Friday Four

1. Last weekend, I watched my one NFL game of the year, and won family bragging rights for correctly predicting the winner and being closest on score. (Until late in the game, things seemed right on track for 19-17, too ...)

Boasts aside, I like good defensive teams, so I enjoyed reading "When Von Miller and the Broncos Realized They Had Broken Cam Newton"

"They haven't played nobody man," [cornerback Chris] Harris continued. "So you look at the schedule and we're the first dogs they've played."

And all Denver needed was its biggest dog, its best dog to go prove the point. The Broncos felt like if someone could stand up to Newton, eye to eye, will to will, then everything would crumble. Newton plays the game with great passion and emotion, it can power him to greatness; it can also leave him in doubt and depressed.

The Broncos defense did exactly what that situation called for: They struck early, and hard, and relentlessly.

2. Many web pages include bloated code that can slow computers to a crawl. This is related to the advertising necessary to make their content available at no charge. So it is that I am interested in new ideas to address the problem, such as this one from Wired:

[I]n the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker. There will be two easy options to access that content.

You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker's whitelist, so you view ads. When you do, we will keep the ads as "polite" as we can, and you will only see standard display advertising.

You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.

Either way, you will get to experience the great content that you expect from WIRED, and you'll be supporting our journalism.

I don't read Wired often enough to justify paying them a dollar a week, but I could see this model being expanded to a subscription model including multiple sites. Had I not coded my own way to avoid some of the problems caused by web site bloat, I'd consider a multi-site subscription -- and might, anyway. Would you?

3. Here's an amusing and informative infographic for job-hunters that catalogs signs that one should not take the job. I've never run into Sign 8:

Your potential employer wants money from you to begin working here. This is a company already on the ropes.

I'm not sure I needed that warning, but I got Sign 7 on an interview once when I was young.

4. For a stroll down memory lane or an interactive look at what computing was like back in the early '90's, use the Internet Archive (aka, The Wayback Machine):

Indeed, the colorful and unique look of Windows 3/3.1 is a 16-bit window into what programs used to be like, and depending on the graphical whims of the programmers, could look futuristic or incredibly basic. For many who might remember working in that environment, the view of the screenshots of some of the hosted programs will bring back long-forgotten memories. And clicking on these screenshots will make them come alive in your browser.

A brief look failed to turn up one of my old favorites, Empire. But maybe that's a good thing.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added link for Item 3, HT reader C. Andrew.