Blames, names and automobiles

Here's a sign of the times for you: a successful IT entrepreneur was caught speeding - and couldn't pay the fine.

The judge decided to make an example of the man, a certain Jaako Rytsola, founder of Finnish ISP Saunalahti, when he was collared back in early 2000.

The normal fine for such an offence is about £80, but m'learned Finnish gentleman threw the book (indeed, the whole library) at him and asked him to cough up nearer to £12,000.

But later in the year, Rytsola appealed because he was broke. What was once small fry to our hero had assumed whale-like proportions. He claimed he'd had zero income in 2000. It is worth noting at this point that the poor impoverished soul was caught driving his Ferrari.

The court felt sorry for him and reduced the fine to £80 - but then changed its mind at a second sitting, having realised that fines in these cases should be based on the individual's average income over three years.

Mr Rytsola is hoping the long-awaited economic bounce back happens soon. We're sure it will. But right now, the amazing bungy-jumping IT industry seems to be attached to a very long rope...

Maybe he should have taken a leaf out of two former Lucent execs' book. Ex-chairman Richard McGinn (who was ousted last year) and ex-CFO Deborah Hopkins (who left in May) will split a £15m pay-off between them, now they've found themselves out on their uppers.

Lest ye forget, Lucent made a loss of £2.29bn in its last quarter (yes, that's three months) and 45,000 people are losing their jobs.

Bet they don't get a £15m pay-off.

If Lucent applied the same sort of accounting practices as Scottish Power, that £2.29bn loss could quickly turn into a profit.

In its latest financials, unveiled on Tuesday, the utility and owner of Demon Internet said a "software error" in its power trading system had cost it £10m.

'Odd,' we thought. 'What error could have caused that much damage?'

A Scottish Power spokesman summed it up for us nicely. "It was the software that balances the accounts," he said. "Basically, it got the pluses and minuses round the wrong way."

We like PRs. Especially ones with good names. The Round-Up hasn't been here for a while because we're normally accused of being silly and immature.

Well, a big, juicy raspberry to that, because one silicon.com reporter spoke to a PR called Hedgie Gundry recently.

But she's got nothing on Randy Bender, Novell's certified directory engineer of the year.

A name like that deserves a wider audience. See http://www.novell.com/education/cde/features/randy.html if you want to find out more about him.

And now for another of our reader's digital blunders. Might be apocryphal, but we like it. A Mr Smith (actually his real name) told us: "We had a colleague who liked to use the 'I'm out of the office' auto-reply feature on email. Unfortunately, just before he went on holiday, he tried to send a fax out, through a networked fax system, but mis-addressed it. The fax system replied to tell him this about 10 minutes later (after he'd gone on holiday). His email account then replied to the fax system that he was on holiday. The fax system kindly replied that the new email didn't have a valid fax number on. And after several thousand arguments, a few hours later the system ran out of disk space."

You can read more of these at http://www.silicon.com/goto-Digital-round .

And now time for a plug. But as it's for charity, please keep reading, especially if you've ever fancied sleeping rough...

Byte Night happens every year, and sees some senior IT folk swap their comfy mattresses for cold concrete to help tackle the issue of youth homelessness.

Past events have been a great success, and the organisers are looking for plucky volunteers to join in this year.

The sleep out will happen on 21 September, with each sleeper having to raise at least £2,000 in sponsorship.

Go on. Get involved. See http://www.bytenight.org.uk .

The Round-Up will be back next week.