3007 counties in America, 1696 NFL players, 449 NBA players, 256 FIFA players, 616 in MLS, and how many million broken bodies, brains and dreams of players that didn't make it? Less than 1 person per county in the country makes it in professional sports. Compared to the 460,000 NCAA student-athletes who don't make a penny, even though the NCAA makes over $9 billion a year. There are more yearly millionaire lottery winners than there are new pro athletes. Yet an endless stream of people throw their lives away chasing that dream. But that's not popular talk, is it. How open each televised game with the story of one of the millions of people who threw their life away chasing that dream.

I'd guess this runs true for most ( if not all ) countries, but I'll mostly familiar with America, so I'll stick with that. There is a sport called football which is largely controlled by the NFL corporation. They took in about $13b in 2016. Not too shabby, right? As a part of that world, are millions of pieces of data that general fans and fantasy football players analyze, memorize, obsess over, converse over, etc. Of course there is a division inside the NFL dedicated to organizing all of that information so that the stats websites, fantasy football world, gambling locations and more can all keep in sync with accurate data at all times. At any time of day, there are thousands of people going over these details on websites, sports-news shows, phone apps, etc. Every which way to twist and turn these numbers so that the past can be understood, the future outcomes can be narrowed down, and profits can be made or bar sports arguments can be won. This is an industry revolving around peopl... read more

It's great that the Postgres people are trying to make improvements to the administration tools they provide. And PG Admin 3 definitely has a lot of shortcomings, mostly related to freezing/crashing. But the 4 separation they have done is cripplingly slow to navigate. One would think that an HTML based UI would be much better, because of how much easier it is to work on compared to something like C++. If I could direct the development path of PGAdmin, I would push it towards creating a layer of separations between the data logic and the view logic. Instead of compiling the view logic into the dll, the PGAdmin could be a dedicated web server to handle all the data/security that is needed for the admin, and allow anyone to branch and modify the display system. The PHPMyAdmin project shows that an open source web UI can be very nice for managing a db server. The open source community has done a good job spending years developing that project. So imagine if they split that project into 2... read more

It's funny how so many people think that their taste in music is locked in time and is the best there ever was or ever will be. Unfortunately this isn't restricted to teenagers. The world obsesses with whatever is visible to them. I'm looking through my archive of music now.. and came across a 6 cd set called "Super Dance Hits of the 90's". And trust me, all those songs that were pretty prevalent in that time have failed the test of time. Even reading their names is making me laugh because of how terrible this all sounds now. Not to mention how many of them sound almost exactly the same. The music world is just like any other corporation based industry. You hear what the decision makers think they can get you to pay to listen to. Being creative or good or original is an irrelevant aspect. The fact that generations of people abandon previous generations of music are a huge indication of music being more of a social driven thing than a taste driven choice. And why does every band see... read more

So... in Puerto Rico... in this tiny little awesome river, is a water slide that was carved naturally into the rocks over who knows how many thousands of years. It is super slippery and VERY awesome. So on one of my trips down it, I popped my GoPro on my head and did a forward flip right when I went off the end. Unfortunately the splash into the water knocked the camera off of my head and sent it falling down into the dark waters. Normally I have my diving gear with me, but I left all that stuff at the resort that day. So I ended up diving off a boulder on the other side of the water for about 10 minutes until I finally was able to find the right blurry black blob that was my camera strap, as opposed to the other rocks I grabbed on the previous dives. Lucky for me, cliff diving is one of my favorite things to do... perfect excuse :)

I got to feed a rhino from my hand! I have the feeding part replay in super slow motion at the end, which is AWESOME! haha They have this crazy weird upper lip that grabs at their food, and her face was covered in wet grain, so it felt all icky. hahah so fun!

I went to the Martyr Memorial in Taiwan which commemorates their independence war in 1910. It features the names of the civilians and military personal who lost their lives in the war. As I walked up, there were a few hundred tourists standing in a perfect row down a long open entrance walkway on the front area of the grounds. I assumed they were standing against a roped off area, but when I reached them, it turned out they just had been held at bay by a few security personnel. The memorial had not comedy opened yet, and so the people are expected to remain outside of a certain area until after the morning opening ceremony. This is essentially the same thing that happens in the Vatican's St Peter's Basilica, combined with the changing of the guard at the London Palace. A multi language repeated announcement came over the int... read more

So far my flight departure had been delayed an hour. How many times am I going to open up apps on my phone that require internet, while I'm somewhere I know has no internet? At least I can charge my batteries... I'm not tired, so I've started doing stupid little tinkering with things. First I moved my scuba watch to my ankle. Because it has been on my wrist constantly for about three weeks, and is getting a little bothersome while sitting here on the plane. Then I hung my Velcro lanyard on the emergency exit door handle. I usually have my phone attached to it, but it doesn't really make sense to do that right now. I should add Velcro to my external battery packs... that would come in handy on occasio... read more