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For those of us, living in the US, the idea of royalty is enchanting. It seems like every girl has the dream of being a princess with a herd[flock?] of unicorns to ride on. And when we travel, who are all the nitwits agape as they look at the castles in Europe? Yeah, Americans.       I'm as guilty of it as anyone. I flirted with the idea of getting married in a castle in Spain recently, until I realized the the cost of the whole shebang would make my dreams smash into the cold hard face of reality. Even still, I do love castles and when I mentioned to my cousin in Slovenia that I'd like to visit some of the castles around his town, I got the simple answer of, "Oh? Really? Why?". Castles are everywhere over there after all.       But, beyond castles, there is the dream of having a royal family. This, I don't get in to. Countries in Europe waste millions and millions of dollars supporting royal families each year. I might add that these are millions and millions of dollars that do nothing but support a tradition that people think they need, which they could really be "wasted" on social programs such as feeding the homeless. Nowhere is this more the case than in Spain, where, once Franco died, their king managed to weasel himself back in to power and re-establish the throne and more importantly the kingdom. This is why it is the "Kingdom of Spain" and not the "Republic of Spain" not matter what the Bush family says. A rather silly thing given that they formed this "new" kingdom in 1978.       This year in Spain has been one of those years that has forcefully and repeatedly begged the question as to why the royal is really needed there anymore. One the biggest flaps came with the cover of El Jueves that took a serious jab at the prince and was recently fined because of it. You can see the cover below. I think it's hilarious, but then again, that's not my royal family on the cover.       But, the latest deal has been that the king told the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, to shut up. Naturally, it was called for, but very surprising for the king to say. And, no it wasn't some simple, "Please now sir, kindly wait your turn to speak.", because you can't do that with Chavez the Thickheaded. No, the king said, "¿Por qué no te callas?" which is the informal and impolite way to say something along the lines of, "Hey dude, shut your pie hole." Not the kind of thing you say at a diplomatic meeting like Ibero-America. For reference, you can have a look at the video below to see how it all went down.       It's really quick, so watch it again if you missed Juan-Carlos coming in with the right-handed hook that for a very brief second in time, made Chavez pause.       The bigger deal in all of this, is how Spain reacted to it. This video was remixed. And of course, it's been the talk of all media in Spain for the last week. And of course, other media and the blogosphere at large.       Naturally, the big question is, why? Obviously, it's because he's a king and he shouldn't be speaking like this. But really, who cares? The media, that's who. We need to all sit back for a moment and realize that no matter how hard we're working for the dollars (or euros) we get, that in Western Europe, the USA, and Canada, life is pretty damned good and we don't have the problems that plague the rest of the world. So, in lieu of actual news, we get to see the king of Spain telling a despot to shut up. Silly yes, but let's see if you can find news that's more important. Oh, you did? Huh. Well, por qué no te callas?

Well, the moment that was bound to happen has finally happened. This, right here and now, is the site's 1,000th article. Yeah, I know, some might say, "Astounding!", "How'd you do it?", "Zads!", or "Where's the the naked pictures?" Obviously the most important thing to say at moments like these are that the naked pictures are in the Bay to Breakers sections: 2006 and 2007, as well as the Folsom Street Fair.       With cheap thrills out of the way, it's probably time to look at where the site is now, which is what I feel to be in a good shape. As mentioned before and probably will be mentioned again, there are 1,000 articles. I'm guessing that there are about 10% that are really good, 20% that are decent, 30% that are something to read if you're bored, and then 40% that are pretty bad. I tip my hat to those that have been with me the whole time. I looked back at some of the older articles and they're nothing more than my blatherings. In fact, I have been going back to re-tag older articles, and have been adding in ramblings as a tag. I might even make it so that some point in the future, if you prefer to only read the writings that I feel are prime, you could stop seeing these. And yes, I know that reading posts about the Academy of Art or how much I don't like certain haircuts can get old.       Despite all this, there were a few articles that I really liked, which if you are in an office somewhere, stuck in middle management, you might enjoy wasting some time to read:       Hey, what's up with the pole?       Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik Re-Visited, and Dubrovnik Re-Re-Visited       Balkan Buses Love to Die       Everything on Praving       How Do Budget Airlines Make Money?       Seven Rules for Contract Web Developers       That's probably enough to choke anyone. As you'll see in this list, most of these articles are relatively recent. There is a reason for this and it is my Number 1 Fan who challenges me to write articles that are more substantive and interesting. Without her, there would undoubtedly be more "80 Year Old Man" posts and really, the world of the blog needs no more of those.              Beyond the articles though, it appears that I've posted 1630 photos to the site. This is something of a bigger deal than the articles because a) I think my photos are a lot better and b) I've only been putting them up for the last two years with most of that focused on the last year and a half when I made the switch to a proper SLR.       Much like the articles, my shots have been readily improving with time. I must admit that while the vast bulk of these shots are mine, there are some from Number 1 Fan in there as well, since we travel and do just about everything together. So, if you see a wide shot that's particularly cool, that's most likely going to be hers. But, looking over all of these, I originally thought that my favorite gallery as of late was going to be Sarajevo. I do like that gallery a lot, but the one that I think is the most interesting is Belgrade. Both are wild places, but the haphazard collision of multiple empires in Belgrade really made for some interesting shots.              Well, enough of all this. Back to my day job that allows the stories to unfold. (That happens to be recounted in The Sometimes Office from time to time...) Oh, and leave a comment, so I know who is out there! People hardly ever comment and that makes me feel sad.

The adventures of Chick continue. In this episode, we get to meet his brother, a retired uranium salesman. They make beautiful music together.       

I was forwarded this article about a guy trying to use a gun on a tire.       I suppose when you get down to it, the honor of a Darwin Award is really earned by the recipient of one. I mean, what is the pattern of synapses firing in a decision like this? "Hmm, tire is stuck. Gun unstucks things with bullet things. Use gun on tire to unstuck it? Yes, unstuck tire means getting to home, to watch game and each pork rinds more. But wait, pork rinds already in car with stuck tire. Stay here with stuck tire and eat pork rinds? Stupid logic brain, no game in car! Oh yeah, sorry gun brain, forgot about that. Shoot stupid tire!"       And thus you end up with a man in Washington State injured in both legs for shooting a tire with a 12 gauge shotgun. Really makes a solid case for that whole 2nd Amendment thing.

It was on my last trip up the Capital Corridor on Amtrak that I saw something new that I haven't seen in the US for awhile: a transit hub. There, in Sacramento, they had finally tied together the Amtrak station, which had been its own hub for some time, with the city train, as well as city buses. Astounding! A US city with a transportation center that wasn't left over from the days when we used to have transportation centers. Something new, brand spanking new, much like the Transbay Terminal tower that San Francisco is planning.       I suppose that I find all of this to be quite a revelation because Sacramento didn't used to just have a transit hub, but it was the transit hub for the West Coast for some time. Being that the First Intercontinental Railroad terminated there, it quickly became The Place for everyone and everything that was moving across the country to converge. Inevitably, this railroad connecting both sides of country lead to the expansionist thinking that has since dominated the American psyche in just about everything we do these days. So, as to whether this railroad was a good thing, is most certainly up for debate and I feel should generally be thought of in the same manner as the one they've built from Beijing to Lhasa.       But, under a discussion of the global-political ramifications of this new transit hub, it's great to see that it's fully up and running. It's funny, because as you look at how close the capital building is and Old Town, you realize that this really was the center of everything in the past for this city. I like it because it gives the feeling that you get when in places like San Francisco, Paris, Zagreb, or Belgrade (to name a few) that you are in the town center once you step off the train. Town centers are good and I'll be curious to see if this new center for the movement of people changes the face of downtown Sacramento and thusly if any other cities follow the model to redevelop aging cores that have been left to rot.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 is garbage. I know. I used it for a great number of years and now it continues to curse me in my current profession as a web developer. It is, for all purposes, broken. There is no fixing it. There are just doing little things in websites so that people who visit using IE6 don't see the thing completely blow up.       So, it's with this that I started up something of a hobby project called, End 6!. It's pretty simple. There's a little chunk of JavaScript that someone can put on their site that triggers a window which gets in the user's face about the fact that they're using a browser that is bad. Then there is the hope that they'll click on one of the links provided to upgrade their browser and make the internet a more friendly place.       This may sound like it's just something that I'm doing to make my life easier and that is part of it. But, I generally get paid by the hour, so why should I care if a job takes an hour longer to do because I have to fix IE6 bugs? Well, because it's just stupid waste. But, more importantly there is the fact that people using IE6 open up their computer to any number of vulnerabilities since Microsoft is not really putting the effort in to patching IE6, seeing as how it is obsolete.       What's the solution? Besides running the End 6! code on a site of your own, upgrade to Explorer 7, Firefox, or Opera and stop being one of the 35-50% of users on this broken system.

Every so often, I'm reminded of the Notice of Revocation of Independence that goes around the net and often attributed to John Cleese, yet not written by him. Overall hilarious, quotes like...              ...do remind me of the fact that we Americans have beat the hell out of an otherwise lovely bastardization of French and German. I have yet to see anyone else combine anything from these countries with better results; the best result to date being crêpe-worst.       And upon reading some gossipy garbage that I should otherwise avoid, I came across...              ...and realized that there are two words we need to stop using: "exclusive" and "hot". We can thank Paris Hilton for "hot" becoming an adjective of mass abuse. "Exclusive" just seems to have tagged along for the ride as they have both gotten extremely popular in common vernacular at the same time.       Perhaps we could expand our vocabularies again and use "exciting", "interesting", "riveting", "engaged", or "popular" to replace "hot" which at its poor three-letter core originally was a word to describe the temperature of something. And "exclusive" could be replaced with "singular", "elite", "restricted", or "non-inclusive" every once in awhile to liven things up.

A recent article about cellphone jamming reminded me about something that was overwhelming upon my long sojourn in Europe and that was the fact that Americans simply can't sit still. As a people, we always need something occupying us these days. Idle time is wasted time seems to be the general mindset of any and all of us.       I mean, I'm guilty of it just as much as anyone else. I'm always on email and I always have a computer on it seems. I also have a cellphone, although I've cut down to the cheapest plan possible because I'm sick of using it. But, being away from Wired America and unplugging for longer chunks of time that an hour made me painfully aware of how annoying we are. Have you ridden a bus or the subway lately? If people aren't plugged in to an iPod, they're on the phone. Then there are those that are even doing both. Then of course, there is that one particular group who can't sit still on the Bart, walking from car to car doing... I don't know what other than not sitting still. Pay attention to those folks the next time you ride Bart. You'll see who I'm talking about.       But, the reason that the cellphone jamming story reminded me of all of this is that there is a segment that is trying to fight back by taking away peoples' precious yet meaningless technology. Naturally, it is completely illegal to jam a cellphone signal, even within the confines of your own business. But, it is becoming obvious that there are those of us who realize that we're heading down a path to over-broadcasted and interconnected oblivion.       Ultimately, I don't know what the endgame will be and maybe there is none. We'll all just keep plugging in more and more until we reach The Singularity that everyone keeps chatting about. Sounds like fun. We'll probably even have Facebook around to pass virtual beers to one another.

After living in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly a decade, I had never made it down to the Mission to see the Día de los Muertos parade and celebration. I guess my general line of thinking was 1) I'm lazy and 2) It's a Mexican celebration, so I really have no business there, except as an extremely causal observer. Naturally, it wasn't until last night that I finally exercised my ability to be this extremely causal observer.       Popping out of the 24th Street Bart station, I was immediately concerned. Not because of my immediate whiteness, but because of all those around me were very much white with the face paint on that people wear for the celebration. I should probably back up a step or two and explain to those who don't know that Mission used to be a very, very Hispanic neighborhood. Oddly enough, my father grew up at the north end of it by Dolores Park and he also said that yes, it was definitely home mostly to Mexicans. At some point in the 90's, this began to change. Kids who graduated from art school or were in to making music or in to any variety of things that fall in to the more creative way of life started moving to the Mission because it was one of the cheapest places in San Francisco at the time. This had two unfortunate side effects. One was that it chased out a great many Mexican families living there because these (mostly white at the time) kids were mistakenly seen as more upscale and thusly for affluent clientèle for the landlords of the area who could thusly command higher rents. The other issue was that with the people who were actually creative came all the groupies--those with a bachelors degree in Art or English Literature whose only talent was partying with those people who actually did do something in Art of English Literature. Then the dot-com happened and the problem grew exponentially to point where you'll see more "ironic" mullets and people paying $5 for a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a bar (because dude, it's sooo White Trash) than you will blue collar, industrious families from Mexico and other Latino countries. Something that I feel is unfortunate because these white kids, who most commonly called hipsters, are just whitewashing out the culture and history that was in the area.       But back to the Día as I was making my way through it with camera and other photo takers around me. As sure as I had figured, there was a flood of white people in the parade. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that it is a wonderful thing to admire the culture of others, but these folks weren't doing that. Beyond the throngs of hipsters with their "traditional" face paint on, there was the constant smell of beer coming from people, others with "Impeach Bush" and anti-war signs, couples chatting not-so-silently with one another about hooking up later on. So overall, my impression from the procession was that this is just another cultural holiday that white folk have used as an excuse to get drunk and wander about under the guise of some larger cultural awareness. This seemed to be lost on the few Mexican families I did see who were trying to take part only to be beaten back by throngs of very non-Latino hipsters.       There was one silver lining in all of this, which is the only reason I'd see it again next year, and that was the shrines that people had put up at Garfield Square. These were insanely cool, interesting, and something I could respect a great deal. I took a lot less photos than I would have though because, well... the light wasn't so good and also there is something of a transcendent pall that comes over you as the reality of the situation sinks in. You see that you're walking through remembrances of the departed and as opposed to the hard, cold, stone tombstones that are common for we white folk in the large empty fields we call graveyards, these are personal. There were shoes of the departed and toys of children that were lost and any magnitude of personal effigy that made the setting something more. Naturally, it would have been super if some grounds keeper didn't think that watering the field before the weekend was going to be a great idea that quickly transformed the grounds into a muddy soup, but even still, the emotion of the shrines wasn't lost.

First of all, Happy Halloween, I'm staying inside. San Francisco is going to be a bit sketchy tonight with the Castro shutdown and all. For those of you that never made it there while the parties were happening, you missed little. In recent years, it's just gangbanger thugs running around drunk and causing problems, like shooting nine people last year. It's actually a good thing to be shutting it down I think. That party (and most others) have seen their good times die due to the current trends in culture.       But on an unrelated note that's actually much more important, we have a whopping good earthquake here yesterday. The effects of the 5.6 were much more pronounced 50 miles away at the epicenter, but as we were sitting in bed chatting about this and that, everything started to do that swirly bit that happens when an earthquake hits. A lot of people don't realize this and they think that an earthquake is this up and down jarring motion you see on when these things are in films or recorded. In reality that look is the cameraman shaking the camera. To know what a real earthquake is like, try getting out of a waterbed when you're drunk. If you're saying, "Yes, but I did that last Friday night and it really didn't feel like an earthquake", try it again, but without the tequila shots.       Thankfully, this caused little damage to us here, as we build for these things. It was however a little bit of a wakeup call. This was the strongest trembler we've had since the big 1989 earthquake. For those who have gotten complacent, the Red Cross has been promoting a serious "Be Prepared" campaign to get people to remember that we do indeed live on top of live earth, which some builders still refuse to acknowledge.