I know we live in a state with beautiful nature and lots of wilderness, but this news article still surprised me: black bear spotted in Chapel Hill.

Sadly, the bear was apparently hit by a car and died, but I had no idea that there were black bears around here.

A related article on WRAL.com talks about two bear sightings in May of this year in Raleigh and Durham: "Law-enforcement officers said they believe the larger bear could weigh around 200 pounds. Residents are urged to stay away from the animals."

It's over 10 years ago that I saw bears in real live, from the bus in Tannersville, NY.

The Lego company has a vault with all models they ever sold, in their original boxes.

Tonight I saw a video of this vault and it's was a real trip down memory lane. They showed the castle, the space ships and many other goodies.

They even showed the Monorail, one of my all-time favorite Sinterklaas presents. Oh, the memories!

"Underneath all that there's a primal connection, something that makes everyone tune into the childhoods when they see the bricks, and get back into brighter, careless moments, even at the subconscious levels".

The match between the Netherlands and Russia was the first one I saw live in Euro 2008, and with the 1-3 result it was also the last Dutch game to see in this tournament.

We went with a a couple of friends to Woody's Tavern in Cary, where about 40 Dutch people were watching the game together. It was nice to meet Dutch people in the area, and to watch the game together. Petra was there, and we met Maarten for the first time as well. Two years ago in the World Cup I watched the elimination of the Dutch team against Portugal in a bar in DC.

After the first 90 minutes the result was 1-1, so another 30 minutes were played. About half way that extra time all TV screens stopped showed the game, and a Weather Alert interrupted the broadcast for about 3 minutes, without showing any information on the game... A big storm was coming over the Triangle, and when we drove home we were right in the middle of it. In the evening we had friends over for dinner and it was a very nice evening.

Watching soccer.

Argentines rooting for Holland.

Plenty of decorations.

Belen and Sasha.

Petra, Guus and Maarten.

I woke up early this morning and spend a productive morning working on a new feature. A co-worker recommended RadRails, and I plan to install it and check it out but I'm pretty comfortable with the command line tools so there's no rush. I played around with a commercial JavaScript/CSS library that we're using, and it is very impressive.

Today at 2.45 pm the game between Russia and the Netherlands starts. I'll be watching it with some friends in a bar in Cary, where a Dutch group gets together to watch the Dutch soccer games. We're prepared!

The other night we went to Kroger for groceries, and the self service checkout machine crashed half-way.

Perhaps it was the cucumber I was trying to scan.