Well fancy meeting you here, Norman.

It's been a few years. I hope life's treating you well.

Assuming a standard office layout, there are a few things you can do to tweak your fitness quotient a bit, but it's mostly through harm reduction rather than positive benefits. Don't smoke, avoid junk food, stand and walk around. Consider a standing desk, use stairs, manage your stress, work sensible hours, walk somewhere for lunch. Incorporate walking in your commute, consider moving to where a healthier lifestyle is a matter of course, not a decision to be made daily.

But the realities of human physiological response to training stimulus means that intensity matters, and you're simply not going to reach appropriate levels of stimulation at the office without radically changing your workspace and creating a considerable distraction and disruption for those around you.

The good news is that an effective workout can be packed into a short time -- 20 - 60 minutes -- and a few workouts a week can make a significant difference in health and appearance. The biggest hurdle for most people is sorting out good information from bad on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Pointers I like to put in front of folks include Liam Rosen's "Beginners' Health & Fitness Guide, the Reddit Fitness FAQ, and books such as The New Rules of Lifting. A healthy diet and a solid 8 hours of nightly sleep are your foundation. A good a strength training routine, and HIIT cardio can fit inside a 20-60 minute workout period.

The best tools are relatively simple: a barbell, plates, rack stand or power cage, and a basic piece of cardio: your body, a barbell, kettlebells, a jump rope, a rowing machine (and if you're going to row, that's among the best technique videos out there).

That said, few offices are optimized for deadlifts, kettlebell swings, Oly lifting, or Tabata erging sessions. Whether you build it or buy it, a gym is a worthwhile investment. Consider it a workshop for improving and sustaining your body.

If you live in an area where a good gym is that far away, you likely have enough space that you can create a decent workout space in your own home.

It's also highly likely that you're overlooking other options: high schools, community colleges, YMCAs, and various athletic clubs offer inexpensive access to cardio and strength equipment.

Note that "gym" and "fitness" don't consist simply of cardio. Strength training is highly underrated by much of the lay public.

A power cage, or even a set of bar stands, an Olympic barbell, and a few hundred pounds of plates will do you a lot of good. It's a bit of an investment, but it pays off in large dividends.

For cardio, a four-minute workout can be highly effective.

You call the switchboard (it can take some digging) and request the office of the CEO, or (better) send an email to the entire executive suite. Frequently email addresses are publicly available or are some variant of first.last@example.com.

I've utilized both techniques at various times.

While travelling in Australia with an (I was told at the sales location) International-capable SIM-swappable phone, that I found out was in fact locked, I emailed the CEO of Cingular, copying a good friend of mine who covers the mobile sector for a tech publication, requesting the phone be unlocked (this after several rounds of frustration on long-distance international tech support). My host was awakened at 5am by a call from the US the next morning.

On discovering significant 419 spam transiting through Microsoft's Hotmail servers, I called the Microsoft switchboard, requested the SVP of the appropriate department, was transferred to him directly, he picked up within two rings, we spoke briefly, he promised that the person responsible would call me within the hour, fifteen minutes later I was talking with the person in charge of Hotmail abuse mitigation, and we worked to resolve the problem over the next several months. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their response here impressed me immensely.

Another spam issue turned out to be a service run by a contractor at a southeastern university. After getting the brush off from the guy at his personal account (and tracking down his consulting gig), I sent a round of emails escalating one level up the university org chart, eventually hitting the president's office. By the third or fourth round I'd gotten the resolution I'd hoped for in the first place.

Issues with delivery through Yahoo (and months of zero useful responsiveness from their help desk and CTO and the self-reporting web tools) led me to finally email the entire executive suite (as far as I could identify -- this was a few CEOs ago) with an email subject line "Gentlemen, you have a problem", containing a brief synopsis and pflogsum extracts comparing delivery rates and times through Yahoo and other major email service providers. Got a response from the "concierge" desk and resolution within a couple of days.

In another case, an airline's exceptionally poor service led me to write an essay and post it to my website (as I'd promised the CSR I'd do when I requested hotel accomodations to compensate for fouling up both legs of my journey and stranding me at an airport overnight). I didn't get the resolution I'd wanted, but my piece generated a number of emails to me from both other frustrated passengers, and a number of airline employees and investors as the company struggled to stay solvent. It ultimately lost that battle, and I cried very, very little.

Look up "the art of turboing". Realize that politics and sociology of most businesses makes such embarrassments a very high priority to resolve, especially if they're chump change to the organization in question. http://macwhiz.com/blog/art-of-turboing/

Malthus's predictions were correct given the constraints he understood at the time. Namely that ag productivity was known, and that population would eventually outstrip it.

What's changed are some constants in the equation regarding ag productivity, largely as a result of fertilizers, pesticides, some improvements in crop productivity (through selective breeding and genetic modification), and mechanization. Improvements in transport and storage also mean vastly reduced wastage between field and table.

What has not changed is the fact that there remain limits to ag productivity. They're higher than Malthus predicted, but they remain -- there's only so much incoming solar energy per acre, only so much efficiency in plant conversion of this to edible food, only so much arable land, and larger limits on other inputs, most notably water.

We've also been practicing ag methods which, over time, tend to reduce, erode, diminish, and/or poison the soil. Especially in desert regions in which large amounts of irrigation water are applied to fertilized/pesticide-treated fields: the water evaporates leaving behind salts and residues.

A saying in ecology is "forests came before humans, deserts followed them". It's a very persistent pattern.

There are limits to population growth. We'll either manage our way beneath them, or, more likely, accommodate them in the usual way via the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, conquest, famine, and disease.

Off the top of my head and the F100: Ford, Apple, Intel, and 3M come to mind as not markedly evil.

There's Kroger, Macy's, Kohl, Gap, and Land o'Lakes.

Lear, for certain values of consumer product (like a G6 ... but that's another company).

Whole Foods. McGraw-Hill, Levi Straus, and of course, Harley-Davidson.

I'm sure there are complaints against some of these. But I don't see these companies as taking direct and blatantly aggressive anti-consumer actions as Sony and others have. Looking up the holdings of ethical / socially conscious investment funds might also prove interesting.

When you've got many or large folders, the switching time can be substantial.

Systems admin, with various alerts and notifications getting filtered to various places. Opening a folder with ~10k messages takes a few seconds, ~100k really starts to bog down. Once I'm in the folder, filtering, tagging, and other actions are really quick. Getting there is slow.

My compromise: screen with several mutt buffers open, primary ones are my inbox and other hot folders, others I'll switch between less-frequently read folders.

Proportionally-spaced fonts are modestly more readable than monospace, for prose text.

Monospaced fonts allow for column-based formatting of tables, ASCII-art diagrams (networking, etc.), programmatic output, etc., which makes for a greatest common denominator balance between both readability and flexibility. For technical uses (programming, systems/network admin), monospace wins hands-down. It's also very easy to write simple programs / shell scripts to output data in fixed-length columns, which again, present well in monospaced fonts but are fugly in proportional ones (most of my text formatting in GMail, FWIW, is based on indenting and formatting in courier program output).

The alleged legibility gains of proportional fonts are minimal, and in the context of other benefits of mutt (threading, quote precedence, syntax highlighting of quote levels, URLs, email addresses, etc.), a full GUI mailer (Exchange, Thunderbird, GMail, KMail, etc.) is a net loss.

There's an issue for those reading mail on mobile devices with displays of Browser overhead means that GMail takes up most of a display, while I can stack up multiple mutt, shell, and other console apps either vertically or horizontally. Much more effective use of screen real estate.

I do.

Gmail, calendar, and Google docs are at least three tabs off the top.

I admin systems for my company, so that adds Nagios, New Relic, AWS, and RightScale tabs.

Might be interested in a few different views of both.

I'm hitting docs on various issues I'm investigating. So that's a search tab and multiple sub-tabs of results or vendor docs.

There's our internal Wiki and task management systems. Multiple other online tools.

Add in a few news/info sites and sub-tabs, and we're talking not 20 tabs but easily upwards of 50-100. Yes, seriously.

The box is also running a ton of terminal windows (local and remote systems), and possible a VirtualBox session or two. Jconsole. Other fun stuff.

8 GB suddenly doesn't seem like a lot of RAM any more.

As far as tabs go, the best thing about them is that they contextually manage my browsing. I use tree-mode tabs which helps a lot. The real issue is that history sucks so badly -- what I really need is a state-management tool. Tabs are a horrible way to go about it, but there's little else that's better.

Gripes about Firefox/Iceweasel updates? Mostly that upgrades tend to break plug-in compatibility. I use different tree-mode tab plug-ins for 3.6.x and 8.x. And Chrome doesn't have tree-mode tabs at all (there are some very weak approximations).

One of the things that computers manage poorly in general is saving user state in a useful, meaningful way. There are lots of tools which have tried to address this, but it's still an unsatisfactory area, especially where multi-tasking is a key use mode.

The best you can do with a good ergonomic set-up is to minimize the negative effects of spending hours in front of a computer.

So sure: get a decent chair, make sure your monitor is set to the proper height. Experiment with sitting/standing configurations. Use a laptop or tablet (or book) periodically which lets you get away from your desk. Get up and walk around every hour or so. That will all help.

But what fixes your musculature and skeletal is actually stressing it. Yeah, weight training. 2x weekly minimum, 3x is a good standard, 4x if you decide to go gung-ho. 30-90 minutes per session. Focus on your backside ("posterior chain"): calves, hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors, lats, traps. Movements like squats, deadlifts, rows/chins, and kettlebell swings. You're going to want to do a full-body program ultimately for balance, but the lifts above are going to be key.

Simply supporting your body in a comfortable state will disengage musculature, as will rests, splints, and other crutches. What builds and strengthens muscle is progressive overload.

For more on this, a great starting reference is The New Rules of Lifting by Schuler & Cosgrove. Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength or Stronglifts 5x5 are good beginning strength programs.

Toss in 3-4 sessions of cardio, including some HIIT interval work 1-2x weekly, and you'll be in far better shape. Particularly as you get older. Which I hear happens in time.

Please, at the very least, make that sugar-free. Water, green tea, black tea, or coffee are all far better for you (in rough order) than soda. Let's re-phrase that. The first two or three are actually beneficial, the fourth 1-2x day is OK. Soda is nothing but bad.

That's possible.

Any dictionary of "common passwords" is going to have to be adaptive.

But the thing is, if you look at lists of common passwords, and of how many accounts can be compromised by them, the really common ones are really common.

Hotmail have taken a long-overdue step here. I'd love to see all major online service providers follow suit, though if we could just get major email providers (Google, Hotmail, Apple, Yahoo, AOL), and Facebook (used for single sign-on), we'd be ahead of the game.

There are still myriad problems with password recovery features (especially in a world of "free" online services which aren't tied to payments, a payment/credit card account, or billing address).

And there's the fundamental problem that most user-based networks are far more interested in increasing the number of users, not in boosting security. Security provisions slow sign-ups, and are fundamentally at odds with increasing userbase.

It's the metabolic and endocrine impacts which Lustig and Taubes are concerned with. You're dumping a load of sucrose (triggering an insulin response) and fructose (triggering a triglyceride release from the liver) with either. If you're eating excesses of either sugar or HFCS, you're going to trigger the same effects. The effect on your taste buds is not significant to the article.

Y'know, I'm tempted back into the fold, I really am.

fvwm's config file format is powerful, but also somewhat opaque. Might still just grab that bull.

As for old school, one of the most tricked-out desktops I've ever seen is Steve Hand's twm configuration (he's one of the core Xen developers). Multiple desktops, all hot-keyed, flying back and forth between windows and desktops while coding up a storm, building sources, and running VMs. Just goes to show you don't need to ran teh new hawt an shinay for a productive desktop.