Just sharing a story I saw on the Web…

So this guy, Patrick Moberg, from New York, spots the girl of his dreams while waiting for a subway; love at first sight if you will. He’s 21 and a designer for Vimeo (a startup, think Youtube in high-res). Said guy quickly makes a sketch of her and posts it up on www.nygirlofmydreams.com. Can you guess the ending?..

Yes! Word gets around, even in crusty New York, and he finds the girl. She was Camille Hayton, an Australian interning in the city. An update on the site read:

FOUND HER!

A friend of hers came across the site, recognized the description, and sent me an email. We’ve been put in touch with one another and we’ll see what happens!

But there’re endings, and there’re endings. Real life ones. www.nygirlofmydreams.com was updated a few months later with a wistful farewell:

Here’s where it gets tricky… In our best interest, there will be no more updates to this website. Unlike all the romantic comedies and bad pop songs, you’ll have to make up your own ending for this.

Not good enough for the noseys around though, and the real ending was indeed dug up by an Australian magazine. They broke up after two months.

I think each person would take away something different from the tale. Is it the journey or the destination? :). In Camille’s words:

I wanted to give it a go, so I wouldn’t later wonder, ‘What if, what if?’

Popularity: 60% [?]

Interest

• Two men raise a lion cub named Christian for years, and are forced to release him when he got too big. This video shows their reunion.

• Impossible vertical 360 photo
• What Google News would look like in utopia.
• “Unicorn” found in Italy
• Pennsylvania experiments with painted “speed bumps” - optical illusions - which can be produced for much less than the real thing.
• Man from Oregon uses helium balloons strapped to a lawn chair to safely fly 200 miles, using a BB gun to slowly pop enough balloons to lower him to earth.

Ethics

• In contrast to heroic stories from the Sichuan earthquake, a secondary schoolteacher tells of how he fled rather than help his students evacuate: “I’m only really concerned about myself”.
• Writer Christopher Hitchens, who had initially opposed the designation of waterboarding as torture, decides to undergo the procedure himself. His conclusion: “Believe me, it’s torture!”
• Teenager from faith-healing family dies of treatable condition.
• Romanian rape victim is allowed to have an abortion that would usually be considered illegal
• Should we give convicts the same opportunity for (expensive) treatment?

Internet

• France government strikes a deal with its ISPs to block porn, terror, and hate web sites
• Associated Press draws up rules that require you to pay $12.50 every time you quote more than 5 words from any of their syndicated articles. Uh-oh!
• A stroll through Wikipedia shows disparities between the attention given to certain subjects: Call of Duty, the popular WWII game, has a longer content total than actual WWII articles.
• Speed test of the latest browsers shows Opera still ahead of the pack! (FF3 is ahead in RAM usage, but most computers have enough RAM, and most browsers use up unused RAM anyway to cache data.)

Science

• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski takes a single e. coli bacterium and cultivates its offspring, which make a significant evolutionary shirt in the 31,500th generation.Some editors at Conservapedia take offense, demonstrating their ignorance of scientific research while hassling Lenski to reveal “his data”.
• Survey of undergrads finds the more men choose romance over success.

Consumer

• P&G evades sales tax by claiming that Pringles “are not potato chips”
• Up to 95% of returned gadgets in the US still work.

Games

• CEO of the company behind Crysis blames piracy for Crysis’s failure, claiming a 20:1 piracy ratio.
• Manager at THQ (Titan Quest) posts similar rant on a forum, taking aim against game piracy.
• Fallout 3 is tentatively banned in Australia
• Kotaku.au has a feature on the experience of a WoW poweleveller (i.e. person who hires someone to do his levelling for him )
• MMORPG Tycoon attempts to simulate making an MMORPG. Activities include setting zones with level ranges, and adjusting monster numbers.
• Only 2, 676 out of millions who were eligible choose to collect on the infamous “Hot Coffee” settlement of Grand Theft Auto
• PS3 exclusive MGS4 pokes fun at the Xbox360’s inferior capacity in-game: “There is no disc 2!”

US

• Damning article about John McCain’s ex-wife and how he left her after her disfuguring accident.
• McCain admits he doesn’t know how to use a computer.
  (To be fair, I don’t think Pak Lah does either…)
• The best of Dubya

Malaysia

There are intentionally no Malaysian political snippets this time :/

• Malaysian taxis voted worst in the world in a magazine survey.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Going down to KL this weekend and thought I’d leave you guys with this (if I haven’t told you about this already).

I don’t usually care much for blogger drama but this case feels a little different somehow.

It started with a post by a Singaporean blogger, Jean, titled “Help needed: I was molested by a friend while I was asleep“. To really get into this, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS. Digest it and form your own opinion.

Basically in the post the blogger outlines how she went on a trip alone with a (guy) friend and ended up sharing the same bed with him because the hotel was out of rooms. On the last night:

Half way through my sleep, I thought I felt hands moving along my back. Being a light sleeper (I’m usually a light sleeper when overseas), I woke up and felt fingers running along the right side of my back. With my back facing John, I didn’t know what to do. I kept very still because I was afraid of being assaulted. He’s easily 1.5 times my size, not to mention being taller than me. Soon enough that stopped but I didn’t dare go back to sleep.

Then I felt it. The distinct feeling of a sausage-like object rubbing against my bottom. I couldn’t take it any more and screamed and jolted up. John then pretended to be shocked and asked me if I had a nightmare. I didn’t answer him but took the blanket and went to the small table where my laptop was. I signed in on MSN and turned on my webcam and told my friend what happened. I turned on the webcam facing me throughout the night, on one hand worried that something worse might happen and on the other hand at a lost of what to do.

I think I was surprised to find myself thinking “WTF is wrong with this girl - alone on a trip and agreeing to sleep in the SAME BED with a guy?” I wondered if I was guilty of victim blaming. At the same time, I couldn’t quite shake off the nagging feeling that if the blogger were such a prude, then she would have insisted he slept on the couch on the first place. No girl is that innocent - hey, considering she’s Singaporean.

A Singaporean tabloid even picked up and ran the story. However they also did something else - they got the guy’s side of the story. It turned out to be quite a shocker. Jaywalk has reproduced the articles on his blog.

Quite the sordid account, and will please those who like scandal and sex :). On my part, I was just glad that my instincts were vindicated.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Just sharing a story that I’d read some time back but got Dugg today:
24 years on - The man who saved millions of lives (Another version here, or the wiki entry)

The uplifting part about the story is how a military officer refused to follow protocol, because it would have resulted in a war costing millions of lives. The sad part is how it was precisely this which caused him to be shunned and considered an unreliable military officer, eventually having a nervous breakdown and living the rest of his life in poverty.

Popularity: 36% [?]