American Idle Archive

Spam has basically put the kabosh on whatever community I had on this site. I got so many comments that I had to put up the firewall of registration to stop it and it was just too much for people to register or login in comment. Can't really blame them.

Now that Facebook is around and my posts here are automatically published on my FB account, whatever comments people tend to have are posted there. It's sort of annoying as FB is so ephemeral. I suppose you could find all all your posts if you were willing to dig far enough, but what a pain and there's no searching for them. The posts live for a while on the wall and then, for all intents and purposes, they are gone. That's just they way it is.

So I don't know if this is going to bring back commenters to my site, but registration is no longer necessary as I finally got around to installing a "Captcha" to prevent spammers from attacking the site. It's not going to stop them from trying. It's just going to stop them from succeeding. A few weeks back I turned off registration after having it in place for a few years and I was bombarded by a mountain of spam comments. I immediately turned it back on. I was defeated, but only momentarily.

The Captcha is sort of ugly, but it only shows up once you start typing your comment. And if it's going to stop spam, I can live that.

I just added a new header to the site, insprired by the paris metro signs.

I'm particularly proud of this one because unlike all the others I've created, rather hastily I might add, for this one I had to draw the font myself. There is a Paris Metro font by David Rakowski. It's nice, but it's not really a true representation of the Art Nouveaur letters you see on the classic Metro signs in Paris. So I had to rebuild the letters that I needed in Illustrator. They are far from perfect, but I think they look pretty good.

I also enjoyed adding the weathering. I'm still not very good at it and will probably take another shot at some time in the future. But all in all, I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

I've been around with the blog quite a bit lately. I came across a plugin, MTFlickrPhotos, that allows you to pull in content from Flickr into Movable Type, which is pretty cool. I've got my photos here.

The way I have it set up, it shows medium size images of the last 20 that I've uploaded to my Flickr account. I'd like to show sets and collections, but I can't figure out how to do it and there doesn't seem to be a way in the documentation.

I'd eventually like to have something like Jeff Croft's site. It's powered by Django, which I suppose I should learn. I'm just too lazy right now.

I've been playing around with the Movable Type upgrade from 3.2 to 4.2 for a while now, but finally found the time to get it up and running. So there's a major change to both the front and back ends. I'm not sure I like this current style, so that will probably change as well when I find the time to build myself a new style. I have a lot of work to do and many sites to build. Hopefully this site will be free of the few issues (namely spam) that plagued the older version. We'll see. In the meantime, it's just nice to work with an updated and greatly improved backend interface. It will take me time to get it all integrated the way I'd like. In the meantime, the old site is here.

I've started Twittering like mad on this trip to South America. It's just so much easier than blogging here since I just send a text message to Twitter and they post it.

http://www.twitter.com/hechtic

The only problem with Twitter is that posts are limited to something like 140 charaters and since I have a tendency to be verbose, it's tough to limit myself to haiku sized chunks.

I'm sure there some sort of a Twitter widget that I can stick in the sidebar that will dynamically update whenever I post a new entry to Twitter. When I get a chance, I'll look for one and replace the someecards voting banner that I should have taken down after the election.

This is just a test to see if I can post new entries using my Blackberry. It looks like I can. If so, I should be able to blog about my upcoming trip to South America from the road without having to spend hours inside of internet cafes. Ill be able to do it while I sip Malbec at some fancy sidewalk cafe in Buenos Aires. Don't know why I didn't think of this before. Oh wait, it's beacuse I'm an idiot. That's right.

I just deleted more than 18,000 spam comments that hit my site in the last month. Feels so good.

Between the Olympics, all the cycling and the sheer laziness that characterizes my life, I have not been able to blog as much as I would like. I want to turn that trend around and document some of the rides I've been on in the last 2 weeks, starting with the Marin Century two weeks ago and ending with the Tour of Napa Century this past Sunday. I've got pictures, stats, and maps up for most of them, but I want to write up something and get it posted ASAP. Hopefully tonight. We'll see. I've been so tired lately, all I want to do I lay my lazy ass on the couch and watch highly motivated people compete for gold 10,000 miles away in Beijing. But if I don't get the stuff written soon, it will drift away, and, like so many other things, will seem like it never happened.

I've suffered for a long time the scourge of spam comments. The idea is that these spammers, mostly coming from Russia, bombard blogs with comments that contain links to sites they are trying to drive traffic to. There are enough bloggers who don't or can't stop the spam the links get published. The published links drive up their Google ratings, and, voila, they are driving traffic to their sites. It's insidious. Many bloggers just give up and turn off commenting. I had to institute the use of Type Key to authenicate trusted commenters, but it really just killed off what little community I ever had on this site.

Then recently, I started playing around with the Movable Type plugins to tweak the settings and stop the spam. I worked on it for a few days and I have finally landed on a successful recipe. I still get spam comments, of course, but 100% percent of it being captured by the filters and no actual comments are being caught up in the mess.

Here's what I've got:

Email Whitelister

This is a great plugin. You can automatically publish comments from people you trust by adding their email to whitelist settings. I can't remember if this comes preinstalled with MT3.2. If not, it should be easy enough to Google it, download it and install it. Then you just add the emails of all your friends and regular comments and ba-da-bing, their comments will always be published—without moderation by you, which is really nice. No one wants their comments moderated.

SpamLookup - Lookups

Junk feedback from blacklisted IP addresses (score 10) Junk feedback containing blacklisted domains (score 10) Junk TrackBacks from suspicious sources (score 10)

SpamLookup - Keyword Filter

Keywords to Junk:

# Your Junk keyword list can contain words, phrases, patterns,
# and domain names. Each item must be on a separate line.

# Words and phrases can be listed plainly. They are tested in a
# case-insensitive manner and match against "whole" words:

n.b. I'm not going to list all the key words because some are offensive and others are links and I don't want to post them here. Basically what you do to add a keyword to filter is type the keyword and them place a number after it like:

badkeyword 10

This will 10 points to the negative score of a comment and help drive it into the junk bucket.

SpamLookup - Link

Link Limits:
[checked] Credit feedback rating when no hyperlinks are present (score 1)
[checked] Moderate when 2 or more link(s) are given
[checked] Junk when 1 or more link(s) are given (score 10)

Link Memory:
[checked] Credit feedback rating when "URL" element of feedback has been published before(score 10)

Email Memory:
[checked] Credit feedback rating when previously published comments are found matching on the "Email" address(score 10)

Good Luck

I've taken off the Type Key Authentication just see if the spammers are still hammering my blog. I fucking hope not. Still not sure what it gets them other than a lot of angry bloggers. Anyway, in the meantime, you're able to comment without logging in. I hope this will increase the level comments back to the golden age before the spammers started to rule my world and I could actually get interesting feedback on my posts. Andrew

I don't know why I go through these periods of not having the energy to write. This has been a stupidly long hiatus. I haven't written anything since I went to Boston to work last May. It's not like nothing has happened. Just off the top of my head, I went to Europe for 3 weeks for work, bought my first road bike, the ski season started, I went to Hanoi for a week for work and then traveled down to Saigon, I paid off my car, I started a new job. I'm sure there's a few important events I'm missing. That's the problem when you don't write and you have the memory of a deranged flea. I will try to backfill with my limited recollection and then try my best to move forward, blogging with some kind of regularity.

Has it really been two months? Wow! I can hardly believe it. It's not like I've doing anything special. Just blowing this site off for one reason or another. Sorry

I've got the comments up and running again. You'll have to sign up for a Typekey account. It's a pain, I know. But it's the only way to keep the spammers at bay.

Sometime I don't know why I bother. In fact, I can't be bothered to blog about half the month it seems and weeks go by with no posts. I have things i want to write about, but often I can't find the time or the energy. Between that and the fact that I'm having more problems with the commenting system-my host actually suspended my site last week because of malicious scripts coming from the Movaeble Type comment CGI files-makes me want to pack it in. I don't know. Probably won't happen. Just something I'm thinking about. Another option is to redesign the site and therby reinvigorate my interest in it, but that can't be done until I get several other projects I'm working on finished and out of the way. We'll see

One of the benefits of insomnia is that it allows you time to tackle lingering problems that have heretofore gone unaddressed, such as the irksome line break issue in the comments whereas the lines would not break despite all the willing them to do so that I could muster up. I poked around and finally discovered the problem. Somewhere in the code, an attribute called "convert_breaks" was set to 0 and it should have been set to 1. This was overriding the settings I was giving the blog in the admin tool. Oh, well, it's over. Our long international line breaking nightmare is over. I did it for Johnny.

*No virgins were sacrificed in the solving of this problem

Sorry folks. I've been so busy I haven't had time to update the site. Lots has happened. There's tons of things I want to' write about and intend to write about. I'll probably back date everything just to keep the timeline correct and hopefully I can start working on it when I get back to the UK tomorrow where my life won't be as hectic as it's been here in Switzerland.

... Have been updated, finally after so many years. Even remade the montage that disappeared when I moved from my previous vile host to someone respectful. Enjoy.

Things seem to be improving on the comments front. Here's what was going on, what I did to fix and what's going to happen moving forward:

Basically, MT was tagging all comments as "Junk" and throwing them into a bulk folder. This is because MT 3.2 (nicknamed Movable Tripe, by my buddy John, will only authenticate commenters who are registered with TypeKey. this is Movable Type's free authentication and spam blocking service. If you're going to be a regular poster on this site, and, fuck, why shouldn't you be? you should think about registering with TypeKey. It's quick. it's Easy. And like I said, it's free.

In order to get around this problem I installed an MT plugin called "Email Whitelister". This plugin allows you to maintain a database of emails for trusted posted above and beyond the limitations of TypeKey. It's a pain in the ass. It shouldn't work this way, but this cloogey work around works. I've tried to include the emails of everyone I can think who would post, but I can't foresee the random visitor who comes to the site and posts on something. Their comments will most likely end in the junk pile and if I feel like wading into the cesspool that is the junk comments folder, I may or may not be able to find the comment and resuscitate it, but most likely it will be lost in oblivion.

I hope that MT fixes this problem. It's really insane that even with all this protection some spam comments still get through to be moderated yet comments from almost all real people get tossed in the junk pile.

When I first started this site, I was in the Peace Corps, had little money and needed to find a cheap web host and I found the cheapest, in more ways than one. I found 1dollarhosting.com owned by some company called Webcountry. At first it was alright. It was a little slow, but everything online in Samoa was slow. They did hoodwink me into paying a membership fee, but that was nominal compared to what I would pay if I had hosted my site at a real company. The problem for me started when I wanted to run Movable Type. I couldn't get it work on my site. The problem was that I didn't have a mySQL database. I could purchase one through Webcountry, but for a few bucks a month and that didn't make financial sense. So another volunteer (thank you, Paleni) allowed me to host my blog on his site. I just uploaded pictures and other media to mine. It was laborious. It was sluggish. But it worked.

When I got back to the States, I moved my site to a real full service host, Total Choice Hosting and cancelled my account at Webcountry, or so I thought. The other day, I look at my credit card bill online, and there's this charge for 12 bucks. 12 bucks isn't much. But I don't want to be charged for services I'm not using. Who would? It's a matter of principle.

I called them up.

They told me that I needed to cancel the service through a specific webpage on their site (which I have subsequently done) but didn't know about at the time, which I think is part of their shady customer service practices.

I explained the situation to the "customer service" rep. I asked for a refund. She said they couldn't do that. I told her that I was going to contest the charge with my credit card company. Then she threatened me. She said if I did that they, Webcountry, would tack a $150 charge on my account and send it to collections, at which point I asked to speak to her supervisor. When I got nowhere with him, I asked to speak with his supervisor, a man named William.

I explained the situation again. He threatened with charging me for storage overages, which I wasn't even aware of. I told him that was completely dishonest, all I wanted was a refund for the $12 for an account that I was clearly not using and for which there had been a misunderstanding about the nature of the cancellation process. He called me dishonest for storing more than 20 megabytes on their server, which was absurd. It was obvious I wasn't going to get anywhere with him, so I hung up.

When I came home, I looked online and it didn't take me long to find a message board with complaints about Web Country. They have an "F" rating with the Better Business Bureau. What a joke.

Here's what the BBB has to say about this piece of shit company:

Some complainants allege false advertising regarding the advertised price of $1 a year for web hosting services, claiming the actual cost is $62. Other customers complain they experience problems with downtime, rude or argumentive technical support representatives, and failure to honor their money back guarantee. Some customers complain that the money back guarantee is useless as fees for services are comprised of several individually non-refundable amounts. Reportedly, only about $12 of the money paid for services is actually refundable. Many customers complain their sites are never activated, and they opt to cancel for lack of response. In these cases, customers disputed credit card charges or put stop payments on checks. Sometimes months later, they receive collection notices billing them for services which were never activated or used.

The company responds to some complaints by disputing allegations, refusing refunds, issuing partial refunds, or offering explanations for their actions. Several complaints are closed as unresolved, meaning the customers are not satisfied with the company's response.

That's a report to be proud of.

Sure enough, this policy of threatening the $150 "Administrative fee" and collections is written into their Terms and Conditions:

18. Refund and Disputes:

All payments to 1DollarHosting.com are non refundable (except those covered by our 30 Money back guarantee- see item 19). This includes setup fee's, membership fees and subsequent charges regardless of usage. All overcharges or billing disputes must be reported within 45 days of the time the dispute occurred. If you dispute a charge to your credit card issuer that, in 1DollarHosting.com's sole discretion is a valid charge you agree to pay 1DollarHosting.com an "Administrative Fee" of $150. 1DollarHosting.com will use Collection agencies and report to the major credit bureaus if required.

I'm no lawyer, but that doesn't seem legal to me. Lawyers? Any idea?

Anyway, the question is, what to do? I could contest the charge with Visa and deal with the consequences of fighting Webcountry or I can just pay the 12 bucks and walk away. In the past, it wouldn't have been a question. I'd have fought them tooth and nail and if they wanted to me to collections and fuck up my credit, I'd sue them, but now, it just doesn't seem like it's worth the trouble. I should just suck it up and file it away under lessons learned, which is exactly what they want me to and how disreputable companies like Webcountry make money. It's really disgusting.

I hate fucking spam, but you have to love some of the "names" of the commenters. Here's a choice sampling:

cum on her face
christina aguilera porn
lesbians licking cum guzzlers
ejaculate on the vagina hot tub
hot little girls free anal sex
skinny girls indian pussy
rate my tits
men eating pussy
hot chick big butt girls
teen sluts britney spears blowjob
skimpy thongs galleries
milf camps
huge black tits free lesbian videos
xxx proposal teen naturists
hard core porn girls drinking horse cum
girls shower young lesbian girls
oops celebs hardcore anime
milf hunter videos shaved girls
milky tits titty fucking
asian lolita sucking dick
girl fingering herself nude girls
teen flashers topless girls
scooby doo porn
moms fucking sons cum shot
hot girls in thongs carmen electra pussy

Scooby Doo Porn? What the fuck is that? And who couldn resist "hard core porn girls drinking horse cum"?

Sorry to anyone who has posted or tired to post a comment since I upgraded to 3.2. The comments are not working and I'm trying to find out what's going. Somehow spammers are still able to bombard me me with junk comments. It doesn't make any sense. I have a post on the MT message boards and I should figure out what's going on soon. I will let you know as soon as I know.

In the meantime, if you want to comment about something, check out my photos at Flickr where comments are working perfectly.

UPDATE: I've been tweaking the site a little and while it's not working perfectly, it's getting better incrementally. I found out that Movable Type was placing comments by actual people like yourself in the Junk comments folder with all the other spam crap. I found the few that were in there and published them. Now if I can figure out how to make my regular commenters "trusted" we'll be in business. Until then, stay tuned and thanks for being patient.

After some fits and starts, I've finally got Movable Type 3.2 up and running, which means more stories and good spam filtering (or so I hear). There's just one minor issues. MT is making me login again after everything I do. It likes that guy from Memento, it can't make new memories and it forgets who I am within seconds. Kinda of annoying, but I have a post on one of the MT forums and hopefully someone can send me the solution.

Update: three days later and lots of posts on the MT forums and fretting, jiggering around,I finally actually do have MT 3.2 up and running and can start to post. Fuck that was awful. Alright time to get caught up on a few things here.

Sorry I haven't had time to write anything. Lots has happened, of course. Some good, some bad. I will try to fill in the blanks when I have more time back in San Jose early next week. We're in Montezuma on the beach. It's nice, not spectacular, but nice. We're about to go eat dinner at a dinner across the road from our place run by a couple of women from Rome. Should be excellent (which is more than I can for the comida tipico or whatever passes for normal food here in Costa Rica). Adios for now.

Sorry about this, but I've had to put TypkeKey back in action because I;m still getting swamped by spam despite my MT-Blacklist filter and I don't want to come back from Costa Rica and have to deal with hundreds if not thousands of spam comments. It's really not that big of deal. If you haven't already, just sign up for a TypeKey Account. Then you can comment. Soon after I get back, I'm going to try to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 and from what I'm told, that should take care of the spam problem once and for all.

As a few of you have noticed (thanks for the emails, by the way) I haven't fely much like posting in the last few weeks. It's not because I haven't had anything to say or have been trapped under something heavy. I just haven't felt much like writing. Anyway, I'm going to try to fill in some of the gaps over the past few weeks with some retro posting, so keep an eye out for them.

The commenting problems seem to have been solved. Please let me know if you have any more trouble at all. Thanks.

I haven't been posting much lately, but that hasn't stopped me from noticing that when people are trying to comment on the spare posts, they are getting bounced for what Movable Type calls "questionable content". Hopefully this isn't meant as some sort of commentary on my site, although I'd probably agree with them. I don't what's going on or why it's happening. It could have something to do with MT-Blacklist, the spam blocking plugin that stops spam in its tracks, but seems to be shielding everyone, which is rather pointless. Might as well just shut down commenting altogether.

In the meantime, if you want to comment, and you should, just sign up with Typekey. It's free. It's quick. It's a impostion, but relatively painless. You'll be authenticated by the man and you can post away. Up to you.

My posts have been very sporadic as of late. I don't know why, but I'm finding it harder and harder to sit down and write for this blog. I think about what I want to write all the time, but when it comes down to sitting in front of the computer and actually writing, even though I have tons and tons of time to do it, I just don't have the energy or whatever it is. Just looking over recent post history, there were fewer combined entries for the last two months than the previous one. I just looked again and I noticed that I write exactly 20 posts in June and 17 in July for each of the last two years. Totally unplanned. Must be some sort of a summer slump.

I finally got rid of the Movable Type plugin, MT-Approval, that forced readers to preview all comments before posting them. The plugin blocks bots from spamming the hell out of anyone's blog and on that account it worked gangbusters. But it was a pain in the ass. I'm using something now called MT-Blacklist that maintains a database of known spammers and prevents them from posting comments. I don't know if this will make any difference to how people use the site, the change should be relatively transparent, but I thought I'd let you know anyhow.

I'm bugging me for a long time now, but I finally have this nasty CCS bug fixed. When I converted my site over from the old html tables layout and converted it to a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) design conforming to web standards, everything was cool, except this one little problem. I had a two column layout, one for the main content and one for the navigation sidebar. Whenever the content in the sidebar was longer than the content of the navigation, the sidebar would run over the bottom border and over the footer. It looked horrible and made feel like a crappy designer.

But, now, with the help of Web Standards Solutions, I've fixed this problem and the site, while still not perfect, works a hell of lot better. I'm still having a problem with some spacing in the header when the site is viewed in IE. It works perfectly in Firefox, yet another reason for everyone in the world to scrap Microsoft's lousy browser and move into the 21st century with a browser that works the way a browser should.

It's not perfect yet, but it's getting there. At least the site looks more or less the way I want it to and most of the images are in the right place. I'm still having a few problems, most notably with the navigation column sticking out over the border on pages where the nav column in longer than the entry, but that should be an easy fix. The most annoying issue is that the cool inline extended entry JS was breaking the CSS for some reason. I'll have to sort that out. I've removed most of the links from the old site, including internal site links that didn't automatically change over. The next big task is to tackle the photo galleries. I think I might have to start from scratch there. I like the way they look, but I think I can do better. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying the improved performance. If you find something that doesn't work, give me a holler. Thanks.

Please excuse the mess while I make some changes including shifting my entire site which had previously been very generously hosted by one of my former colleagues in Peace Corps Samoa to my own host. It's a serious chore, as the site was spread out over two hosts, but one I have it all sorted out, a long overdue change, my life will be so much easier. The previous server, while a godsend at the time, was seriously slow. It took forever for anything to work on the site, from posting comments to rebuilding templates. The new server is super speedy. On to the future.

Pleas don't give me any shit about the way this page looks at the moment. I had the site looking all sweet and tasty after implementing CSS Design a few weeks back. It looked great in IE, but was totally broken in Firefox. Since I've started using Firefox, I want my site to look right in Firefox, damn it. Also, an increasing number of people are coming here using Firefox.

Anyway, I spent all night tonight tweaking the code, trying to get it to work right, but I just couldn't do it. I had it working offline perfectly. The navigation sat there right next the blog entries exactly the way I envisioned, exactly the way it looked with tables. But when I ran the code through MT, it kept turning into a clusterfuck. I tried several times, and ended up with different, but equally broken results. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I want to move and redesign the site completely, but not before I get this design working. I'll keep at it, but I don't want to waste too much more of my precious time trying to figure it out.

Comments are up and running again, so, you know, say somethng.

My comments are down again. This time I can't blame the spammers. I made a little adjustment to the site and I, like a the complete idiot that I am, I didn't test to see if it worked. I'll have it fixed and up and running before lunch so you can leave me your pearls of wisdom. In the meantime, if you want to comment, you can fire off an email.

Sorry to those few people who comment on my site regularly, but in the interest of stopping spam comment that have mine and many of of friends sites, I've set up Typekey registration for comments. It's really no big deal. If you want to comment, register. If not, then don't. I just can't have hundreds of comments from someone hocking free online poker wasting any more of my time.

I couldn't figure out what was going on with the comments, so instead of banging my head against the wall, I just upgraded Movable Type from 2.6 to 3.121. It was relatively easy with a few minor headaches like exporting all my entries from the old version and importing them in the new, and updating all the templates. I still have a little work to like transporting all the "sub" pages over including photogalleries and anything on the site that doesn't naturally belong in the blog, but that can be done over time.

I'm not exactly sure what the deal is, but the comments are not working again. I think my site was hacked by spammers, because right before the comments konked out, the MT-Blacklist plugin that blocks "spomments" stopped working for no reason that I could find. I need to upgrade anyway. One of these days I will get my act together and move up to 3.1. Until then, if you want to comment on something, please send me an email at hechtic1 [at] yahoo.com

I'm towards the end of the process of removing tables (except where intended such as tabular data) from my site converting American Idle over to a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Design. My site is a very complicated mosaic of multiple blogs and I have close to a 1000 entries so it's tedious process, but the end is in sight.

Why am I doing this? The basic idea of CSS Design is that the substance of the site, the entries and the information, and the style of the site, how it looks, are separated completely. The great advantage is that once the meat of the site is removed from the style, it's very easy to change the look and feel of the site because one cascading style sheet controls everything about the site from what fonts you use to where information is placed.

To see how this works, have a look at my site without a style sheet applied. This is simply the blog in its rawest form. In the future, without too much effort, if I want to give my site a facelift, all I need to do is compose a new stylesheet which is far easier than going into every document and finding places where changes need to be made.

Since I'm in the middle of this process, the site is in a state of flux, so if you see something weird, don't worry, I'm probably just testing something new. However, there might be problems that I'm not aware of so if you see something straight-up wrong, just email me and let me know.

If you really want to see this in action, check out the CSS Zen Garden

It's becoming harder and harder for me to get up the energy to blog consistently. I don't know why that it is. It's certainly not for lack of time (I'm working only from 4-7pm most weekdays and on the weekends). And it's not for lack of anything interesting to talk about. Maybe it's just getting tired and I need to move onto something else entirely different. Maybe the site needs a face lift or I just need a vacation from typing.

One of the residual tragedies of having my old hard drive crash is the loss of hundreds of fonts (which I thought I had backed up) including the one I used to make the header of the page (Berlin Sans, if I remember correctly). As I'm starting to make changes to the site to reflect the fact that I am no longer associated with the Peace Corps or Samoa in any way, I'm having some trouble because of these missing fonts. I'm going to start hunting them down. Hopefully Flash won't give me too much trouble. It's probably a time for a complete site overhaul anyway, but I do like that font.

If anyone knows where I can get Berlin Sans Demi or any of the Berlin Sans fonts, don't hesitate. Thanks.

So much has been going on here and I've just been lazy about writing. I promise I will have lots of new content tonight with some great pictures including shots of the snowboarder faceplanting on the rail. It's worth the wait.

Andrew

Sprint runs a communications center at the top of the Eagle Bahn gondola where I am now trying to thaw out my little toes. Internet connection is super fast and, best of all, it's free. So you can expect daily reports from the top of the mountain.

The weather is complete crap today. It's about 20 degrees and there is no visibility. It's not exactly the kind of day that screams, "group portrait". So instead of taking pictures (and making money) I've spent most of the moring skiing and getting to know the mountain, which is massive.

It's great skiing on a day like this because even though it's cold, windy and snowy, the trails are full of powder. The problem for me is that I'm in horrible skiing shape which basically means that one run down the mountain releases enough lactic acid in my thighs to make me want quit and head home. I'll be in shape in a few days, but meanwhile my skiis are chattering all over the place. It could be worse. I could be where you are. :)

Sorry about the lack of posts on the site since I arrived in Vail. It's not for lacking of anything interesting to write about. I just don't have the usual access to the Internet. Not only have I had massive problems with my laptop which is knocking on death's door after the year in Samoa, but this job thing is really getting in the way. I've been working from 8:30-7 every day since I arrived and when you factor in the required social drinking (Vail is more like a big bar with skiing problem, than a ski resort with a drinking problem), I just haven't had the time to inform my viewing public of my day to day activities. I'll try to rectify that as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.

It's been a long time since I posted any pictures on this site. It's not because I haven't taken any. I have taken tons. It's a combination of me being lazy and having some problems with my computer which I won't burden you with at the moment.

Just now that in the next few days, I will add tons of new pics to the site, especially pictures of my kittens in their new natural habitat. Keep your eyes peeled.

I want to wish everyone out there in Internetland a happy and healthy new year. Best of luck in all your endeavors in the coming year.

cheers,

Andrew

Now that former Governor Tom Ridge has raised the national terror alert level to "Orange" or high, up one level from elevated or "Yellow", here are some helpful tips to safe use of this website:

1. Report any suspicious posts or comments to the FBI
2. Arrive at the site several minutes before you intend to post, especially during the busy holiday season
3. Remove metal items from your pockets, take laptop computers out of luggage for inspection, take off coats and be prepared to remove shoes
4. Go about your business as usual

You can’t stop posting or commenting because of this. That gives them exactly what they would want. Security professionals at all levels are working to keep this website safe.

"Finally - no matter your faith or culture - now is the time of year for important celebrations. So, I encourage you to continue with your holiday plans. Gather with your family and friends and enjoy the spirit of this season. There is no doubt that we have a lot to be thankful for - not the least of which the opportunity to live in the greatest country in the world. It is a country that will not be bent by terror. It is a country that will not be broken by fear. But instead, we are a country blessed with a population marked by goodwill and great resolve. We will show the terrorists both this holiday season - goodwill toward our fellow men, readiness and resolve to protect our families and our freedom." Make sure to report any suspicious activity, especailly by your neighbors.

thanks,

The Management
American Idle

Information courtesy of Ready.gov, a service of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

You might not have noticed this, but between the 11th of November and the 24th of November, failed to log a single entry. It's not that nothing happening. Plenty happened. It's that I was away from the computer, didn't have access to the web and basically blew it off. Here's the question: Should I go back and fill in the missing days with the stuff that happened to me, post stories and pictures or should I just get on with my life?

Here are where the last 100 page views came from:
OCTOBER 12, 2003

Yesteryday, almost nobody came to the visit American Idle. There were only 3 unique visitors when I usually average about 30. I guess people had better things to do on September 11th. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.

I love the government building. Something about its silouette is so striking that I can't help but take pictures of it.

It was built as a gift by the Chinese government a few years back and is far and away the most prominent landmark in Samoa. It's also where I work, so I come to it every day.

I can see it from where I live above the little airport. From there it looks like a castle out of a children's fantasy book. My camera just does't have the reach to take a decent picture of it from my house. But I'm getting a new digital camera in a few days with a massive 16x optical zoom (this is with the 2x teleconverter which makes it the equivalent of a 400mm lens on a 35mm camera).

The Coconut Blog, a blog dedicated to "News, Notes, and Dispatches From Wherever Coconuts Grow" (Samoa falls into this category in a big way), has written up American Idle. How very cool. It would be nice if this, and a few other mentions here and there, drive some traffic to my site.

You can find the story at The Coconut Blog here

American Idle has been around for a few months, so it's time for a facelift. It's incredible how much work goes into making even the smallest change. This is mostly because I still have two sites that are merged into one, the original site that I built when I was in training at the end of the last year, and the Movable Type blog the I started a few months back.

I been working lately on moving them closer to one site, but before I finished, I decided I needed a fresh look and have given myself tons of work to make everything look consistent. At least I don't have a real job to get in the way of my computer time or anything.

Hey, you! Yes, you.

If you're reading this site, please post on a comment on this entry (or any entry that you find interesting).

See that link right below here that says, "post a comment"? Just click on it and write something. Write anything. I don't care what you write. I don't care if I know you. Just write something to let me know that you came to the site. It would mean a lot to me. Thanks, Andrew

If you can beleive this shit, there's a fantasy exchange for trading "shares" of blogs. Someone set up a website called Blogshares where you can buy and sell virtual shares of blogs. Why you want to do this, I'm not sure. It's just one more way to stroke the ego of the people in the subculture who publish their lives online

Shares of American Idle are hard to come by at the moment. There are 5000 outstanding shares of which less than 160 are in open float. It's very closely held. If you want to get in on it, you're going to have to hurry.

I'm about to register and buy up what I can. I should own the damn thing, right?

It's all done in JavaScript. If you want the code, it's posted below.

I stayed up all night last night working on the flash intro to the site and it is working like a charm, finally (sort of - the images sometimes still get stuck loading, but at least they load in the right place and in the right order).

This was not easy to pull off. Flash is a pain in the ass to work with. It's one of the least user friendly programs out there. And the help documentation that Macromedia provides is dogshit. That aside, it's serious fun to play around with and make animation.

In the latest version, Flash MX, Macromedia has included dynamic capabilities, which is how I solved the loading problem that I was having with the first go around. All the images in the movie are loaded dynamically off a server so the .swf file, the actual file that contains the animation, is tiny, only 16K or so. Before it was over 250K, which is large, especailly for the narrowband connections in Samoa.

The really beautiful thing about the dynamic images is that I never have to edit the flash file ever again. If I want to change the images that appear in the movie, all I have to do is upload new movies. I love it!

I just added a new translation feature to the site. You can now read these pages in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and even Norwegian. I found this site Free translation, http://www.freetranslation.com/.

I'd love to know if it's any good. Can someone who reads any of these languages check it out and let me know? It certainly looks good, especially the Norwegian.

American Idle in various languages:

French - L'americain Tourne au ralenti.

Spanish - Marcha Lenta Americana

Dutch - Amerikaans Inactief

Italian - L'americano Ozia

Portuguese - Americano Desocupado

Norwegia - Amerikansk Idle

After struggling with Flash MX all weekend, I finally got a finshed product for my new intro page.

It looks great offline, however when I put it online, the movie gets stuck after the second image. At least it does here in Samoa where the connections are very, very slow. I'm still waiting to hear from someone at home if it loads properly.

I'm trying to work out a way where I can load the images dynamically and drastically reduce the size of the .swf file which is something like 226K at the moment. I'm also working on a "preloader" that might solve the problem for us low-bandwidth folks.

Let me know what you think. If you have any questions about any of the pictures, I'd be more than happy to answer them.

I've added three new galleries to American Idle. They are not completely done. The pictures are all up, but the pages have not been built, so there are no captions, but you can see all the images.

TAUI PERLA AND KARMIE

The new galleries are:

Taui's Birthday Bash
Tour de Savai'i
Churches of Savai'i

There are also three new images in the tattoo gallery that are very cool including Taui, pictured right, Shawn Wilson and Blair Paul. Have a look.