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Some might say that it's an incredibly derogatory word for someone who is crippled or handicapped. Oh, but no, no, no. In my book a 'crippie' is a slightly less than incredibly derogatory word for a 'crap hippie'. You know the type. Those with prayer flags at their house, or dreadlocks, or incense always burning, or Marley posters up on the walls, or any variety of things that point to their taking on the trappings of what the hippies were in the sixties without actually taking on the doings of the hippies in the sixties. Crippie meccas include places such as San Francisco [The Mission], Humboldt [all...], Nevada City (which I will be covering shortly), and of course the true nexus, Barcelona [El Raval or any random building with squatters]. Oddly enough, I seem to be surrounded by these folks in all my most favorite spots. Perhaps I'm a crippie myself? Not hardly. I'm much more in to doing things that make this world a better place and not feeling like I need to grow out dreads to show it. That and incense gives me the worst headaches in the world.       We probably all have a crippie in our lives and so now, I give you a name for these folks. Use it if you want. Some of my previous words are better circulated than others, but I'm always out to make the world a place bent around a vocabulary that I've created. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't always think that I'm the bestest sometimes and thusly, praving, kockalocks, and fatcarts are still just part of my own personal vernacular. Someday though, you will hear someone call someone else a crippie and you'll know the source--sarcastic ole me.

I was pointed to this fun little Flash game. Essentially, you need to trap the cat with dark green circles. It's not as easy as it seems, since the cat goes wherever he damn well pleases, which would be like any typical cat.       This was originally from Afrigator which has a wealth of undiscovered sites in there. It's not nearly as mainstream as Digg or Slashdot, so you can often find new things in there that no one else has heard of and pass their discovery off as your own if you're a cheeky soul.

Maybe I was out sick that day or was otherwise un-San Francisco-ed, but I simply don't remember when we got hit by 10,000 bouncy balls for a Sony Bravia advertisement. It seems that this happened around the end of October, 2005. There were a good number of blogs that covered it, yet once again, I was unaware. In fact, I don't know what much I was doing then other than chilling out after being laid off two months previous.       But, as it turns out for those who didn't know about it (like me), the end result was quite, quite cool. If you're curious, watch the commercial below in much less than cool YouTube resolution...              Once again, if this doesn't seem familiar it's because I believe it only aired in The Europe, again proving that we're not cool enough for nuthin' in these here states of America.       If you're curious for a spoof, you can enjoy it here. There are also other versions here [NYC] (which is actually my favorite), here [Egypt] and here [UK I'm guessing]. And just in case you think it's still all fake, check out the video for making of in San Francisco

For those who don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger happens to be a very brilliant actor. Those aware of his moment in Eraser where after many attempts to have a "Deep" moment with Vanessa Williams, after one too many cuts, he finally yelled out, "I'm not an actor!" should take heed. For, accusing him of flubbing lines and sounding about as smart a lump of cheese at times, is ridiculous. And to support my argument, I submit this evidence:              I mean look at that. Okay, I admit that it's not perfect Shakespeare, but it's surprisingly good for an action actor. Oh yeah, it happens to be in Spanish as well, because we all know that Arnold is pretty awful in English. I don't know why he hasn't stuck to Spanish all this time as he is much better in it than English and it would have gone over even better with the Hispanic population in the last election. Oh and in case, you were wondering what his line of 'Hasta la vista, baby' would be in Spanish (since it loses something when speaking Spanish lines in Spanish), check out this.       But, it all seriousness, it is obviously the overdubber that gives Arnold a better tone in Spanish. It's quite funny actually, since in Spain all of his movies are dubbed in to Spanish and it's always the same guy doing it, so people thought that Arnold actually sounded like that or something like that. It came as a rude shock once he became governor (again, I still have trouble accepting this) of California and they suddenly heard what he really sounds like. And naturally, a great many of us cried as he was sworn in to office as the first governor of the state unable to say the name of it correctly. Viv l'Kalifohrniya!

You know, I get really bothered when a company wants to give me an offer, but wants to get something out of me above and beyond my money. The reason I bring this up is because H&M sent out a 25% off promotion to some people. A friend forwarded it to me and just to keep my options open, I wanted to get the coupon.       Now, I rarely shop at H&M anymore as they use sweatshops and 3rd world labor to make just about everything they sell. But on the off chance, something in there isn't from one of these places, I might feel tempted to buy it, thus the interest in having a 25% coupon.       So, going to their site to get the coupon at www.hmfriendsandfamily.com I was more than slightly perturbed by the fact they wanted a rather large slew of my personal information to get this coupon. I'm not happy about that, but I proceeded through the hoops to get to the final page to download the coupon. But as it turns out, you don't need to do this, just to this link - here and you can keep all your private info to yourself if you want.       I might add that this coupon is only good from December 7, 2007 to December 9, 2007, so if you happened upon this article sometime in the future, it ain't gonna do you much good. Happy shopping and watch those labels!       

Damn you Onion! I knew that one day you would find me and spoof me up good.       It pretty much all revolves around the article about a fellow they call "Fancy Man". You can read it and if you know me, you're bound to see some similarities. The most poignant being that the guy in the article is a web designer and he likes tea. Oh yeah, he also happens to be 29, when I'm 30. Oh yeah, there's also the "hoity-toity copper-bottomed tea kettle" that he uses and I admit, I'm rather in to the one I've got since yes, it does make a difference to nuke it or boil it. Microwaves do strange things to food and beverage. It's the last bits in the article that stray from me. Oh yeah, they also make no mention of a blog, although I'm guessing that would be implied.       I suppose that the really disturbing thing about this is not that I feel someone who knows me, spoofed me. I'm just not that cool. It's more the fact that there are apparently more of me out there in such great numbers that The Onion could write a whole article about. That my friends, is by far more disturbing.

I'm no expert at photography. I've only taken about 25,000 shots which sounds like a lot until you realize that most pros take millions--each year. In fact, I don't really think that you can even call yourself any kind of a professional until you've taken at least 100,000 and sold some of them. Naturally, there are those natural born talents who don't need all this practice, but they are far and few between those of us who do.       Even though I am still, for all purposes, a hobbiest when it comes to photography, I have developed a very discerning level for what I consider to be a good shot. This ultimately means nothing as photography is an art form and art by its very nature is completely subjective. So, a shot of someone's family where the heads are cut off and it's out of focus may be a masterpiece to them, while I think it's garbage. But, being this as it may, I realize that I like photos where what they've photographed seems like it is artificial because it's so good. When the scene is just hanging there and you can imagine what happened before and what will happen afterward, that, in my mind, is perfection. It doesn't even need to be technically perfect for me to find it a perfect shot, just so long as there is an emotion to it.       A good example of what I'm talking about is a shot that is below. It's from the San Francisco Chronicle's website and is part of an article about the wildfires happening in Malibu currently. Skip down to take a look at it if you haven't already. See what I mean? Those chairs sitting there and the still smoldering ashes in the background just make this a great shot for me. Sure, you could read all kinds of garbage art school stuff in to it like how it's a statement of this or that. But all that is secondary nonsense. The photo stands on its own and just happens in such a way that it almost seems fake because it's so real.       A good example I've seen recently of where a photographer goes too far and makes a work too artificial, was at the Open Studios in San Francisco. There was one photographer there who had photos of Burma, but these photos were ridiculous. While technically quite sound, they were so posed and so fake looking that they would have worked better as cologne ads, as opposed to a work of art for the home. Now, some people may be in to this, but for me, posed and staged photos are for the most part dull (portraits being an exception) and they feel so commercial that any hint of artistic depth is wiped clean away. But, this is ultimately just me two cents and that doesn't really buy that much these days now, does it?

So for anyone that's really in to it, I had to take comments offline for a bit today. There's nothing wrong with the system, it's just that some bastard spam bot has decided that I'm a very lovable target, which sucks.       There is no overall problem, because most of my mantraps seem to work well. So, these buggers just keep posting and I keep seeing crap email because of it. And frankly, due to the fact that I get so few comments on the site, I just don't want to have a new email notification every five minutes about a new comment that really isn't a new comment and didn't even get posted on the site.       But, this isn't a probably that just my site has. It affects pretty much anyone who allows the public to submit information to their site. We all have to deal with it and some of those ways to deal with it are really annoying, such as those annoying groups of letters and numbers you have to enter.       I really don't want to saddle and end user with that, so I try to take on the fight behind the scenes. This is done in four parts:       1. Get the offending IP and block that user in .htaccess. This is really useful (albeit heavy-handed) when you have a site in say, Spanish and you've got spammers coming from China. You can block whole networks and it works pretty well.       2. See if the user is just tossing data at your site. Setting up an authentication "session" for users works well for some spammers because they will try to post information at your site from their server without actually viewing your site. Giving someone a token when they visit a page and then checking for that token really goes a long way. Of course, there are plenty of ways around this.       3. See if they're human. A human being can't type a comment in five seconds, but a machine can since there is no typing going on. If you check to see if they spent that long writing a comment and block them if they did. This works well and has yet to snare any real people.       4. In rare instances on some sites, I require any comment with links to be approved. Most users on most general sites never leave link comments. Spam bots do though, since that is the main reason they're doing what they're doing. Checking for a bit of link code, or better yet, just dropping comment with five or more links can catch other annoyances.              So, that's it. A couple of the tricks I use to keep my site crap free. Now I just need a filter to run whenever I write about things that piss me off, so that I can make the site totally crap free. I'll probably enable comments again after the holiday if it's causing you a lot of pain not to have them.

Sitemaps are back and the best that they've ever been. They're a far cry from putting up some half-assed page with maybe 25% of all your site's URLs. Those were pretty useless and really just for the search engine spiders anyways, so why not take the page out of the equation? The Sitemaps protocol does just that and being that it is supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft/Live, it has the teeth that a standardization needs to catch on.       I've been using the sitemap XML format for some time now with my sites and it really does work. The spiders find everything on your site. The only catch is that you need to submit your sitemap to the search engines for it to get read. Yeah, I know, you should just be able to use the SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml bit in your robots.txt file, but the search spiders really don't seem to pick it up like they do when you manually submit it. Being that this is the case, management tools have been build for dealing with your sitemap feeds. Google was the first. Yahoo! soon followed. Microsoft, as is usually the case was markedly behind the curve, but has released their system to the public just four days ago.       What follows is a review of the three systems. Generally, they all do the same thing, but much unlike the standardization that when in to the sitemaps protocol, their system are rather different from one another...              Google Webmaster Tools       Far and away my favorite. They have been tinkering with it for a great long time and have gotten it to a place, where I feel that it's a solid application.       The thing that I like the best about this system is that it just seems to get better. It's like there are a team of guys sitting around who are actually using it on sites and when they think of something that could make it better, they do it. But beyond this novelty, I'd have to say that my favorite part is the Statistics tool. There are tools in there above and beyond other sections, where you don't need to use this system to pull off those functions; just phrase a query right. With Statistics, you can find out when you were last crawled and the overall PageRank of your site.       One tool that I find to be something of a downfall is Diagnostics - Web Crawl tool. At first it seems very informative, but then you realize the the 404 errors it finds on your site were really just flukes on the server and the pages are still there.       For a little while, things were getting kinda clunky with this system, but now, everything seems to be heading in the right directions. They even have a mobile section developing in there, which is pretty cool.              Yahoo! Site Explorer       The middle-comer to the game and a good system. Unlike Google and Microsoft, I think that they took longer to work on the system behind the scenes (or just bought out a smaller company.) So, when it came out, it was working very slickly from the start.       First of all though, I apologize for the URL. The site isn't the easiest thing to find, at least for me. I think going here, clicking on "Site Explorer Home" and then logging in will get you to the management page. This was of course my first initial annoyance with the system overall--trying to find it. Once in though, I've found it to be a nicely setup page with different levels to manage different feeds for your sites. But, that's about it. There are not any additional functions in here. In some way, I appreciate that. No goofing around. You want to submit a sitemap? Then this is where you do it.       They do have some gimmicky items you can put in there under the Badges section if you want. They also have a blog if you want to keep up on the latest and greatest. Although, it's ironic that the one really big stumbling block that I see for their system is that their updates aren't so late and great. I have yet to see a notification that my sitemap has been crawled before I tell it to do so and I've waited up to a month with some sites. So, that's not so cool and requires a great deal of handwork, whereas the Google system swoops across your site very often.              Microsoft Webmaster Tools       Still, very, very much in beta. The basic system is functioning, but like most things Microsoft, it was released a bit too soon. This was of course after dropping the ball for some time on getting a system like this going. As you can see in the comments, people have repeatedly asked, "Um, why are you telling us to do this, when you don't have a system to work with it?"       Since MS really is far out of the #1 and #2 spots, it would be expected that they would bring out a set of tools that aren't all that amazing. But, oddly enough, they're actually pretty decent currently. I happen to like the Website Status section under Summary. It's the closest that I've seen MS get to creating a PageRank score. But, it does show how pathetic MS has been in indexing. For this site, they only having 53 pages, which falls far short of the 3,200 or so that actually exist.       And then they have some keywords scorings in there are well. This tool set is not nearly as robust as Google's, but if they keep working on it, it might get somewhere yet.       There are a couple of serious bugs with the system. For one, it appears to be much happier in Internet Explorer, which is no surprise. Another is that the FAQ links to nothing. Another is that their "click to expand" function to list all your sites keeps tossing the one you just clicked on to the bottom. I find this annoying and would prefer a static list that was alphabetical. Ah, and then some of the sections just vanish. For instance, while writing this, all the Summary for a site was gone. An hour later, it was back. Yes, beta. Very beta.       I don't know how their spider regularity is at this point, since this service is very new. As of using it for three days, they still don't appear to have picked up any new pages. Then again, this could be a reporting bug. We'll have to see how this plays out over time.              Summary       Which one do I love the best? Google, of course. But the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to use all three, so get used to it! It would just be nice if you could use the account on all three systems to manage your account. Microsoft is actually better than Yahoo! and Google on this because you only need to have a one of their IDs which can be set up with any email.       In the end, I think we should all be thankful there aren't XML hacks like what you have to do to get a site working in Explorer 6...

In London, they just started Eurostar service to the new St. Pancras station. Beyond the fact that you don't have to wind your way through wacky Waterloo station, you can now make it to Gare du Nord in just two hours as opposed to previous two and a half.       Due to this new, speedier, faster, truly high speed train service, they have launched a rather bold advertising campaign. You can see the most striking example below. Essentially it says, "Attention, London is just around the corner." It's clever, funny, and definitely gets attention, but does it purvey the message that they want? I don't know and I don't have anyone in Paris (whom I assume they're targeting this at) to ask at the moment. I would think that you'd want some French guy timidly poking the Queen with a baguette to encourage the French to go to London. This just speaks more like an air raid siren in that, you'd better get ready and put out your most room temperature beer possible, because the Brits? Yeah, they're a comin'!       Ah, but according to Sky News, this one was targeted at the Belgian market. Still, it doesn't seem to have the effect that I think in should in that you really want to get people to London and not vice versa. Maybe slapping the Queen with a waffle would present the message that I think they were trying to present.       Hey, I'd love to see the John Cleese Silly Walks one if anyone can find it!