is going desk to desk applying patches, they’re wasting a TON of time and leaving you open for bigger issues.
To that end, Microsoft has updates for 112 security issues this week, and Fortinet firewalls are seeing issues with a known problem from all the way back in 2020. When you’re done reading this newsletter, go make sure your systems are all up to date!
Copper
Electric vehicles and data centers are leading to shortages of various minerals and ores. In the case of data centers, it’s copper. This one was in my inbox with some good clickbait; “Copper extracted by bacteria“. It worked. I clicked through to find that Amazon is working with a copper mine in Arizona to extract copper using acid and bacteria. More interesting, however, was the amount of copper that goes into just one data center, how long it takes to be mined, and what the rise in data centers is doing to the price of the material.
Travel
Anybody interested in booking a room in a hotel on the moon? Now you can, for the low low price of $250K. No availability until 2032, it only sleeps four, and the building is inflatable. Think I’ll stick to the ice hotel.
Sneezing
If you’ve ever spent any time with me, you know that when I sneeze, they come in multiples. Not three or four, but 10, 11, and more. My record is 23 in a row. I had a cold when we were in Florida for the New Year, and on one day I sneezed at least 150 times. Yes, 150. My body was sore for four days.
People know to wait until I’m done before saying “bless you” or “gesundheit”. Otherwise, they might lose their voices. So, I had to laugh when this piece came through ranking 11 types of sneezers. #3 doesn’t do it justice, so I guess if I had to slot myself in somewhere, we’d go with #9. Anybody else out there fall into that category?
Redundancy
For businesses that need to be up and running, we’re big fans of redundancy. Many of our clients have redundant firewalls (known as “high availability”), meaning that if one fails, service rolls to the second unit and there’s no downtime. In some cases, we have clients with redundant internet connections; this helps balance the load if there’s a lot of internet traffic, but more importantly, if the Spectrum (for example) connection goes down, there’s still the AT&T line to have access to the outside world.
One thing we don’t see as frequently are redundant power sources. Sure, we have healthcare facilities who have emergency generators, but many businesses don’t go that far. If you’re without power for any length of time, what’s the impact on your business?
Snow Plows
Well, we finally got a good snow storm (I missed the New Year’s Eve version as we were out of town) and I got to use the snowblower twice yesterday- before work and after dinner. That’s the sign of a good winter day! Appropriate then that Jim Miller sent me this piece about ODOT snow plows now being trackable on Waze.
And while we’re on the topic of snowplows, the annual list of names for Scotland’s ‘gritters’ (what they call snowplows) is out and I see at least six references to James Bond.
First person who tells me all six (or more) gets a box of Ashton swag. Bonus if you can tell me what actor Mr. Miller is often mistaken for.
Since you’re probably doing nothing tonight (to celebrate, of course), you’ll have time to watch this one two or three times to understand exactly what happened on the ice. And speaking of things happening on ice… the US bobsled team had a bit of a situation over the weekend, and since I only took one year of German in high school, I don’t know what the announcer is saying (other than “ist kaput”) but it sure sounded comical.
If you’re having trouble getting through to either of those links, it’s because Cloudflare has/had another outage this morning (its second this week) and it’s effecting sites like X (Twitter) where those two videos are posted.
Have a great weekend and enjoy the snow!
Abbey