Month: May 2014

Even par after twelve holes, and all of it from the back tees. It's a rare pleasure shooting a thirty-six on the front nine way back from the championship tees. I was going strong, but the further I got the more nervous and insecure I became.

Okay, so what if I shot a bogie on the thirteenth par three. Sure it was a lousy chip rolling past the hole and I missed the putt coming back by leaving it short. I should have just shaken it off and continued. Actually, that's what I thought I did, but I guess subconsciously this hiccup was eating me up inside.

After that I choked the rest of the way, starting even par after twelve holes it went like this: bogie, bogie (sliced into the trees and lucky it didn't go out of bounds), bogie (nice six iron ten feet from the flag but just off the back of the green, chip two feet from the hole, jabbed putt right for the miss), double-bogie (shanked a 4-iron of the tee), double-bogie (flubbed an easy chip from just off the green and three putted) and a bogie to end it all.

This has happened to me before a a couple of other occasions. Going along strong, worried to make a mistake, collapsing like a fool. It's all mental and I have no one else to blame but myself.

My final score was: 36 + 43 = 79 (at least I broke 80).

Golf is the cruelest of sports. It keeps taunting you to come back and to keep trying again and again until you somehow achieve that once in a lifetime perfect round.

I'm still hoping to achieve some day in the near future.

So this is pretty embarrassing. Barely qualified for the NGF Monthly Cup and felt excited. Joined the last flight as the last person. Drove early in the morning all the way to the east of Holland to the Heelsum golf course so that I could play with the best golfers. Mostly young bucks less than half my age, so what was I trying to prove? I guess I needed a new challenge in life, so I gave it a go anyway.

My swing felt pretty good and I was hitting some really long drives off of the tee. On the last hole I really let one fly, best drive of the year. However, two triple bogies, three double bogies and only six pars killed my game in the end.

Nice to be humbled, realize that I am not the best golfer in the world anymore, get back to basics and make me rethink my game.

In order to deal with stressful moments better so that you can remain focused on behaving effectively and doing what matters to you most, just follow these four simple steps:

• Stop
• Take a deep breath
• Observe with an open and gentle attitude
• Proceed positively

"The motivations of man, because he sacrifices his health
in order to make money, then he sacrifices money to
recuperate his health, and then he is so anxious about the
future that he does not enjoy the present the result being
that he does not live in the present nor the future, rather
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then eventually
he dies, having never really lived."

- Dalai Lama

After I updated to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, url links in other applications stopped working. Well, when I clicked on the links my google chrome browser would fire up properly, but it would stay stuck at the homepage and not be redirected to the link that I clicked on.

This was irritating me for days and I just could not figure out what was going wrong. I uninstalled and re-installed google chrome a number of times, removed the hidden ~/.config/google-chrome directory, on and on.

Just about the moment I was ready to give up completely and go back to firefox, I had an unexpected insight. The simple solution is just to do the following:

rm ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Probably something went wrong with the ubuntu upgrade whereby this file got leftover and wasn't deleted properly.

It sure would be nice if I could always putt the ball right in the middle of the hole like this more often.

Becoming a Resilient Person - The Science of Stress Management

Suppose you try to upload a file and keep getting server errors thrown in your face. Have a look in the apache error log and see if you can find a line looking something like this:

mod_fcgid: HTTP request length 136872 (so far) exceeds MaxRequestLen 131072

If that is the case, then you are in luck. To fix it, look for the apache configuration file called /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf and edit it. All you need to do is add the following line at the end of the file.

FcgidMaxRequestLen 2147483648

These are the details for Centos 6, but for other operating systems it should be something very similar.

So far this year, my golf game has been steadily going downhill. I do not believe that there is any correlation at all between the amount of time I practice on the driving range and my actual performance out on the golf course.

The more I practice the more I get stuck, it just doesn't matter any more. I even wasted sixty euros on a one hour golf lesson to readjust my grip. Throughout the week, I hit lots of buckets of balls and putt for hours, but I keep asking myself what for?

Though I am very frustrated I do not let it show. I pretend to be relaxed about my lousy golf game and joke around. I appear so very cool, calm and collected. The truth of the matter is that I am boiling inside, raging at myself because I cannot understand why I am playing so poorly.

I am tempted to throw my bag of clubs into the lake and my golf shoes along with them. But I better not, because perhaps in a few days or weeks I may need them again.