Six random things

[sawyl]

A handful of things have greatly cheered my day including:

• learning of the existence of the field of disaster sociology;
• realising that, after the bail out, $9bn to fix the LHC seems like nothing at all;
• successfully completing a particularly nasty sendmail reconfiguration;
• Stephen Hawking rebutting the scurrilous allegations that, if he were British he'd have been killed off long since by the NHS committee for euthenasia, by noting that he is in fact British and that rather than killing him, the health service has played a large role in keeping him alive;
• David Byrne's enthusiasm for cycling; and
• an interview with Dave Gibbons on comics, computers and stuff.

ETA: My sendmail change wasn't completely without incident after all. To get the stupid thing to work correctly, I was forced to chance netsvc.conf to ignore DNS, forgetting that a couple of the compute nodes do actually have access to the outside world and do actually need to be able to resolve hostnames. Oops.