Welcome to the latest edition of Facebook Follow Friday. Each Friday there’s a tradition on Twitter called Follow Friday, and I decided to do a Facebook version here. What’s it have to do with OCD and addiction, you ask?
Mood music:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv9-zSWMGP0&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Simple: A person in recovery needs the people around him/her to stay sober and abstinent. Most important are your family and closest friends. But the friends on Facebook can be helpful too, especially those who brighten up the wall with positive, witty, thoughtful posts. That stuff rubs off on the reader, and if that reader has fought depression, addiction, anxiety and all those other things, the mood gets a needed lift.
The folks I want to acknowledge this week are mostly from the security world. In knowing them through my day job, they have also become friends:
Jeri Ellsworth: She’s actually one of my new connections, a self-taught computer chip designer best known for, in 2004, creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. The “computer in a joystick” could run 30 video games from the early 1980s, and was very popular during the 2004 Christmas season, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel. Check out her work and you’ll forget about your troubles for a bit.
Erin Jacobs: Known in the twitterverse as SecBarbie, Erin is a security professional who has done much to advance the cause. She writes a blog that makes security accessible to everyone, and can always be seen at the big security conferences. I’ve learned a lot from her.
Jack Daniel: Another of my security friends, a fellow member of the NAISG board of directors, the man with the 31-year-old beard, driver of the Shmoobus. Jack’s more than a man and more than a security pro. He’s an experience. 
Brad and Davida Dinerman: I’ve known this husband-wife force of nature for a long, long time. Brad is the engine behind NAISG (the National Information Security Group) and Davida is a longtime PR pro who has helped me out with many an article over the years. I’ve learned a lot from them, too.
Andy Ellis: He’s CSO of Akamai Technologies and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I’m not sure I would have pulled off my series on distributed denial-of-service attacks this year without his input.
Bob McMillan: Bob is one of my colleagues at IDG. He writes for the news service and is one of the most prolific security journalists I’ve ever met. I’ve been grateful as hell for his articles this year.
More next week…