Hmm. Several things technologic have cropped up with me lately. First, a hardware problem: I have several computers in an outbuilding, stored in less than optimal, rather humid conditions (there's A/C out there but not often running). At least one computer is 18 years old. Trying to start it up yesterday, I got a indication that the HDD could not be located (although a mouse cursor did appear successfully). I restarted and just got a blank screen. Three restarts later - same thing. How to fix it? What worked was to leave the power connected and come back in 30 min. Evidently, either something on the mobo "charged" up, or perhaps caps or resistors warmed up to a temperature they liked - or that something downstream from them liked. Startup went fine.
Another thing - a news story. Yet another break-in at some big organization compromised a bunch of information, this time lots of personal info per account, like medical data for thousands of users. What to do if that happened to you? I haven't read this in any industry publication but I'd think that it would be good to look at all data exposed, then separate the pile into these categories: what cannot be changed, what can be changed, and what is less consequential. Your balance in the office coffee fund is probably a member of the third category (although perhaps it could be used to track your activity) but the first category would include stuff like SSNs, DOBs, military discharges, traffic tickets and other matters of public record. The second category interests me. Logins as well as passwords, and even vlan's, IPs and so forth are things that don't have to be what they are. Though sometimes complex to change, they probably should be changed periodically.
And a third thing... on jobs in the tech area, there's a headline I saw recently that claimed that the amount of time that a job went unfilled went from 25 to 27 days on some average or other. Don't have much way of checking the validity of the claim, but assuming it's true, I wonder why it happens. Maybe there are fewer babies being born, maybe fewer immigrants are those of technical proficiency, maybe students are dumber, maybe teaching standards are lower... but what if it's something else? What if economic pressures on businesses and government organizations are such that fewer people have to do more work? And therefore must know more than in previous times? This would mean a greater reliance on guru-level workers that have never existed in vast amounts. Maybe. Just maybe.
