There are a lot of people who will judge you purely based on the quality of your code and skills, as it should be. But there are definitely some people in our field who will blatantly discriminate against job candidates based on their age. I've seen it myself when I've hired older candidates and gotten discriminatory feedback from peers and managers. Many people I know have seen it as well -- here's one example from someone I know.

About ten years ago, a good friend of mine (a highly experienced software development manager) was running a programming team. She asked her team to give her feedback about a developer who was in his early 40s. One of her programmers said the candidate was too old. He didn't think the candidate could possibly be up to date on current technology, and would never be able to keep up with the rest of the team. My friend hired him anyway over the (blatantly illegal and, frankly, disgusting and stupid) age discrimination of her team member. The new developer turned out to be one of her top programmers.

It's now ten years later, and the person who raised the objection is probably older than the candidate he had wanted to reject. I wonder if he's gone on an interview recently...

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is one of the best books on usability I've ever read. It's entertaining, highly thoughtful, and contains a lot of timeless lessons about usability and UX. My favorite story in the book is a case study of the software bundled with the Logitech ScanMan. They used personas to understand their users and strip out all of the extraneous features, and instead concentrate on making a much smaller feature set easier to use:

What surprised us was that every one of the test subjects expressed the opinion that Peacock was the “most powerful.” In literal terms of the number of features, this was far from true. In terms of effective power realized by the user, we had increased it significantly. page 141

From TFA: Facebook officials say their service is good for people. "Facebook can be like broccoli," [Facebook spokesman] Schnitt says. "Everyone can benefit from it but not everyone will want to."

That's very unflattering. Is that really how Facebook is perceived by the people who work there?

If Brazil borrows from India, it doesn't matter if those bonds are indexed in reals, rupees, renminbi, or Icelandic krona. Brazil can just go to JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, BofA, or any other bank with a derivatives desk and buy some currency swaps. As far as Brazil is concerned the loan is now indexed in dollars. The bank doesn't want to take any risks, so they'll probably go straight to India and sell them the other side of the swap, and India would be more than happy to buy it. The bank now makes a fee without taking any risk, and Brazil and India get the PR boost of using bonds indexed in BRICs currency -- without giving up the relative safety of using dollars.

You meant Ridley Scott and not Scott Ridley, right?

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

A little more info on large quakes (including references to the sources for the data on large earthquakes since 1900) here, if you're interested: USGS list of 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1900

My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.

Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see it. I think they now feel burdened with this new information that people that they work with aren't getting along, or something to that effect. My work life got easier when I stopped making the people around me feel uncomfortable, and I bet that my fellow socially awkward geeks would also see similar results.