I’ll be posting my impressions regularly throughout the week.

We search for the ball around the tree, but can’t find it. Then a fellow searcher lets out a shout: the ball is in the tree, about 5 feet off the ground. In the shot below, notice the shoe of a fellow golfer in the lower left corner to get a sense of the ball’s distance from the ground:

I got out my sand wedge and then swung upward into the branch. The ball pops out of the tree and rolls within a few feet of the tee. Here’s where the shot landed:

Probably two of the most amazing shots I’ve ever had, in succession.

And I made par.

I did, however, remember that the lead singer has black hair and is married to a blond actress—

—who is the daughter of another blond actress whose name, for the life of me, I could not remember—

—but I did remember that she is in a relationship with Kurt Russell, and that they starred together in OverBoard.

You with me so far?

When I arrived at work, I googled “Kurt Russell” and “Overboard”. Answer: “Goldie Hawn”.

I then searched “Goldie Hawn” and “daughter”. Answer: “Kate Hudson”.

And then “Kate Hudson” and “husband”. Answer: “Chris Robinson”.

His Wikipedia article contained the name of his band. Answer: “The Black Crowes”.

I then went to ITunes, search for the Crowes, and purchased the song.

I love the internets.

On Monday, Buffett said he wasn’t leaving the bulk of his riches to his children because he is “not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when the alternative is 6 billion people” having a chance to benefit from the money.

My respect for Mr. Buffet continues to increase, but I doubt his progeny is too happy.

(For those who know me, this is a rather ironic statement: I have been known to watch my share of golf and billiards, probably the two pinnacles in the Boring TV Pantheon.)

However, I really enjoy the yearly championship competitions of these sports — even more so the World Cup. Every four years the world participates in a friendly (yet not-so-friendly) World War. Except in this world war the likes of Ghana and the Czech Republic routinely route the U.S.A.

This year I’ve really enjoyed the competition. Today’s two games, Germany vs. Sweden and Argentina vs. Mexico were absorbing — especially during the beginning of the games. (2 goals scored in the first 10 minutes of each of the games.) And what was that goal from Rodriguez of Argentina!!?

The play has also been interesting — I took the time to finally understand the rules of the game. My enjoyment of the game has increased four-fold.

Another observation: soccer players are floppers! Oh, how they flop! Athletes of all sports flop, but soccer has taken it to a new level. It seems there is some unwritten rule between players and referees that every flop should involve some sort of penalty. Seriously, how hurt can two people get when they both jump up at the same time for a header!?

Duplicate the table you want to play with.

The MySQL syntax for this command is simple:

CREATE TABLE duplicate SELECT * FROM live

For large data-sets, you may want to limit the size of the test table:

CREATE TABLE duplicate 
SELECT * FROM live WHERE field1='value' LIMIT 0, 10000;

(Can you sense a theme for the last week?)

This is just another reason why I am constrained to evangelize the One True Editor. Every single engineer at my company, once I show them the flexibility and power of TextMate, immediately wants a Mac as their dev environment.

I'm quite impressed. It's based entirely off the Firefox code base, so a lot will be familiar to Firefox users. The Flock developers have drastically revamped the interface, and socialized it as well.  Adding and sharing bookmarks, blogging (this post was published through Flock), rss feeds organization and viewing— all have been integrated into the browsing experience.

I'm particularly impressed with the integration of Flickr and del.icio.us. I won't bother describing what is best experienced by downloading the thing.

Confirming Springer’s findings, several .Mac users indicated seeing eWorld artifacts in their online .Mac experience.

“Man, I saw those little amorphous eWorld guys and I thought I was having another bad mescaline-induced flashback,” said Mac user Trent Davies.

Davies then freaked out looking at an online image of the black MacBook.

“Pismo, man! Pismo! Aaaaaaahhhhh!”

So, is the author referring to me? Are there other avid Mac users named Trent Davies out there?

Whatever the case, it was a rather amusing start to my day.

Sad, I know.

Condone is another of those words with which I got off to a bad start: I initially thought it meant something along the lines of condemn. It sounded similar anyway. It turns out, however, that condone means nearly the exact opposite of condemn.

I still have trouble with condone, having to remind myself every time I hear it that it means the exact opposite of my gut reaction.

And that I do not condone… Or I do.

No, I don’t.

Set a man on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

• Beautiful packaging. As always.
• During the initial “welcome” wizard, I checked the “transfer from another mac” option. The transfer took about an hour, but that was very slick. I usually look forward to the marathon installation process with new hardware, but it was nice to skip all that and get to using it.
• When you transfer over your Applications directory, does it overwrite newer versions of applications with your older ones?
• This sucker is fast, fast I tell you.
• I’m surprised how seamless Rosetta is. Everything generally seems snappier. Even Word. (Except for the fact that my Office license didn’t transfer over. Grrh.)
• If you want to determine if an application is a universal binary, click “Get Info” on the application. The Kind field displays whether it compiled as a Universal or PowerPC application.
• Does the mac version of World of Warcraft run well? I guess I’ll eventually install Boot Camp, but that still feels wrong to me.
• The keyboard backlighting is a thing of beauty.

Golfers make better swingers

I immediately made several observations:

1. Her husband is a golfer.
2. They are both very old (I sped up next to her to check — definitely in her 60’s).
3. She probably bought the vanity plate as a gift for him.
4. They have absolutely no idea what the quote on that license plate means.

At least I hope so.

Increasing Success By Lowering Expectations

It is intended to draw laughs, but there is a lot of wisdom in that statement. It applies equally well to activities in business, religion, and any form of inter-personal communication.

It is an especially important maxim for the despair and disappointment that often accompanies the “one-up-manship” stress of Valentine’s Day.

Of course, I’m a guy, so this opinion is automatically disqualified on grounds of extreme bias.