I saw Greg Williams at lunch today at the Pit. Check out the comments in the post below.

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UPDATE: I'd like to welcome any readers who might have arrived here via web searches for "mucous seal". It's been three years since I had mine removed and I've had no complications. Good luck!

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Daddy's kinda hurtin' right now. On Wednesday, I had what's called a mucous seal removed from the bottom of mouth, near my tongue. It was this little cyst the size of half a peanut. I've had it for more than a month. It was painless, not causing me any problems, but to be on the safe side, I went to the doctor to get it checked out.

She told me to leave it for a month to see if it would go away on its own. It didn't, so I had it cut out. The procedure itself took less than ten minutes. She froze my mouth and then used a scalpel to cut the damn thing off. Three stitches were put in to seal the wound.

Afterwards, I wasn't given antibiotics or any other post-op drugs. The pain is almost non-existent, well except for the first two hours when it hurt like a sumbitch. The problem is that my tongue has swollen to comical proportions. Because my tongue is so big now, it's difficult to swallow and speak. The speaking I can do without, though I talk with a lisp now as many of you have heard. It's the eating that I'm having a hard time with. A swollen tongue also has lowered mobility so I can't use my tongue to dig food out of my teeth.

I have to eat bites of food that are really small so it takes me even longer to consume my meals. I'm getting the impression I'll probably lose some weight because of this.

When I do talk, it's almost impossible to talk without a lisp. The lisp makes you say things you normally wouldn't say. It's like the lisp makes you want to talk like a moron. This of course all good because I start my new job on Monday and my co-workers first impression of me is that I'm some idiot.

I'm hoping by Monday, the swelling will have subsided enough that I can speak and eat somewhat normally. Until then, I'll be like Kramer from that Seinfeld episode where Mel Torme thinks he's mentally challenged.

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As some of you know, I'm not a big fan of reality TV. I don't like Survivor. When the first finale of the US version was on, my entire testing team went to the TV room to watch it. I stayed at my desk along with Peter Dodson to continue testing NHL 2001. I don't really care for The Amazing Race, The Apprentice, The Contender, Temptation Island, Super Nanny, Trading Spouses, and the list goes on and on.

If there was a reality TV show that I do enjoy watching, it'd be Cops. Oh man do I like watching Cops. There's something about watching bad guys getting caught that is so entertaining. Do not call me if they have a special edition episode on car chases.

Anyways, you can add one more reality TV show to list that I watch regularly. The show is called Beauty and the Geek and it's on the WB network. The show's premise is essentially this: get seven geeks together with seven babes and just film the carnage that will undoubtedly will ensue. Actually, there's more to it than that. Each geek teams up with a beauty. The goal throughout the show is for each pairing to learn something from each other's lives. For example, the babes chosen apparently aren't too book smart. In the first episode, the geeks had to teach them grade five geography. In return, the beauties have to teach the geeks pop culture things like pop music and how to dance. At the end of each episode, the teams compete against each other in an "elimination challenge". A team is eliminated at the end of each show.

Being somewhat of a geek myself, I could sympathize with a lot of the guys on the show. Let's see, there's a med student, computer programmer, at least one virgin, and one hilarious guy who's never kissed a girl. He's funny not because of the kissing thing, but because he's just a character.

The beauties are for sure extremely attractive. The casting people however, chose really stereotypical good looking women though. A lot of them purport to be not really interested in school or books or even caring about being educated. I've met several women in my life who are just as attractive as these ladies but were highly intelligent. I guess the show wouldn't work if they had gotten those ladies instead.

Here are a few screenshots from the first episode:







I must mention one thing, the show is being exec produced by Ashton Kutcher, so there remains a possibility the public might be getting Punk'd. Regardless, after just one episode, I think I'm hooked on the show. I can't wait for the next episode.

If you want more, here's a 2.5 minute clip from the first show:

beauty_and_the_geek_101_clip.avi - 25 Mb

The show isn't on local Vancouver cable as far as I know, but I was able to find it using Bittorrent. Contact me if you want the first show!

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The SJC softball team played their first game today. Though I have captained the team the last two years, Adam is now running the show. It just makes sense that the captain of the SJC team should actually be living at SJC. I am, however, still part of the squad. To use a completely incorrect analogy, I'm Linden coming back to the Canucks with Nazzy as captain.

Anyways, this year's team has a radically different look compared to last year's. For the first time in recent memory, we have more ladies on our team than guys. Unless something drastic happens, we will probably never have to worry about a shortage of women come game time. More than 50% of the team doesn't even live at SJC, though many of that group are ex-SJC residents.

Something that hasn't changed is a few of our players are playing softball for the very first time. It also wouldn't be a SJC softball team if we didn't have at least one former cricket player with us. Those guys and their crazy, gloveless fielding.

When the other team showed up, I thought we might be in a spot of trouble today. Most of their team had gloves while several of players had none. We also only had one bat, the other team had a fine selection of bats to choose from.

As the game progressed however, my fears were allayed as we stayed quite close to the other team for the first few innings. There was a scary moment when one of the opposing players got hit with the ball trying to catch an infield fly. She took it right in the mouth and just from the sound of it, it looked awfully painful to me. She went down for like a minute but she was a trooper and trotted off to get some ice with another teammate.

Our fielding and hitting was actually quite decent for an SJC team. As Joel will tell you, however, I didn't play shortstop too well today. I missed a few balls when diving should have been the strategy, but I hesitated. I think I only could have been charged one error today but I hope I improve the next time out.

Speaking of Joel, boy did he put on a show today. Because of his busted hand, he couldn't play today but instead, graciously took over the role of manager, base coach, cheerleader, and statistician. When we were up to bat, he was calling out the lineups and telling our baserunners when to run. He offered encouragement to all our players when we were both hitting and fielding. He negotiated and discussed the rules of the game with the other team, at times asking for actual demonstrations of the rule in question. True to his professional conduct as a lawyer, Joel was vocal and effective.

Even before the game was over, Adam and I were wondering how we were even able to function the last two summers without Joel. All the little tasks he took care of were traditionally handled by the captain and his or her co-captain. We both thought that Joel was an indispensable tool out there. He even was entertaining to the other team, so much so that I think the girl in black with the knee high socks was checking him out.

Ok, I think I've inflated Joel's ego enough now. By the way, we won the game by one run! Yay us!

With me starting work next week, it'll be tough for me to join the team for the rest of the season, but I'm hoping to hammer some sort of deal with the company. Maybe I can start work earlier on Tuesdays and still make the games.

In any case, good job out there team!

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I'll be at the passport office today. Come see how long I'll be waiting.

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I hope I never have to make another decision that was as agonizing as this one was. Nevertheless, I am happy to report I am the newest software engineer at Digital Eclipse.

I'll have more to write about this later, but right now, I need to get outside and relax.

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Frequently rated as one of the top burger joints in the Lower Mainland, Vera's Burger Shack is opening up a new location at the UBC Village. After running some errands today at the Village, I noticed Amigos, which was previously Country Style, had closed up. The windows were all papered up, but there in black letters was the announcement that Vera and her burgers would be arriving soon.

I think it's about time that another high profile tenant move into the Village. The Village is ok, but the arrival of a gourmet burger joint is certainly welcome news to me. We'll finally have another dining option other than sushi and McDonald's.

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As part of being a responsible web site owner, I look through my visitor logs every once in a while to see if anyone is doing things they shouldn't be. These things include hotlinking which is essentially directly linking to files off my web server without showing the page or context from which I originally intended the files to be presented from. What's worse is when someone directly embeds my files into their web page without citation. I wind up having to provide the bandwidth for someone else's web page.

The worst offenders come from these crappy on-line communities like myspace and xanga. These sites are supposed to offer young people a one-stop shop to set up their little sites complete with blogs and photo albums. In reality, these people rarely make use of the blog aspect but instead concentrate on seeing how many images of Orlando Bloom they can hotlink from their site.

I find these sites pathetic. Not because they like Orlando Bloom or whatever celebrity, but because they leech off other web sites to provide the images for own little site. Some of these kids just go overboard with it, cramming upwards to 50 images of whatever into their site. Each image of course, coming from servers they don't own.

So, I found just such a leecher while combing through my access logs. A xanga user named "spazzypatti" had been directly embedding a link to an 8 Mb Star Wars mp3 file from my server. This meant that anytime anyone visited her xanga site, my server had to transfer over the 8 Mb file so that her visitors could have something to listen to while they perused her site.

No way, not on my watch Betty. I ain't footing the bandwidth bill for you and your friends. She had a form on her site that allowed me to e-mail her. I politely wrote that I noticed she had linked to one of my files. I also told her she was welcome to download the file to her own computer and then host the file on her server somewhere else. I finally explained to her why hotlinking is bad and why I carry the burden of her actions.

I had actually sent out an identical message to another xanga user who had done the same thing to me with the same mp3 file. Within a day, he had removed the link to my site. Thinking that I could also reason with "spazzypatti", I let have a whole 24 hours to remove the link. After a day had passed, I checked my logs again. Nope, she hadn't removed the link. I was still getting requests for that file from her site.

This is where it got interesting for me. I went back to her site to see if she had wrote on her blog that I had e-mailed her. She hadn't but I nonetheless did see an eye-opening post. Turns out she's a teenage Republican party supporter and not a fan of Michael Moore. Read the third comment for the post though, my man Zach lays the smackdown. Anyways, I was thinking, not a Michael Moore supporter huh? Yes... yes... I could do something good here.

I quickly found an mp3 file which remixed Moore's 2003 Oscar acceptance speech as a anti-Bush song. I uploaded the song to my web server and changed the name so it matched the file name that "spazzypatti" had linked to off her site. Now, when anyone went to her site, it would play this anti-Bush song. Perfect! I also made sure to change the links from my other pages so that the original mp3 file could be still found by people who legitimately clicked on it from my web site.

It took her less than half a day to realize what happened. I will give her credit for revisiting my web site and relinking to the newly renamed mp3 file. When I woke up the next morning she had it back to the Star Wars song. I recognized that we could theoretically go around in circles with renaming and relinking so I thought I needed to end it immediately.

I changed the server settings so that there could be no more hotlinking of mp3 files from my server. Though this option was available to me from day one, I thought a polite note was more useful. Then when I found out she was a right-wing hack, I decided to have a little more fun.

I will leave you with two interesting items. The first is that our intrepid Republican appears to be a big Star Wars fan and also a fan of the latest movie. In the latest film, one of the most prominent sub-plots involves the deterioration of rights and freedoms as a leader gains more and more power, supposedly to help wage war more effectively. Ah the irony.

Second, "spazzypatti" appears to have discovered the dangers of writing a blog about her own life. Here's an excerpt from one of her posts:

"ok so i wont be updating for a while because xanga is pretty stupid and my mom has been reading some of the stuff i/you guys have been writing and she doesnt like the idea of opening my life to every random person on the internet..."

"say i write something about someone and that someone reads what i wrote, then they say something mean..so i say something not nice back which cause a huge fight over something purposeless"

They grow up so fast don't they? Hey, why do you think I write about what I had for lunch so often? It's a safe thing to post and no one gets offended.

Until she finds something else to write about, I think "spazzypatti" will have to archive that site for a while.

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