I think my proudest moment as an IT person is not some of the large-scale systems I’ve designed or put into production, or data centers I’ve built out, but when a small business I was consulting for was struck by malware and most of their important data was encrypted for ransom. They thought recovery would take weeks, if it were possible at all.

Thanks to my good backups and planning, I had them up and running just the same again in hours. In many other cases they would’ve been sunk, maybe enough to go out of business.

If you do nothing else, please make sure you have good backups. This is probably the single most important part of being in IT and often the most neglected.

The woman who lifted 332.5kg boulders. Leigh Holland-Keen has become only the second woman to lift Scotland’s legendary Dinnie Stones.

That’s 733 pounds. This isn’t the same as a deadlift — it’s more like a rack lift. So a 733 pound rack lift would be about the equivalent of a ~420 pound deadlift. Impressive for anyone, in other words, and amazing for a woman, especially since she’s 5’2″.

This matches with what I found here, which states her personal best deadlift is 185kg or about 408 pounds — but that’s from 2016.

So I could not yet lift those stones, but I expect to be able to in about a year myself.

"I'm looking to lift weights but not get too big."

That's cool, and as long as you understand:

Nobody in the history of the world ever got ACCIDENTALLY jacked.

— Daniel Kelly 🇬🇧 (@DanielKellyTRT) January 31, 2019

Yep. I’ve worked my ass off (actually, my ass size has increased, but you know what I mean) for going on five months now and people are just now noticing any difference. I could tell, but to most people it wasn’t apparent.

And I’m working out much harder than even most lifters do! For instance, the day before yesterday I did squats, leg curls, leg lifts, scissor kicks, calf raises (all of 30+ reps with weights, the bodyweight ones 90+ reps), and then yesterday I did deadlifts (135×7 warm-up, 225×5, 295×5, 245×5, 245×5 fast as I could do them), and then I took a nap and did pull-ups until I couldn’t do them anymore, dumbbell presses, isolation curls, tricep extensions, and then chest flies — all of 30+ reps with as much weight as I could lift.

That’s two days of working out and that is typical for me. That is just about as much working out as you can do without overtraining. In fact, today, I am not doing anything as literally everything is sore.

My point is that it takes great effort, even for men, to get more muscular. No one is going to accidentally look like Hugh Jackman. It’s just not a thing that can happen. I’m pushing my body as hard as I possibly can right now and though it is changing, it is slow. It’ll take 2-3 years more of this to get truly muscular again.

This is a great graphical representation of the fact (that some people still deny, bizarrely) that what matters has gotten more expensive, and the irrelevant has gotten cheaper. It is adjusted relative to inflation:

From here. Their conclusions are wishy-washy and/or wrong, but the data is fine.

How does stuff like this get past fact checkers? It’s from this article.

Watches powered by quartz were invented in the 1980s—they were much more accurate, and powered by batteries that kept ticking without interruption much longer than any mechanical watch.

The first quartz wristwatch was invented and released in the late 1960s, and more were released from the early 1970s on.

In December 1969, Seiko produced the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch, the Seiko-Quartz Astron 35SQ[20] which is now honored with IEEE Milestone.[21] The Astron had a quartz oscillator with a frequency of 8192 Hz and was accurate to 0.2 seconds per day, 5 seconds per month, or 1 minute per year.

So, only off by more than a decade. No biggie. You should hire me to be your fact checker. This kind of crap will never make it through.