Just imagine if this was your home:
The World Cup seems a lot less important when you think about the trouble that these people face.
I ran across this recently and thought it was pretty funny. You will really only understand it if you have ever played Star Craft and know what Facebook is:
This post serves dual purpose as I was also lucky enough to get in to the Star Craft 2 Closed Beta. While I didn’t really get to play all that much, I made my friend Jacob the happiest guy on the planet by inviting him to the Beta as well. Playing with him was really fun as he’s pretty good so I was elevated from averagely good to really good status just by being paired with him 
. I preordered the Collector’s Edition of the game and can’t wait to give the single player experience and it’s level editor a spin.
I wonder they didn’t post this video to vimeo?
So the 2010 edition of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver came to a close yesterday hot on the heels of a Canadian win in the hockey final against the United States earning us probably the only gold medal most Canadians cared about.
I was busily migrating Kari’s email and wasn’t watching the game with my full attention but every time a goal was scored I knew about it. As the clock ticked down the final minute I decided to give the game my undivided attention and, of course, the Americans scored to tie up the game 
. At this point I figured it might be best if I didn’t watch the game anymore. Thankfully a few minutes later our boys got the job done.
These Winter Olympic games proved to be the best showing ever for Canada. We earned 14 gold medals, setting the record for the number of gold medals earned by a single nation during the Winter Olympics, along with 7 silver and 5 bronze. Only the US and Germany managed to snag more medals than Canada with 37 (9 gold/15 silver/13 bronze) and 30 (10 gold/13 silver/7 bronze) medals respectively but I think it’s safe to say that our medals were of better quality 
.
My Facebook news feed is full of people proclaiming that they’re proud to be Canadian which isn’t something that people normally do. Instead it’s usually full of people proclaiming how awesome it is to be Italian or Portuguese. I must say that this is a nice change since instead of being at each others throats we’re all rooting for the same team. So until the 2010 FIFA World Cup… go Canada!
Back when I first met Kari a friend of mine was getting married so a bunch of my buddies wanted to go to out for some drinks. I told Kari that I was going out with some friends and that Mod Club (on College) got tossed around as the place we’d be going to.
When I actually met up with my friends we took a vote between Mod Club and a strip joint. The strip joint won of course.
The women there were like hawks, I would just glance at one of them and they’d be all over me. Being a good boy I of course turned down all of their offers. Later in the evening Kari sent me a text message inviting me to swing by her place afterward. As the evening wound down I eventually made my way to Kari’s house and explained to her what had happened with my evening, mainly the switch from the regular night club to the strip joint. After my story she noticed some sparkles on my cheek. I thought about it and remembered that a young lady that went by the name “Innocence” had gotten especially close to me while trying to persuade me to utilize her services and went so far as to brush her cheek up against mine.
It’s been many months now since that night and I can only imagine what trouble I would have been in if I had lied about where I went. Instead, I’m fortunate enough to still have Kari in my life along with occasional teasing about my run in with “Innocence”.
So for Christmas I ended up getting Kari a Nespresso machine that I knew she had her eye on since our trip to Europe. I bought the frother together with the machine as a combo since I noticed that she also seemed to be a fan of this additional magical contraption.
Normally I don’t wrap gifts, I just toss them in a nice looking bag with some tissue paper. For Christmas though I try to put forth the extra effort, so when it came time to wrap the two boxes I decided to start with the frother since it was way smaller. Half an hour later I had a neatly wrapped frother and enough insight into the wrapping process that I was able to come to the conclusion that there was no way I’d be able to wrap the actual machine since it was so much larger. I decided to hide it away in a closet and present her with just the frother and the book I got her that would hopefully convince her to stop smoking
When I presented these two small gifts to Kari I immediately saw the look of sadness in her face. I could actually see the thought “Is there a Nespresso model that small?” pass through her head. She opened the book first and did her best to contain her impending greater sadness. As she started to peel away the wrapping for the frother I immediately darted into the bedroom to get the machine and came back and exclaimed “It’s ok! It’s ok! I got the actual machine too!” so she wouldn’t get the idea that I only got her the frother and still be disappointed. Happiness and relief came over her face and I knew right then and there that I done good .
While at work I was looking into something that we could replace MySQL with since the two trends these days are to not do any JOINS between tables and to work with large datasets. I came across a database called MongoDB which was apparently very good at both of these things and used guides on the internet to get it going on a local Linux box.
I got to a point where it was almost working 100% but for some reason my simple test script couldn’t connect when run by Apache but could when run via command line. I would get the error:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'MongoConnectionException' with message 'Permission denied'
I scoured the internet and found only a single reference to my problem but couldn’t find a solution. After direct emails with Kristina Chodorow the primary maintainer for the MongoDB Perl and PHP drivers I found that the solution to my problem was to run the command:
$ /usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1
Hopefully this helps someone else. Thanks again Kristina .
Well I’m now 30 years old. That’s pretty damn old 
.
So after wearing a palatal expander for 6 months I finally had it removed this past week.
I was looking forward to being able to enjoy nice juicy steaks and being free to eat whatever I want again. Instead, to my surprise, my gums were terribly infected due to being covered by the apparatus. So instead of juicy steak, it was back to simple soup. Merely touching my gums with a toothbrush caused them to gush blood everywhere.
It’s been a few days now and while my gums are in pain still, it’s not as unbearable as it was when the ordeal began. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to be to eat a juicy steak soon .
So as I was making my way to the door to get off a bus the other day I felt my rear pocket and noticed that my wallet wasn’t there. I was seated at the very back of the bus so I ran back there and began staring at my seat and the purse that had been placed on it as soon as I left. As the passengers started staring at me like I was some kind of weirdo the owner of the purse asked me, “What are you looking for?”. “My wallet actually,” was my troubled response. At the point I wasn’t a weirdo anymore and everyone at the back of the bus came together looking around for my wallet. The effort didn’t find it so I quickly made my way off the bus so I could avoid having to talk to anyone about my current predicament.
Instead I sought comfort from my girlfriend and sent her the following text message:
I just lost my wallet.
My mind started racing and I got very tense. Did I lose it on the subway? Was I so focused on the book I was reading (The Lost Symbol By Dan Brown
I sent Kari a message with this new revelation and then immediately called her as I briskly walked home. I kept her on the line and when I finally made it in to my home and up to my room I immediately saw the familiar black blob that is my wallet on my desk. Immediately relief came over me and I was glad.
The main thing from this ordeal that sticks out in my mind was the reaction from the people at the back of the bus. After first I was some weirdo staring at people and things at the back of the bus and the next, after saying a few choice words, I was some guy that was about to have a terrible evening.
None
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
