All week I’ve been trying to get myself some reputation on stackoverflow so I could mark helpful answers as I keep poking around for solutions to tricky programming problems I’m working on at work…but hadn’t been having much of any luck with trolling around the site to find open questions to answer that weren’t extremely difficult questions or outside areas of my expertise. But then today, when I was poking around on there, thought I’d try answering a couple, and actually stumbled upon a question that while I wasn’t sure I had the *right* solution I had a partial idea what was wrong and what I’d try to fix the problem, and left a comment suggesting my idea, and then a couple hours later, whoa, when did I got from reputation of 3 to reputation of 28? Go back and look, and apparently my hunch turned out to be right on and just what the guy needed to solve his problem so he’d approved the answer and voted up the answer giving me reputation points for each of those actions. So I was excited about that.
And this was kind of random funny coincidence too, but when I was poking around on the site–they have this feature called badges, and when I was poking around on the site, I happened to notice a username that sounded awfully familiar, and so I clicked on it, curious whether it could be my college classmate Mike or not, and sure enough, the personal info in the profile matched up. And for bonus funny random points, it looked like he’d created his account near the same time I did (like as in within the last week?) from his profile.