French traffic monitor NetValue doesn't just measure Web stats - it also has some dab-hands with the old organic baked goods. On Thursday, a select group of Net Valuations and skiving journalists will head out to the New Territories to get their hands dirty. 'We're all going to bring out the hippie child in everybody as we take a trip to a farm community,' enthused the firm's invitation. 'We're going to plant trees and flowers, bake bread, learn the process of recycling paper, and other neat activities like that'. Oh goody. Apparently NetValue's marketing department has tracked down the one surviving Hong Kong farm that has not converted half of its fields for toxic waste and container storage. 'You are invited to hang out with us as we figure out how life might have been different if we chose farming as our daily bread rather than tracking online activities'. With Web measurement firms threatening to outnumber dotcoms, it is probably not a bad idea. You can make more bread in farming. The perils of over-automation. Either press release distributor iPress needs a decent sub-editor, or it is entering the adult-content business. On Friday the site issued a press release headed; 'BROADBASE SOFTWARE EXPANDS ANALYTIC AND PERSONALISATION CAPABILITIES WITH RELEASE OF E-COMMERCE ANAL'. A case of taking personalisation a little too far. After defusing last week's global security scare over DSL modems with a quick posting to its Web page, Alcatel's marketing wizzes sat back and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Not only had they dazzled the world's tech media with baffling excuses, they had even managed to prevent their engineers from messing the whole thing up. Or so they thought. But then some genius forgot to turn off Microsoft's Track Changes editing command. They have fixed it now, but thankfully, someone thought to save a copy. It was http://morons.org/articles/1/188 . There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of rats in the bilges of the good ship dotcom. Like rice weevils in the kitchen, just when you think the last one is dead and buried, another turns up in your pasta. In one of the most ironic about-faces of the past year, Internet.com supremo Alan Meckler, owner of 170 Web sites and one of the Internet's earliest commercial evangalisers, has decided to rename his company INTMedia Group. Apparently Meckler has no plans to close down his successful dotcom business, but has realised that in the fickle, technophobic world of Wall Street, image is everything and dotcom is 'so last year dahling'. The effect was instant. Internet.com's stock price was up 18 per cent on the day. Do you reboot your server a) weekly b) daily c) every time it crashes? If you are able to answer that one, you probably aren't running Novell. According to a report in trade paper Information Week, the University of North Carolina lost one of its servers some time ago. And for five years, the box kept on handling network traffic without interruption. After conducting their own fruitless searches, administrators called in Novell engineers to help them locate the mysteriously stable machine. The Novell crew had a brilliant, yet strangely simple solution. They worked out which cable was connected to the server, and followed the wire until they literally hit a brick wall. It seems some years before, builders had managed to seal up the room in which the server lived, forgetting to remove it first. Hong Kong contractors get everywhere.