A lot of people come here looking for information on The Pixies, so I better give those people what they want.
The big news is that my favourite band is going to come to Europe in 2004!!! Rock Werchter confirmed this week that they have contracted my favourite band. I really hope that the irresponsibles of the Benicassim festival have their eye on the pixies as well, so I can see them close to home.
[Update 2004.03.03]: For a complete tour schedule, have a look at Pixies 2004 Tour Dates.
It has been really quiet on this site; I just did not have the time to write.
I could have written about how we put a christmas tree in our house, and why we have a real tree and don’t want plastic.
I could have written about the fire my company had which destroyed the warehouse and covered the rest of the building with a black blanket. Now we have placed our support department in a small cabin in the garden.
I could have pointed you to some nice sites about web design or tell you some jokes.
I could have told you that BlogShares is up again.
Anyway, I hope I will have more time to write now.
Eight months ago I discovered BlogShares, a fantasy blog shares market. During these months I have spend my bored moments trying to convert my initial $500 into a fortune by trading virtual stocks. As far as I now, my account passed $90.000.000 this week, so I was really close to the ‘magical’ 100 million limit.
But I won’t reach that limit, since BlogShares is closed. Seyed, the creator and administrator of this game cannot support it anymore; the database crashed and won’t be restored anymore.
Game over.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbours came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “May be,” the farmer replied.The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbours exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “May be,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “May be,” said the farmer.
Now that I have been working with LOAF for several days, I have the feeling that the technology is not completely finished yet. I have studied many LOAF implementations, but have the feeling that most implementations are just too difficult to implement.
A lot of implementations are written in obscure programming languages, and need a powerful server to run on. But this way the LOAF technology is kept away from the big audience, who know nothing about programming. In my opinion, LOAF should be more easy to use, Joe Sixpack should be able to use it on his blog. And that preferably by only changing a single setting in his weblogging software.
So, I decided to create a LOAF implementation in CSS. Notice that this stylesheet is XHTML1.1 ready, since it also styles the element. You only need to copy the file to your server and your site is completely LOAF-compliant.
To use the LOAF CSS implementation on your site, follow the steps below:
The latest trick spammers have is setting up fake blogs, usually with the design copied from another site.
Though these sites look harmless, all links direct you to pr0n sites. To get visitors to their ‘webblogs’, they use a trick known as referrer spam. They request pages from other sites, pretending to come from a link on their weblog.
Since many sites display the referrers on one of their pages, home page or statistics page, the spammer effectively creates links to his site this way. And the more links to your site you have, the higher you get in Google’s search results, which results automatically in more visitors!!! You can read more about all this at idly.org.
Even though I do not display my referrers, and Google does not spider my statistics, I still don’t want these spammers to use my site. So I blocked them based on the referer field by adding the following code to my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} a-b-l-o-g.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} akksess.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bongohome.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} busty2.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} gamling.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} gdough.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} herbalecstasypills.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} jennifersblog.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} kwlablog.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} malixya.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} mikesplace.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} mp3int.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} onlinedatingchat.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} saulem.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} teoras.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} websearchus.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} worldnewslog.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} wr18.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
If you feel that I have added your site to this list by error, just let me know, and I will review my list.
Just for the record: at this moment we have planned two short visits to Holland.
The first visit will be at X-mas time. We already have the tickets, and will stay in the cold part of Europe from December 25 until December 28.
In spring we plan to come at Easter time, probably from Friday 'til Monday. If everything goes alright, we'll bring some people from over here with us.
As usual, invitations for a coffee or a beer are very welcome, though I cannot guarantee that we will accept your offer; it is our holiday after all.
To be honest, there are not a lot of great concerts to visit in Lleida. The main reason is that Barcelona works as a huge magnet and has all the goodies. But for me 160 kilometres is too far away to do regularly on a mid week’s evening.
But today finally I can see a big name in Lleida: John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. For those who don’t know John: he is mostly famous for having some great talent in his Bluesbreakers as Clapton and Jack Bruce (Cream), Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Andy Fraser (Free), and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones). Besides that he also knows quite well how to play the blues.
I am really looking forward to this concert, though he could have chosen a better concert hall than the Wonder mega disco outside the city. I prefer to listen my Chicago-style blues in a place with more atmosphere as the Escorxador.
Via random($foo)
After reading about it at Russell Beattie’s Notebook, I just had to add LOAF support to this site. You know, I always like to try out new technology. If anybody encounters strange behaviour in LOAF, please drop me a message.
[Update 2003.11.14]: Changed LOAF link to the ‘official’ LOAF wiki.
