My anger, though, doesn’t arrive when and where you’d think it would. Gliding into the radiation machine, getting a hormone shot and wearing mini-man-pads don’t set me off. It’s smaller, less expected, things, like a fellow customer being mean and rude to the server behind the counter at Starbucks, or a car busting a red light as I walk to my New York office.

That kind of behavior has always bothered me on some level. But since I learned that I have cancer, I react differently. I’ve walked the streets of New York for decades, and not thought twice about the cars that run red lights and nearly nail me and other pedestrians. It’s a fact of life in the big city, like rats on the subway tracks. I used to shrug and keep walking.

Since my diagnosis last April, though, and especially since my prostatectomy last July, it has not been so easy for me to shrug it off. Perhaps it’s because prostate cancer and its treatment have left me feeling vulnerable. Now, it’s as if a heedless speeding car pulls some small biological trigger of agitation that too quickly metastasizes into rage. Suddenly, I’m howling at the traffic. If I could, I’d turn green and bellow: “Hulk smash!!!”

Getting Angry About Prostate Cancer - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

The Son Of Sam (SoS) is my attempt at bringing the same basic design ideas from the world of web applications (and pretty much any application written after 1990) to the world of SMTP processing.

At its core SoS is just a Python based SMTP server that can receive emails, process them using handlers based on routing regex, and then relay results out again using templates. All of this is done without using alias files, m4 macros, pipes, weird protocols, or duplicate processing of the emails.

SoS just works like a flexible scripting language SMTP should operate.nullnull

ZSFA -- Son Of Sam Email Server

Other proposals include everything from persuading consumers to eat less meat to slapping a “sin tax” on pork and beef. Next year, Sweden will start labeling food products so that shoppers can look at how much emission can be attributed to serving steak compared with, say, chicken or turkey.

“Of course for the environment it’s better to eat beans than beef, but if you want to eat beef for New Year’s, you’ll know which beef is best to buy,” said Claes Johansson, chief of sustainability at the Swedish agricultural group Lantmannen.

As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions - NYTimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities accused William Del Biaggio III, 41, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and part owner of the Nashville Predators hockey team, of defrauding investors and using the money to buy his $25 million stake in the professional sports team.

S.E.C. Charges Venture Capitalist With Fraud - NYTimes.com

When I was in the minor leagues, I had the brilliant idea to work for some extra spending change over the holidays. So I took a job at a Barnes and Noble in North Jersey. (Although I was a first-round bonus baby, we only made $850 a month my first pro season, which was quite a shock.) I had an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, so in many respects I was considered overqualified for my job as a cashier. Still, I figured I was a ballplayer who was keeping busy and making some Christmas money.

That was until a guy walked into the store wearing a Penn Engineering hat. He was young, maybe a sophomore, and when I told him that I had graduated from the engineering school, his face fell. Then I pieced it together: I had shaken his hope for getting a job commensurate to his Ivy-league degree.

But I was only doing what ballplayers do in the off-season: something that makes no sense whatsoever.

Op-Extra Guest Columnist - Heading Home - The Endless (Off-) Season - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Why Vote? - New York Times

The phrase ""Boil The Ocean" describes an attempt at something that is way too ambitious, effectively impossible. The first time I heard the term was several years ago from an IBM developer. I thought it was an IBM-ism but I've been hearing it more and more outside of IBM. A Google search turns up an early use of the phrase that really captures its meaning:

When asked by a reporter what to do about U-boat sinkings during World War I, Will Rogers is said to have responded: "Boil the ocean". "But how would you do that?" the reporter continued. Without a beat Rogers replied, "I'm just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details."

Classic.

Boil the ocean

GREAT cornering and eye-popping acceleration make Porsche’s cars popular among thrill-seeking bankers and hedge-fund managers. Now its clients are discovering that the carmaker itself has an unexpected talent for cornering markets. In a few tumultuous days it is thought to have made a cool €6 billion-12 billion ($7.5 billion-15 billion) on the share price of Volkswagen (VW)—a coup that has roiled the world’s financial markets.nullnullnull

Porsche breaks the hedge funds | Squeezy money | The Economist

Satellites are achieving unparalleled efficiency with a new protocol, DVB-S2. The performance of DVB-S2 satellite systems is very close to the theoretical maximum, defined by the Shannon Limit. That efficiency could be pushed even further by network optimisation tools and equipment recently developed by European researchers.

Satellites approach the Shannon limit

“Any modification to the exterior or electronics requires new certification,” Mr. Zornetzer said. So the Googlers brought in the fighter jet. “The Alpha Jet they are bringing on board is considered an experimental aircraft, so we don’t have the same issues as with a passenger plane,” he added.

Mr. Zornetzer said the Alpha Jet will spend most of the next few months in Seattle being converted from military to civilian use.

Google Founders’ Fighter Jet Will Fly NASA Missions - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com