And now for something completely different: The Larch.

1) NFL: I grew up playing that addiction called American football. Oh, so you've mastered signals and slots? Well screw you, I won a local punt, pass and kick competition.

I could write for days and days about the NFL and reasons for its dominance; it's quite a savvy organization. But I'll leave it at this:
* Parity breeds hope. Every year, every fan base can consistently cross their fingers that "next year is the year." This year the Steelers and Seahawks got their wishes.
* The player speed and complexity of the rule book help send the NFL into the territory of debate like beauty contests and ribbon gymnastics. Even dwarf bowling has more scoring precision.

You'll never hear an argument about who won the 100-meter dash; there's no human intervention. But throw in an ever-changing set of regulations, and have middle-aged men trying to make game-time decisions about a "Tuck Rule" with Tom Brady in near white-out conditions live in front of 100 million people - you get a recipe for disaster/success.

Could a billion dollar industry pay to have an RFID chip in the nose of the ball to determine whether Big Ben crossed the line before being down? Sure, but you wouldn't have debate/controversy leaking all the way to our tiny Planet.

I plan a similar campaign to heighten KDE awareness. "Did Sebas just use java garbage collection techniques and the Singleton pattern in his PyQt code? That's unheard of, illegal, and it's frankly got to be stopped! Can we get a review? Are sanctions necessary?"

2) Off-site storage: For those of you planning to take out my house with a Stinger missile or a partially operational battle station: Don't bother. You may destroy my house, but you won't destroy my data or my dignity.

Until recently, I've been computing as many would expect. Recklessly and idiotically. All of my personal data, an accumulation of several years, was held on striped drives (RAID 0.0.1beta). One goes down, both go down. I had a back-up of a year of two old on another machine, but nothing remotely recent.

No longer. Data back-up to external USB drive: Check. Data validation: Check. Held off-site in safe, dry location: Check.

So, I can remove my "Back-ups are for Sissies." tee-shirt and temporarily rejoin the land of the Logical. You want to keep me from Bananarama or Frogger or the All Your Base swf? Bring it.