What’s covered by your disaster recovery strategy? Lightning strike? Check. Flood? Check. Seagull crap? Hactivist squirrel nightmare? According to Computing readers, even the most rigorous DR plans are no match for a crazed rodent or the disgusting habits of airborne poo-dispensers.

“Accumulated seagull poo blocked a roofing vent, indirectly causing a fire in the datacentre!” moaned one reader. “Squirrels repeatedly attacked our fibre backbone!” shrieked another.

And you thought they just bury their nuts for your amusement, a bit like the average coder.

Martyn Hart, chair of the National Outsourcing Association (NOA), must rue the day he added his voice to the shouting match over CSC’s UK job cuts. First, he appeared to suggest that he thought the layoffs were a good thing. Several days later – after the fuss had died down – Hart said that, no, he didn’t think the cuts were a good thing after all: that was outrageous media spin.

Hart should have left it there and patted his PR company on the head for some swift – well, maybe not swift – damage limitation. But not content with blowing one foot off with a blunderbuss, Hart then took aim at the other. What he meant to say, he added, was that CSC’s most talented people would be the first to leave if voluntary redundancies were on the table, and so compulsory layoffs were much better.

Well done, Mr Hart! A bomb defused, and then expertly primed once again. Impressive.

We have had cause in the past at Backbytes to make fun of Mensa, not least because it’s easy to do. But the organisation for self-declared smart people that never seems to do anything useful except tell us how extraordinary its members are, is at least opening itself up to a broader demographic.

Last week it admitted two-year-old Anthony Popa Urria. The tiny Canadian can recite the alphabet backwards and forwards, count to 1,000, name the planets in the solar system and doesn’t have a girlfriend. So he’ll fit right in.

We’re not anti-intellectual here, but sometimes we wonder why the world’s cleverest people don’t just ask the rest
of us before they start their research projects: we could save them a lot of time.

“When stacking apples on a market stall, fruit sellers naturally adopt a particular arrangement: a regular pyramid with a triangular base. The Laboratoire de Physique des Solides has demonstrated that this arrangement is favoured for reasons of mechanical stability,” Science Daily tells us.

Next month: zoologists finally discover why that bear is going into the woods.

One person unlikely to be welcome at a Mensa meeting in the near future is Jovan Cummings, who celebrated robbing a Dollar General store in Florida by uploading pictures of himself, with the loot and the gun he used, to his Facebook page.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that a detective looking at the surveillance video thought he recognised the suspect – and solved the crime by typing Jovan’s name into Facebook’s search engine, and looking at the results.

The lesson: if you’re going to take photos of yourself with the proceeds of a robbery, put it on MySpace, where no one will find you.