U!S!A! Love makin' not OK!
I just caught a glimpse of this poll which placed American men as the fifth worst lovers in the world. Someone the Russians actually placed better than the Americans, which I find to be a stretch given that the rates of spousal abuse as massive over there. I guess when not beating, they find time to caress gently. The best for me was that the English were nearly the worst because they let the women do all the work (somehow this wasn't the case in Russia) and that the Germans were the worst due to stinking up the room. So much for the stereotype of anal retentive cleanliness.
Naturally this all led up to my Spanish wife getting the last laugh as Spanish men are considered to be the best lovers in the world. I'm convinced this is merely due to the women who thought this being there on holiday, drunk, and suffering from heat stroke during the love making. Naturally, this brings me back around to this video to prove my point and to try and sooth my annoyance with this poll that must have only been taken by Northern European gay men because then, sure, Spain is probably the best, not that I would know.
30 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: love makin, us america
Block the tracers, regain your privacy
Some time back, a marketing guy I worked with told me about ClickTale, an Israeli company that provides you with this snippet of JavaScript that you can install on any website that allows you to track your user's activities. Let me emphasize that it's not just seeing something like, "Oh they came in through Subpage 23A, then went to the home page, then left." which may seem invasive, but is something I don't have such a problem with as it helps you to make a site better. Admittedly, users should probably be made aware of this, but given the fact that every site out there tracks user traffic these days, it seems the cow has long been let out of the proverbial barn on that one.
No, ClickTale allows you to actually see what your users are actually doing. It pulls up your actual site and you can see where their mouse goes, what they click on, what they type in to fields, how long it takes them to react, etc. While you don't know their name, you do know their unique IP on the web, which browser they're using, what country, and even what city they're coming from. Yes, it is very Big Brother. At first, I thought it was cool and then I realized that it's actually quite ucky, especially as no end user is ever told about how deeply they're being monitored on a website. By the way, I do track statistics here, but it's mostly to see how many people visit and not much else. ClickTale is something I've long abandoned and never plan to return to.
So, it was with great annoyance that I found out that my main local news source, SFGate is using something similar called Tynt Tracer. I can understand why they'd do it as this service tells you whenever someone has copied content from your website. In their case, I assume it's because they'll want to sue anyone who uses more then two sentences of it somewhere. It's really quite dumb as those who are stealing their pages are using what are called "page scrapers". These are automated. They leave no trace they were at your site other than an IP address hit in your logs. They also don't load JavaScript which is what this Tynt system is using.
So really, what SFGate is doing is just seeing what people copied out. I don't know why they're doing it, but it makes me really uneasy. It's absolutely none of their damned business if I copy a name from an article and search for it on Google to find out more about the person. Sure, it may help them refine their business, but I really don't care. Pay for focus groups. Don't spy on me without telling.
Since I am a web developer, I'll let you know that it happens to be quite easy to deactivate this Tynt system or their Tracer.js. First, use Firefox. Next, install the AdBlocker Add-on. Open up the Preferences in AdBlocker and click Add a Rule to block. Put in *tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js and click OK. That's it. You're done. No more snooping on you because really, they've got oodles of other systems in place to track your general usage stats and I don't have a problem with those. It's ones like this where I draw the line. And oh yeah, blocking that script will block it on any other site that's using it as well. So neener neener.
26 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: code, internet, privacy
Mighty Leaf now in prop-bag size
I'm a bit of a sucker for sales on tea. It seems that I always end up doubling my ready tea supply whenever discounts abound. Naturally, the fact that Mighty Leaf (also @mightyleaf) decided to mark down a slew of their teas recently meant that I ended up ordering a 5kg box of loose leaf goodness.
One of the surprising items that came out of this was the 1/2kg bag. Normally, the biggest you can buy is the 115g bags. Those are all well and good, but I drink boatloads of tea (seriously, I do. I've endangered the life of many a sailor) and so I try to buy in as big a bulk as possible. For one, it's cheaper. For two, it incurs less waste in packaging. It's just that the half kilo bag was never really available for some reason. Maybe it's just for wholesalers. But, I was stoked to not only get it, but also find out that Ceylon Kenilworth is good because otherwise, I would have had a lot of tea to give away.
Anyways, you can see the difference between the bags below. This half kilo bag looks more like a prop from a movie set than anything else. At least I finally have a manly bag to match size. Of course, I'm sure this still doesn't un-gay tea for a certain previous co-worker.
Apparently these larger sizes are something of a very new thing. All I can say is cool and about time!
24 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: better buying, tea, tea reviews
San Francisco in stun-o-vision
Naturally this came up on Laughing Squid in that this guy named Ben Wiggins decided to shoot stop motion video around San Francisco (and some other spots in California) with his super high resolution Canon 5D Mark II. The results are badass. Just watch the video below. My favorite bits are the fog banks rolling in and out as well as planes landing and taking off from SFO at night. Blow it up to full screen for extra special three minute evening at home.
19 09 2009 2 comments
Tags: photography, san francisco, video
The San Francisco Tourist Guide
I was quite intrigued by this article which talked about what are apparent commonalities that all guide books must share about New York City as all tourists stick to these guidelines. In looking around, I was astounded to see that apparently the same is true about San Francisco. Blinded by the obvious, I raced down to my local library and found that every major book does indeed cite this Publication T-NO as the definitive guide to visiting San Francisco. I found a copy sealed in a room only accessible once one is bedecked in a baseball cap, short pants, chewy pretzel, and a camcorder. Here is what I was able to glean from it before I was found out to be a local (shouldn't have worn the damned hoodie!) and quickly hustled away by security.
- San Francisco is often called "The City" by locals in the area. Unknown to many, "Frisco" is the actual preferred name. Call it that often. You'll find yourself blending in faster this way.
- There are four tourists attractions in San Francisco: The Bridge, The Crooked Street, Fisherman's Wharf, and the Cable Cars. Sometimes they are incorrectly called the "Golden Gate", "Lombard Street", "I never go there", and "Much slower than any other actual public transportation". In common conversation you may need to resort to this lower class vernacular in order to communicate with your taxi drivers where to go.
- Once you have seen these four attractions, San Francisco offers a wonderful array of Irish Pubs for the weary traveler to sit back and enjoy.
- Walking. Whoa, whoa, whoa! This isn't Los Angeles, is it? People really like walking here and it can be quite sickening to those not accustomed to it. Take a pedicab along the Embarcadero once you are done with the four main attractions and have had your fill of tipple at the Irish Pub.
- Make sure to take a taxi or airport shuttle for approximately $25-40 from the airport, especially if your hotel is at Powell and Market. The BART metro from the airport to Powell and Market is only for locals and you will be incarcerated immediately if seen attempting to use it!
- By advised that you are better off taking a taxi to the Golden Gate Bridge instead of the 28 bus. You could very well encounter what every tourist hates on that bus: other tourists.
- Stay out of the Tenderloin at all costs. You could quite easily be killed! There are no delicious Vietnamese, Thai, or Indian restaurants there at all!
- Make sure to take a picture standing next to one of the heart sculptures on Union Square. No one has done this before, so you need to make sure to focus your camera for 5-10 minutes to get the shot just right. Repeat as many times as necessary and stand as far in the middle of the sidewalk as possible to get your perfect shot. The locals will understand.
- If by chance you find yourself on public transportation (this is highly unadvised), when taking the escalator, make sure to block the entire steps. The locals always step right, just in case tourists need to get past. They're really nice people that way.
- Despite the size of Chinatown, there is only place to eat Chinese food, which is House of Nanking. This establishment knows how to cater to the tourist well, ordering their most expensive dishes for you and charging accordingly.
- Likewise, there is only one place to eat Italian food in all of North Beach which is the Stinking Rose. The name is so incredibly clever. Hilarious even. Genius. The name to end all names. Something to comment on forever and ever.
- Taxi drivers are incredibly helpful in San Francisco. No matter how short the distance, they will always take tourists the longest way possible to give them the chance to show off their magnificent city.
- Do. Not. Buy. A. Transit. Pass. The convenience of being able to not hold up a bus or train while you board, nor have to remember to take any money for the fare, nor having to remember to get a transfer is far overshadowed by the fact that if you will actually have to use the pass to get your money out of it and why do that when there are so many friendly taxi drivers.
- Make sure to tip at least 25% in restaurants and 50% in bars. While this may seem steep, it challenges the locals to tip higher and they're the type of people who thrive on challenge. Plus, it balances out the meager 10-15% that they leave, thus providing servers with the comfortable existence they deserve for writing down an order and then walking back with it.
- Pick any hill in the downtown. Walk one block of it. Stop. Then ask "How in the heck do all these people do this all the time?" An option is to have your travel companion take a photo of you on the hill, but be advised that San Francisco hills are magical and appear flat in photos.
- Rent a car if for no other reason than to drive down the Crooked Street while filming it on your camcorder.
- Take the Cable Car, stand at the front and use your camcorder to film all 3.4km of the trip. Each moment will grow ever more precious upon consecutive viewings at home.
- Skip Alcatraz Island. It's just a prison and let's be honest, we saw all the best parts in "The Rock", especially the underground mine which the authorities don't let you see anyways.
- Wear shorts. All the time. San Francisco has a reputation for being cold, but it is surprisingly warm year round. Short pants are an excellent choice of attire for your outings. If for some reason the weather unpredictably changes in the afternoon, there are always helpful merchants waiting to clothe your in the latest Alcatraz fashions for your enjoyment.
- View the gays in the Castro with special care, preferably from the safe confines of a moving vehicle. Actually setting foot in the Castro could very well give you, "the gay" and force you to live your life in as "fabulous" a manner as possible, which could very well kill you.
- There are approximately 30 museums in San Francisco. Likewise, there are approximately 50 Irish Pubs. Obviously, you should visit all the Irish pubs and not the museums because if locals thought the museums were better they would have built more of them and less of the Pubs.
18 09 2009 1 comment
Tags: san francisco, tourists
That pretty much sums up the times
I admit it. I play the lottery. Yeah, it's stupid. Yeah, it's a waste of two dollars a week. Yeah, I could spend that $104 on one really nice dinner a year. But, it's something I've done on and off for the last 15 years and as far as dumb vices go, I rate it pretty low. Plus, I'm a sucker for the "what if..." factor that they prey upon all us suckers with.
Lately, as the economy is truly way deep down, stuck up on the second bend of the crapper, it appears that I'm not the only person getting a hit of Lottocaine twice a week. Right after the draw, they post the numbers on the website. This in turn means that you see the image below for about two hours after the draw. There really isn't anything wrong with the website except for the fact that a couple million people are hitting it at once. Obviously, "what if..." has devolved in to "dammit please..." these days. Not a good sign. Not at all.
17 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: economy, errors, stupidity, us america
Bay Bridge bypass in 3:46
For those who only know about the signature Golden Gate Bridge, I need to point out that here in the San Francisco Bay Area, our much bigger bridge is the Bay Bridge. Half of it is a nice suspension bridge. The other half (ie, the Oakland half) is an ugly "cantilever span" that had a chunk collapse in the big 1989 earthquake. That being the case, and the fact they knew 30 years previously it wasn't seismically sound, they're working quite hard on replacing it.
In the process of getting the new bridge built, they had to do this switch-a-roo on the traffic going to Treasure Island in what was billed at the "triple bypass". The weekend before last, they completed this work, shifting a 91m double decker chunk of road in to divert traffic to the bypass. While it takes away from the four day enormity of this event, some clever fellow went and made a time lapse video from the surveillance camera that Caltran had focused on the work. Watch it below and see them toss around these many thousand ton chunks of road like Legos. Also watch a touch of fog roll in and out at various points.
14 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: bridges, san francisco, video
How will we remember this?
I didn't even really get what the Twitter trending topic of dc912 was until the end of today. I suppose part of me realized what it was, but part of me was just unwilling to believe that thousands of people would descend on the capitol of the US to decry the establishment of a government health care system for the country. Why we, the richest and most powerful country in the world don't already have one has been mind blowing to me for years.
You see, I grew up without health care. My family had "too much" income to qualify for the free health care and not enough income or the blessed qualifications to get our own policy. My father worked as a glass blower in a studio that thought itself above offering health care to the employees. My mother worked as a part time teacher at a community college who, while offering a fantastic package for their full time workers, gave nothing to the part time staff, saving no end of money. I grew up ahead of my time, not being scuttled to the doctor every time I sneezed and having to "walk off" twisted ankles and the like. I suppose growing up this way is one of the reasons I can pop a blister or for that matter, trim my own nails.
As the years passed, my brother and I were lucky. A couple of cuts that needed stitches here and there, but no serious problems. My parents paid for everything out of their own pocket. Some 25 years ago it was still costly, but somewhat possible to pay your way. I doubt the scar that was 16 stitches on my arm would cost less than $2,500 to be dealt with today which is two months of rent for me in San Francisco and nearly half a year for others in the state.
Sadly, it was my father who finally got burnt by the lack of insurance. For years he had suffered digestion problems that the doctors we could afford to go to would label as Irritable bowel syndrome. As it turns out he had Carcinoid syndrome which is a particularly nasty thing as is slowly grows benign tumors mostly around your digestive system. The tumors don't kill you though as in the more common cancers. What kills you is slowly having your crucial organs being unable to function with most often the liver first to go.
Over about five years, I watched my father slowly waste away. You know how gaunt Steve Jobs looks these days? Well, picture a man about 185cm (6'1") and 100kg (220 lbs) who was incredibly strong losing all his muscle and dropping to about 2/3 his original body weight because every time he ate he was unable to digest the food and was literally starving to death. I'd visit every couple of months and each first impression of him scared the hell out of me as he declined in health, but I couldn't let him see it because he pressed on, never complaining about his body as it crumbled upon him. A stronger person, I've never known.
It does turn out that there is a cure to carcinoid. It's a once a month injection that costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $4000. That was nearly twice as much as my father made in a month and while he tried desperately to qualify for Medical (our medical system in California for the poor) the condition worsened until one day, while seated and gently carving a new piece of art, he had a fatal heart attack that ended his five year battle with a disease. My father, a happy and satisfied man; an American living a rural Californian community free of toxins, eating a healthy diet, not smoking, only drinking socially, and exercising regularly, died from a completely curable disease at the age of 60 in the United States of America simply because he wasn't able to afford the treatment or even be granted the ability to know earlier in life that he had this curable condition.
This happened six years ago and I bring it up not to tug on heartstrings, but to prove a point that America is letting itself die. It is unconstitutional not to have a national health care system in place. It is wasteful monetarily not to have this system and eventually replace all the redundant systems we currently have for the old, poor, military, and government workers. It is also wasteful as we pay for all those who seek primary care in our emergency rooms or overworked clinics.
To all those who marched in Washington DC, I can't be angry or even frustrated with them. Anyone who puts a Hitler mustache on a picture Obama is so easily led astray that you can't be mad at someone like that. The same goes for all those in this Tea Party group who oppose a national health care system. They're unable to truly understand how this system will not only save the country money, but will also personally save them or someone they care about some day as more and more of us are without any form of insurance.
Don't get me wrong, I think we should most definitely pay for a government system. It should not and cannot be a free system. People misunderstand this about the systems in Europe; they aren't free. People pay for them through deductions from their paychecks. And if you have no paycheck and are poor, then you don't pay, but obviously you still get access to health care because it is a fundamental human right that was written in to the constitution of this country over 200 years before this became an issue. That's how important it is.
I have suffered my own personal losses, worked to get past them, and voted in those who are working to make a system such as this possible. I have done what I can as a citizen and now can only wait to see how the pieces may fall. My only concern in all this is for our collective memory of this period in history. How will we remember this? I can only ask in that once the votes are counted and if it fails, we have a monument be erected to all the politicians and how they voted. Something permanent beyond a file in a public record stored away and out of sight.
We need to remember all the No's of the 111th Congress and all the Joe Wilsons out there. Their stupidity must be remembered and their names become part of our common vernacular for "fool" or "crook" as they are cursed by the 99% of us at the "bottom" who will lie dying in the street, smirking one last smirk, and remembering how great America once was, just before we lost that chance to stop an inevitable decline if we are left helpless to heal the citizens our nation.
Write to and call your national senators and representatives. Tell them they will not serve another term if they vote No and stop national health care.
12 09 2009 0 comments
Tags: health, obama, us america
The BBC does confound
On the one hand, I love the BBC as they report on world news at a level that seems nearly impossible to maintain in this day and age. On the other hand, they're such patriarchal Imperialists, that is making me nuts at times.
I'll leave the Africa elements out of it for the time being and focus on articles such as this one. Okay, so despite the crap title it's about a Croatian doctor in Croatia who allegedly refused treatment to a man who is Serbian. Think about this for a second. What would happen in Britain if a doctor of say British lineage refused to treat someone of say Irish lineage. Would it be worthy of an international headline? No. Would it even make it out of the local news? Probably not unless there was a lawsuit. Most people would probably see it as one or two guys being ignorant dumbasses which is what is happening in this instance. This is on the same scope yet here it is.
But the reason it's news is because for some reason, which I guess must be some weird form of Empire solidarity, the British sided with the Serbs in the Yugoslavian wars. Because here's the other problem I have with the article, "Many international organisations have expressed concern that only around half of the Serbs who left Croatia have gone back, with over 100,000 still displaced." They don't happen to mention the uh... hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats who haven't returned to Bosnia because of what the Serbs did there.
And that's the real problem in that the BBC casts a wide net, but they are far from balanced as seen with this very positive article about Serbia by the same author. I've had to stop reading the Europe news altogether and Africa I mainly just glance at to see if something comes up. I dread the day that I actually have to stop reading it altogether, but with how blogs are forming the majority of my news sources these days, I'm sure the day will come in the near future.
10 09 2009 2 comments
Tags: media, perception, stereotypes
Time for a new Hudin.com
So... you might have noticed things are a bit different. I mean, the colors are kinda the same, but there have been some massive updates due to changes I've made in my blogging habits. Now, in addition to my more personal rants articles here, I'm now pulling in my latest post from Maneno on my Subsaharska blog where I blog more regularly about African tech and travel. I've also put links for the RSS feeds to both sites in plain sight because if you're not using a feed reader, you're nuts. If you are, subscribe to Hudin and Subsaharska. You'll be incredibly stoked that you did, probably.
So, other than getting this to be more of a Hudin portal like I did recently for #1 Fan, there are a ton of technology upgrades that happened here. For those who care, I switched this site over to using jQuery from MooTools (just to give it a try) and I rehashed all the CSS. I also made use of all the PHP classes I've developed for Maneno to make this site hum. It's amazing how only once you really dig in to all your old code you find stuff that is ancient. I think I found something that was like half a decade old, which is ancient in the web. It makes sense though as the last upgrade of this size I pushed out in 2007 from Spain, which undoubtedly missed a lot of bits. I think this is officially version 7 of the site.
Otherwise, I fixed up some things like the tea reviews where I made the interface to find reviews a bit more slick with some AJAX business. The contact page is back for all of peoples' hate mail needs. About got a little bit of a brush up, especially as the section on my Digital Gas was out of date. Photos are exactly the same and still flowing. The blog got a large facelift as I really wasn't in to the old look anymore. I'll probably get bored of this one in six months or so and redesign it yet again.
One of the biggest changes is the Search box you will see at the top of every page. First of all, that's running with AJAX and will populate the body of any page where you run a search. Secondly, it's using the Google API. They have this wanky JavaScript think that anyone can use, but it's crappy as hell to get working. I did a runaround of all that and used the more "hardcore" programming approach to get what's called a JSON back from Google when querying them with search terms. Overall it works quite well, but there is a massive amount of work to be done on that, so it's really basic at the moment. It does indeed work for simple searches though.
I think that's about the meat of it all. There are a lot of things I did for administering the site that once again, came from work on Maneno, but I won't go in to them as this is already probably super boring and you're regretting your new RSS subscription to the feed.
09 09 2009 2 comments
Tags: hudin, updates
