Last week, I stumbled across an interesting statistic: 70% of overweight people classify themselves as "normal weight".

It's re-inforcing my view/opinion that fat people don't know they're fat. It's cruel NOT to tell them! If nobody tells them, they'll never know, and they won't do anything about it. By telling fat people that they're fat, you are helping to save them from the many ailments, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Recently there have been so many examples of people embracing PC to the extreme. People have lost their sense of humor in exchange for trying their best not to possibly offend. Personally I think its hilarious, if you can't take a joke as a joke (if its obviously not meant in an offensive manner) then what's the point? Plus most of the PC terms are just pretentious.

Here's some of the best examples of PC Extremeness I've found:

• Thought Shower or Word Shower substituting for brainstorm so as not to offend those with brain disorders

Having gotten my hands on a copy of the AOL Search data, I decided to try my hand at a bit of data mining. Of course, the first thing that jumped to my mind was to import the data into a RDBMS of some sort. I have immediate access to two -- MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Both are installed on similarly-specd machines.

AOL recently released 20 million search queries from users of their system. They attempted to protect the privacy of people by removing their screen names but the search queries have allowed some people to be identified. The data itself is quite valuable for research, something which AOL should be commended for. But since people can be identified this was one big cock-up. AOL has removed the links but the data lives on thanks to bittorrent.

I stumbled across this post in the DCS Software Engineering forum (yes, it actually works sometimes!)

We're looking to start implementing but have run in to a problem. We are using a package (JBossRules) that has some VERY nice stuff for Eclipse, to the point where development time will be adversely affected if were to not use it.

The problem is that the eclipse plugin requires Eclipse 3.2. At present only 3.1 is installed on the student systems.

I discovered three new html tags that are actually quite old, I just hadn't heard of them.

The first one is <fieldset>. You use fieldset to arrange your form elements together. It creates a box around the elements. It's good for accessibility because it groups elements together into semantically obvious groups. See http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/forms/_LEGEND.html You can use the <legend> tag to put a title into the box as well.

For the last semester, and so far in this semester, we've had lecturers preaching to us about the importance of testing and quality management. A good chunk of last semester was spent trying to drill into us the importance of good testing.

It seems to me that a University is not the most ideal place to teach people about good testing and quality management processes. The phrase "he who lives in a glass house shouldn't throw stones" comes to mind. The ANU Department of Computer Science has the poorest quality management processes I've seen in any organisation.

It's official, it has returned ....

One of the worst fashion tragedies of the 80's (and there are so many to choose from!!).

The high waisted jeans/pants

RIP hipsters .... welcome back big bums

Having worked in a few desk-bound positions in organisations, I recall the differing "standard" of desk decoration.

At the Chief Minister's Department, you'd get funny looks if your desk didn't have at least one photo of yourself pinned on the partition.

By contrast, at the ACCC, the standard appears to be undecorated desks (apart from papers strewn around).

How can two seemingly similar workplaces have such different conventions for personalising workspaces?