At one point when Elise and I were dating, I mentioned that one of my favorite childhood memories was when an archer shot a flaming arrow into the torch of the 1992 Summer Olympics. She looked at me with surprise -- surely I knew that the archer did not actually hit the torch, and that the lighting of the flame was timed to when the arrow was near. I insisted that I had seen it with my own eyes and remembered it clearly. The debate sat unsettled for a couple of years.

With the advent of Youtube, it became easy to find videos of just about anything you could want. Elise decided to settle the debate once and for all. In one of the happiest moments of my marriage, I found an email, sender "Elise", subject "You're right", and the body text was a Youtube highlight. There was much joy and celebration that day.

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(You can tell where this is going, I'm sure...)

A few weeks later, I got another email from Elise. This time the subject line was just a frowny face. The body text: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vea23TG-GWU. I knew where this was headed. At 2:31 you can see the glorious finish that I remembered from my youth. At 2:35 you can see the point where my innocence was lost forever. Youtube commenter chrisz71 summed up my feelings perfectly:

AHHH- this just ruined SO much for me- I was around 6 years old when this was on- and of course, I didn't pay attenetion to it- but i DO remember the arrow in one of the more amazing lighting of the torch displays ever- that one camera angle just ruined my memory of this, and how cool it really was.

Unbelievable. This guy survived an SR-71 breakup at Mach 3.

Boy, do I love my pressure washer! 2500+ PSI... ho ho ho!

A couple of cool montages here, here, and here!

If you have 90 seconds, you can watch the various empires of the past 5000 years. Very neat stuff.

How a Beautiful Software System Becomes Frankenstein. It's a vicious cycle and I've seen it happen!

Two functions make Google's algorithms ridiculously fast and scalable: Map and Reduce. Joel on Software does a great job explaining how they work.

It's because of Management by Random Drop. Boy, that explains a lot!

This is a good list of software engineering proverbs. And I'd say they are all true.

Here is an explanation of toLowerCase() behavior in different locales. Be sure to use the locale-independent version of toLowerCase() if you are not displaying the output to the user!