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As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) – I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion – If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

Merry Christmas!

1. If you come to me to ask technical questions, please don’t argue when you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about what you’re asking than I do, then why even ask? On that same note, if I am arguing with you, it’s because I’m certain that I am correct; otherwise I’d just tell you “I don’t know” or perhaps point you somewhere that you could look it up. We don’t argue just for the sake of arguing.

2. When you start a conversation by insulting yourself (e.g. “I’m such an idiot”), you will not make me laugh or feel sorry for you; all you will succeed in doing is reminding me that yes, you are, indeed, an idiot, and that I’m going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me, you don’t want to start out this way.

3. We’re okay with you making mistakes; fixing them is part of our job. We are NOT, however, okay with you lying to us about a mistake that you made. It just makes it that much harder to resolve and thus makes our job more difficult. Be honest and we’ll get the problem fixed and both of us can continue on with our business. Lying to us and, therefore, costing us twice as much of our time will not win you any brownie points with IT.

4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or — gasp! — even possible to fix. If I tell you that you’re going to have to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted two months ago, please don’t get mad at ME. I’m not ignoring your problem and it’s not that I don’t like you, we just can’t always fix everything.

5. Not everything you ask us to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you’ll almost certainly ensure that we treat none of it as a priority.

6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give us some time to get to your problem; it will get fixed.

7. E-mailing us several times about the same issue is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying as well. We record issues in a database so that we don’t lose track of them (remember how we ask that you create a ticket? That’s why.) We will typically respond as soon as we have a useful update to make. If your problem is urgent, please do let us know (but see number five).

8. Yes, we prefer e-mail over phone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly or anti-social, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for us to list out a set of questions that we need answers to than it is for us to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and, while we’re waiting, we can work on other problems.

9. We may, at times, seem blunt and rude. It’s not that we mean to, we just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. We assume that we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, don’t be surprised when we tell you. We don’t care that it was a mistake because, honestly, it makes no difference to us. Please don’t take it personal, we just don’t want it to happen again.

10. Finally, yes, I can read your e-mail, yes, I can see what web pages you look at while you’re at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and yes, I can tell if you are chatting with people on instant messenger (and can read what you’re typing, as well). But no, we don’t do it. It’s highly unethical and, perhaps more importantly, in all reality you really aren’t that interesting. Unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t do it. There really are much more interesting things on the Internet than you.

I hope this didn’t come off the wrong way because, even as much as us IT guys refer to “users” as “lusers”, we do like (most of) you. Just like you, we’re here to do a job and we try to do it the best that we can. It’s easiest to do that if we all work together, stop pointing fingers, and give other people the space that we would like to get as well. If we can do that more often than not, things will go well and work out for all of us.

P.S. IT guys are easily bribed with food and/or beer (personally, I prefer the latter). That’s a sure way to get your problems moved to the top of the list. *wink*

No idea where this originated, but I received it several months ago via e-mail. For your enjoyment…

You know you’re a computer security guy (or girl) when…

• You not only lock your laptop with a physical cable leash, but you change the combination of the lock when it’s not in use so that it can’t be “compromised”.
• Although you have no ill intent, you spend no small amount of your downtime in airports thinking of ways to circumvent TSA security — and you’ve come up with several can’t-miss terrorist ideas that even Jack Bauer couldn’t stop.
• You lock your screensaver with twice as much insistence when security friends are around than when strangers are, because you’re not nearly as worried about a stranger’s intentions.
• You’re immediately discontent with all newly announced security solutions, even before you know anything beyond the name.
• Having extralong passwords that you must type over and over again to get correct is not a bother.
• You have a database program to store all your passwords, but even it doesn’t contain a single, decoded password.
• When you read industry-mandated security guidelines, you chuckle at all the newbie mistakes.
• You secretly hope you don’t miss a big virus outbreak while you are out on vacation.
• Any security book you read is covered in pen from the technical corrections you’ve made.
• Your Internet browser home page is a computer security news bundling Web site.
• You’ve so fine-tuned your personal computer’s host-based firewall that you are sure it is causing problems with legitimate programs, but you really don’t care.
• You fantasize about a job where you could bust into the house of unsuspecting malicious hackers and take them away to jail.
• You’ve got a new car with a built-in GPS and computer, but you are constantly worried about how easy it would be to hack.
• You suspect that every banner and Flash ad on every Web site is hosting malicious JavaScript.
• You loath government interference with the Internet because you know they will only mess it up more and not fix the problem (see CAN-SPAM Act).
• When you hear that we’ve arrested some big spammer, you have the same nonreaction as when you hear we’ve arrested Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 person … again.
• You resist every new application install because of the new attack vector opportunities it will bring.
• You know that mobile small-form-factor computers have almost no security.
• Your cell phone is password-protected.
• You resent having to give out your Social Security number to any person or company, especially because you have never given it when dealing with the Social Security administration.
• You already own or covet one of those special screen covers that prevent people on either side of you of from reading your screen.
• You can’t prevent yourself from laughing out loud when someone announces they think that computer viruses, buffer overflows, or whatever will be solved in five years.
• You hate upgrading your computer because it means spending days trying to copy and convert all your cool hacker and anti-hacker tools to the new system.
• You have solid friends on computer security discussion lists, whom you know would be there for you in a life-crisis pinch but that you’ve never met in person or talked to on the phone.
• Although you never try to shoulder surf other people’s passwords, you can always tell by sound alone when they haven’t typed one that is eight characters or more, and you chuckle inside.
• When someone hands you their USB key to copy something, you always decline, and instead offer your known, clean USB key. You would also prefer one-time, disposable, Tupperware-like memory drives if they existed.
• You always slow down when reading security guidance looking for the words “should,” “must,” “never,” and “always” — and you understand their importance.
• By the time you read a CERT security bulletin, you’ve known about the issue for several days.
• You always investigate SSL certificate errors when they come up in your browser.
• Finally, you know you’re a computer security person when you have so frequently spoken passionately to complete strangers about computer security and the frustration it entails that you know what it’s like to be covered in sweat — and the listening partyto have a look on their face that says they didn’t know what they were in for.

Are there others? Post them in the comments below!

Today is (was) Patch Tuesday.

I’m glad that I’m not using [MICROSOFT PRODUCT]. The latest [VIRUS/WORM/TROJAN] exploits a [FLAW/BUG/BACKDOOR] in [MICROSOFT PRODUCT], and it [DOES/DOESN'T] use Outlook and the stupidity of users. Luckily, I’m running [FREE ALTERNATIVE TO MICROSOFT PRODUCT], so I’m not at risk. In fact, [FREE ALTERNATIVE TO MICROSOFT PRODUCT] has protected me from [ANY INTEGER OVER 200,000] [VIRUSES/WORMS/TROJANS].

And just look at the [HUNDREDS/THOUSANDS/MILLIONS/BILLIONS] of dollars that we’ve saved.

Capital One’s home page says that they redesigned their home page. It’s “Designed with you in mind”.

I’m not so sure.

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