Friday Four

1. It's interesting to hear that obnoxious fans make recruitment harder for their own teams:

Sure, it's great to play for a rabid fan base, but after experiencing firsthand how powerful that fervor can be when it is channeling extreme negativity, it really makes you think twice about where all that collective anger comes from, and whether you want to subject yourself and your family to that all the time.

This comes from the negative, but still interesting, retirement announcement of San Francisco Giants relief pitcher, Jeremy Affeldt.

2. Dumb kid pulls notorious stunt, learns lessons, and comes good:

Three years after [releasing the MySpace] worm, in 2008, [Samy] Kamkar went back to court and got his probation lifted. The first thing he did, Kamkar recalled, was head to the Santa Monica Apple Store and buy a laptop. He then went to the nearest Starbucks, opened it up and connected to the internet.

But after three years offline, "I didn't even know where to go," he says. So he visited a couple of websites -- not MySpace, he says laughing -- spent ten minutes on the internet and then went to see some friends.

Kakmar says he was "very introverted and shy" before the Samy worm, so "the three years away from computers were actually really good for me, for someone who's always on computers all the time, it allowed me to do other things."

A bit like a high-tech Frank Abagnale, Kamkar has turned to drawing attention to how computer security can be improved.

3. It's been awhile since I noted how much easier Emacs makes my life, so here's part 5,008. The other day, I wanted to dump a web page into my calendar, but something that wasn't even showing up kept crashing my calendar program. It turned out to be a "zero width space". Now that I know about these, I can now zap them with two keystrokes any time I run into the problem again. On top of that, it will be easier to find things like that in the future.

4. From Inc. comes my favorite sign that the HR manager is actually a Dalek:

No one has ever gotten unemployment. Ever. On an unrelated note, sometimes her trash can is completely full of ashes. Weird.

Here is the rest of the list.

-- CAV