Today, Israel won its first (and most likely, only) 2008 Olympic medal in Beijing. It was a bronze medal…in windsurfing.

I watched it happen live, of course, this morning (approx. 9am Israel time) and was amazed by the response of the announcers. In the last 5 hours since it was televised live, they have replayed the race at least 4 times. And every time they replay it, I’m shocked by the way the announcers are absolutely SCREAMING when the sailor crosses the finish line. (And you might be able to hear my trying not to laugh in the background…)

Of course, I had to get it on film.

Take a look at what REAL Olympic enthusiasm is:

Note: I was completely alone when I filmed this so any noise you’re hearing is from the television.

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A few nights ago, I went online and registered on the Nike Human Race 10k Marathon Israel site.  I didn’t do it before now for a few reasons:

1.  I wanted to train for a few weeks to see if it was even humanly possible for me to do it.

2.  I needed help with the registration since it was all in Hebrew.

I could translate where I should type my name and the t-shirt sizes but thought perhaps I should be sure I wasn’t accidently filling in my phone number where my credit card info should be (and vice versa).  Long story short, E helped with all of the translations and it’s official!

[pic] above: The official registration confirmation all in Hebrew. You can understand my confusion? At least I know my name in Hebrew! And I think the bottom part roughly translates to “Good luck you masochistic American”.

P.S. What a snazzy shirt I’ll be running in!

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Yesterday I took some time to migrate my website feeds to Google.  My feed provider, FeedBurner, was recently bought out by Google (big suprise, eh?) and Google sent me an email asking me to verify my websites with them.

No prob.  They sent instructions to access my domain name manager which required a lot more brain power than I anticipated.  (It took me upwards of an hour to figure the damn thing out.)  In the end, I created a CNAME record (after a massive amount of fiddling) which verified my websites for Google.  A few minutes later, I received a feed in my email from my www.patriotmissive.com site (enter at your own risk) and all was right in the world.

I was so excited to have done it correctly that I forgot to read the last bit of instructions:

“After completing domain ownership verification, you can remove the CNAME record.”

Of course, I didn’t remove it and neither did I check back to see if my site was being directed properly after all my messing around in the domain name manager.  Like the mediocre administrator that I am, I just got up and went on with my day.

I had no clue anything was amiss until Dad sends me a concerned screen shot of what this site was loading yesterday morning:

[photo] Is that Leisha Hailey?? Coincidence? I think not.   As much as I’d love to have Leisha Hailey as the American Babble representative, I knew I had to set things right.

Thank you AN Hosting tech support!

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