Collection of useful, relevant or inane places on the the Internets for 21 Dec 09:

• Dangerous Minds | Flying The Stressful Skies: Drone-Pilot Burnout –
  

  Fifty-seven percent of crew-member-related mishaps were, they write, “consistent with situation awareness errors associated with perception of the environment” — meaning that it’s hard to grasp your environment when you’re not actually in it.

  

I have designed, built and supported a number of remote data centre that I have never seen, and that lack of situational awareness has led to mistakes. I am forced to work on a subset of available information when making changes or operational decisions. It seems it a universal problem, the military just has the money to do the research.

• CCDE Bootcamps UK, USA & Hong Kong, CCDE Training Courses, CCDE Written & Lab Preparation – First company I've seen offering CCDE bootcamps.
• Which Is the Top Tech Company to Work For? – GigaOM – Cisco isn't on the list. 

Why should I care ? A company with unhappy workers is not a company to be a customer of. Unhappy workers don't care about my problems, they are busy looking to go somewhere else (home, another company, whatever) and aren't interested in making my life better.
• HPA – Wi-Fi –
  

  There is no consistent evidence to date that Wi-Fi and WLANs adversely affect the health of the general population. The signals are very low power, typically 0.1 watt (100 milliwatts) in both the computer and the router (access point) and the results so far show exposures are well within internationally accepted (ICNIRP) guidelines. Based on current knowledge and experience, radio frequency (RF) exposures from Wi-Fi are likely to be lower than those from mobile phones. Also, the frequencies used in Wi-Fi are broadly the same as those from traditional RF applications.

  Remember: your mobile phone has a typical output of 1.2 Watts. That is TWELVE time more powerful that a Wi-FI and can boost up to 3 Watts, that's thirty times more powerful. The radio signal from the mobile phones around you are far greater than any Wireless Ethernet network. If you can’t make sense of that, go and stand in front of your microwave oven and give it some thought.

• EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system • The Register – HP sacks a bunch of key EDS staff after the merger to achieve "cost savings". Maintenance on the mainframes stopped and then they fell over and one of the largest banks in Europe can no longer process cheques.

That's another Cloud Computing failure from where I stand.