Erik's Blog

The other day I noticed an interesting article in Spain’s sports newspaper, MARCA. The article starts something like this like this:

Yeste walks towards the corner flag for a corner kick after two attacks on goal by Athletic Bilbao. He hasn’t yet set the ball down when a shout is heard from the far end of the bar: Gooooooal!!! Seconds afterwards, Yeste kicks the ball, which deflects off Lass in the first row, and Llorente scores the goal.

All the excitement of watching a soccer match has been ruined. What just happened?
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The other day I received an email asking me to link one word in one of my posts to a website. In exchange, they offered me $50 per year. Now, my ad revenue from Google AdSense is about $7/month or $84/year. If someone (not you, Mr. SEO Marketer!) offered me $50/year to put a large bold ad on every page, I might consider it. But one ad hyperlink on one word on one post? No problem!

To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.
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Yesterday, as I was digging through my coins to pay for a cool European lager, I happened to glance at the artwork on the heads (Or tails? Who can tell anymore?) side of the coin. At first I thought it was some kind of joke currency or bizarre token that someone had slipped me in mistake or trickery. So I saved it, pretty sure it couldn’t be real. But lo and behold, it’s a special 2009 commemorative 2€ coin. To quote the Official Journal of the European Union (PDF):
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My parents are visiting, and they brought a set of photos that I haven’t seen for a very long time. They are photos that I took just before and during my high school graduation from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics on June 1, 1996. Needless to say, it was quite a blast from the past. There’s nothing like a photo of the dorm room you lived in fourteen years ago to bring back a flood of memories. My time at NCSSM was definitely the peak of my academic career. Everything (i.e. a four-year bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NC State) after that was a slow glide downhill.
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I recently found myself in a dark room with my iPhone and a cold pint of lager. For reasons still unclear to me, I set my beer down on top of my iPhone, and the result was amazing. A beer lamp!

In short, Apple has manufactured not only the best mobile phone on the market, but also the most awesome coaster ever!
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…or Why You Should Put The Cork Back In The Wine Bottle. Yesterday I opened a bottle of wine to have with lunch, as I often do on Sunday. Normally, however, I either put the cork back in it when I’m done, or insert a plastic cap. Yesterday I forgot, and today when we went to pour some leftover wine for our midday meal, we found some intruders were in there enjoying our delicious beverage.

At least some of them were alive and swimming around…perhaps drunkenly.
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This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.
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It’s weird, the songs we sing to our children. When a song is needed to get a baby through a stressful time or maneuver, the parent often doesn’t have time to specifically choose a song for the occasion, the brain is just told to sing, and sing it does.

Recently my brain and I been going through a John Williams phase. I love John Williams’ music. If Beethoven or Bach or the Strauss boys were alive today they’d be scoring movies, too. Different songs come out of me at different times depending on the current parenting operation. When I have to flip her onto her stomach as part of a donning or doffing, the Superman theme comes out as she naturally resembles a flying prone human.
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My sister-in-law has been begging me to make this photoshop construction for a long time. Finally on Saturday I took the pictures, and today I spent a disturbingly small amount of time (< 5 minutes) photoshopping two photos together.

One interesting thing that I discovered in this endeavor was that it’s really hard to move a 7 kg weight from one side of your body to the other without drastically changing your posture. On the photos with Nora on her right, her hips were exaggeratedly to her left, and vice versa.
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Two weeks ago, I was contacted by someone claiming to be a contributing editor to a book that is about to be published, asking if I would accept money in exchange for permission to republish a blog post of mine in their book that may or may not sell millions of copies in over thirty languages. Here’s the email I received (hyperlinking mine):
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