There was some excitement at church today.

By way of making an illustration about sin, the speaker had a fascinating message about the scientist who discovered the cure for leprosy. His story got a bit detailed around some of the people he studied and their disfigurements. I found it very interesting, and understandably gross. At one point I realized I was feeling pretty nauseous. “Maybe I should step out and get a drink… naw, don’t be a wuss.” after another 5 – 10 minutes I decided i was probably the message that was making me feel sick. Even though he was done his illustration I still felt the need to occupy my mind, so I tried reading some verses in the Bible.

Focusing on the letters is the last thing I remember.

Apparently at this point my wife asked me if I was feeling ok. I looked at her with glazed eyes, sat forward a bit; then passed out! My head went back suddenly and Kristi caught it! “Are you alright?!” I came to and thought I had fallen asleep in church! I was drenched in full-body sweat and realized I had dropped my Bible. I was very confused as to what happened.

Luckily we were sitting toward the back of church (and not at the front laden with a bass guitar as I usually would be), and we were able to quietly duck out. The usher of the day actually had some first aid training and made sure I was ok to leave which was nice. K talked me into going to the hospital and we got to see someone right away (a miracle in Kincardine).

Essentially, the doctor tells me I’m a variation on those guys who faint when they see blood. I can watch all kinds of gorrie movies, and play violent video games; but for some reason when people talk about it I feel gross. I can remember several times watching TV as a kid, or plays in highschool, or being with friends exchanging stories about the origin of scars when I started to feel gross. In all of those instances I was able to change the subject or escape.

Now, a few hours laters I feel 100% physically. Psychologically I feel like a dork for not being able to will myself to tolerate some mildly detailed story about a kids fingers falling off! *THUD*

UPDATES!

In the days following the incident I learned two things:

1. I was actually coming down with a bug on Sunday that would last the next few days leaving me constantly tired. I think this was a huge factor.
2. My Grandmother also faints when hearing about blood and guts.

According to this website I’ve been on Twitter 521 days as of posting. I love this site for probably the same reasons as most people.

1. I now know what some stranger on the other side of the world is doing in real time (great when that stranger is an expert in my industry)
2. I can interact with people of similar interests (and do zany experiments)
3. The site is so simple and straight forward that it begs for use

It is in its deceptive simplicity that some complex issues come out of Twitter. One I have coined “Twitter Pace”.

This has happened to me a few times; I will start following someone who is retweeting or @replying me only to find they are tweeting approximately every fifteen minutes – full time. To me this is waaaay too often, as I’m only following 200 or so modest tweeters. I am at a pace with those users. For me personally, I tweet upwards of once an hour as do most that I follow.

I expect that someone who is tweeting so often as to fill my listing of recent tweets is following over 1000 users, and doesn’t see their name appearing concurrently. By the same token, I imagine that friends who are following me and less than 20 others would think that I’m a spammy user! It’s all about Pace.

My life long relationship with peanut butter is probably as boring as yours. I’ve loved it since childhood, but never alone, always with jam or bananas or honey. On its own I find the taste overwhelming and semi-terrible.

That all changed when K and I went gluten free for a short period. In that time I tried Brown Rice Bread. On its own, or in other sandwiches this bread is fine, but nothing to write home about.

However! When you combine the two – peanut butter on Brown Rice toast (the instant the toaster pops), suddenly some kind of insane chemical reaction happens making the two the best thing since sliced… well, it’s just pretty fabulous. I’ve been known to have this three meals a day.

Granted, this bread is kind of expensive compared to other breads; but when you compare it to the Starbucks insanity that I’m much more accepting of, it seems downright sensible.

My mind is opened to weird combinations now. Bring it on Commenters.

Earlier this week I wrote a post about how well my name and username perform on search engines like Google. As a result I’ve been thinking a lot about names this week, and have come up with a few fun facts about my name.

1. Girl Name

Everyone has a name they would have been given if they were born the opposite gender. If I had been born a girl, my name would have been “Mary”. I wonder what affect this would have had on my life. I have a unique name, and I often have a unique perspective. Had I a normal name, would I be a little more subdued? It’s extra ironic since there are lots of girls named Arley in the world.

2. Moving Name

When we moved to North Bay from Edmonton I was four years old. Inexplicably when we got here I would tell the neighbourhood kids I was playing with that my name was “Chris”. My parents think it was the logic of “new town = new name”. I wonder if I resented having an unusual name that early. Who knows! “That Chris is a nice boy” “Who?”

3. Username

I came up with ArleyM in late grade 11. I had taken a job at the local A&P, and I would always find my name on the schedule as “Arley M”. This would be presumably to differentiate me from the other Arley’s (of which there were none). I thought it was hilarious, and I adopted it. I was also a huge KMFDM (a German heavy metal / industrial band) fan at the time, and thought “Sacha K” was such a cool name.

I love my name. It has family roots; after my Great Grandfather Arley Laidman. As a kid I didn’t like it so much, and often wanted to change it …or go by my middle name “Steven”.

As I recently documented in my DEBUT article; I have my own short URL service called RLE. I works by adding small strings that redirect. It starts with one character strings like 1-0 and a-z, before presumably moving to two characters and so forth.

Right now I’m still in the one-character zone, and I’m being a bit miserly about where I’m using these decadently short URLs. I recently needed one for a text message I had to send. Shortly after showing that link, I had to take it down; thus leaving “rle.me/c” as a useless short URL. This was a bit heartbreaking; until I decided to do something funny (yet somehow even more useless) with it!

My original broken short URL is http://rle.me/c
http://bit.ly/xOAlv points at RLE
http://ow.ly/nJ28 points at Bitly
http://tinyurl.com/nchced points at Owly
http://icanhaz.com/arleym points at Tiny URL
http://is.gd/2NKIE points at I can Haz
http://doiop.com/gekq61 points at IS GD
http://dwarfurl.com/b7778 points to Doiop
then after a visit to PHPMyAdmin…
http://rle.me/c points to Dwarf URL to complete the circle…

Now when I go to any one of these links it ridiculously goes through all of the links. Why, you ask? Why not! … this will probably last until one of the companies sees what I’ve done and kills that link.

It’s fun, since Owly adds a bar everytime through. I love watching the status bar. Man.

I need to pay more attention in massive conference calls.

UPDATE

A friend tells me that this is basically a microcosm of how a DDOS works. I didn’t realize it was that evil.