Recently I attended the first ever LatAm Bloggers Blowout. Sadly I was only able to attend the Friday night blowout, I had to miss the subsequent Saturday and Sunday blowouts.

The best part was meeting all those great bloggers. Us bloggers are a bunch of blabbermouth extroverts so there was no shortage good conversation. I wish I’d had more time to get to know everyone, but there’s always next time. Thanks again to Wayne for sacrificing his sanity to organize the event, he did a bang up job.

Attendees of the Blogger Blowout were given blog homework assignments which came from the book “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog” by Margaret Mason.

My assignment:

How did you get those scars? The one on your thumb is from when you were three and you wondered whether scissors could cut skin. The one on your stomach is from your emergency appendectomy. Your boss figured you had to be in the hospital, because it was the only reason you’d ever be late to work without calling.

Your scars indicate what type of life you’ve lived. Whether you’re athletic, fighting for your health, or just occasionally clumsy, let each scar remind you of the story behind it.

My oldest scar is in the middle of one kneecap. The Momsicle tells me that I acquired it by jumping off a chair when I was about 18 months. I don’t remember exactly what she said and I don’t remember the event.

My next oldest scar is on my face, just by my eyebrow. It causes the nearby eyebrow hairs to poke out at weird angles. I was about 6 and I was trying to pull some piece of clothing out of my sister’s hands. I remember it being her clothing, or rather, I remember myself being guilty. She let go of the item and my own momentum sent me headlong into the corner of my bedpost. One inch over and I would have hit my eyeball on that bedpost.

Then I’ve got a scar just to the side of my other eye, it’s very small. This one was from a raging lunatic who had taken an ungodly amount of LSD and was drunk as well (terrible combination that is). He threw me down 3 flights of stairs. Before I passed out I remember hearing his mother yell “Call the cops before he kills her.” It apparently took 6 cops to get him into the patrol car, but I don’t remember that part. I’m lucky to remember anything at all.

I’ve also got a scar on one foot from a drop of hot oil that flew from a pan. That should have taught me not to cook barefoot…but it didn’t.

And my most recent scar is from a glass that one of my kitties broke. I brought the glass upstairs. When it was empty I placed it near the top of the stairs so I would remember to bring it down. Well my Lilah cat went romping and hit it and broke it. Then I walked by, didn’t see it, and got a deep cut in the top of one foot. That cut healed quickly, but left a distinct scar which still hurts.

I’ve got a few more scars from surgeries, but all were laparoscopic, so there’s almost no scarring on the outside. The inside, well, that’s another issue…

I’m kind of a Wikipedia junkie, I even use Wikipedia as a verb, as in “Hang on a sec, I’ll Wikipedia that”. Today I came across the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page, which provides information about how often different Wikipedia pages are viewed. But most interesting to me was the list of the most viewed pages.

In the month of February 2008 the most viewed normal page (not the home page or a search page) was, not surprisingly, a page titled “Valentine’s_Day”, at number 6. It was viewed 2,368,531 times during the month (well, the majority of views were on February 14).

The next most viewed normal page, at number 7, was the “Barack_Obama” page, which was viewed 2,625,243 times during February. That’s a lot of interest, in fact it’s more than 90,000 views per day.

Number 9 was “John_McCain” which was viewed 1,614,941 times (that’s more than 1 million fewer viewings than Barack’s page had).

I got curious about where Hillary Clinton’s page was in the list, I started scrolling down and didn’t see her name. So I used the browser’s search function and found her down the page at #77. The “Hillary_Clinton” page was viewed 646,899 times in February (that’s almost 2 million fewer viewings than Barack’s page).

In fact, in February there were a whole slew of things that Wikipedia users read about more often than they read Hillary’s page, including:

Sex at #13
Zacarias_Moussaoui at #20
Amy_Winehouse at #39
Canada at #46
Lost_(TV_series) at #32
Global_warming at #51
Abraham_Lincoln at #54
United_Kingdom at #55
Scientology at #56
George_W._Bush at #63

I’m not sure what all of this means, but I must say it didn’t surprise me. I find Lost and Global Warming and Sex and Abraham Lincoln all to be more interesting than I do Hillary Clinton. Not that I won’t vote for her if she gets the nomination, I will, but she simply doesn’t interest me.

Barack Obama on the other hand does interest me. In fact I’ve subscribed to his web site’s RSS feed, so I can stay up to date on whatever his camp is up to. And I find myself visiting the Barack Obama web site pretty often (it’s a well designed site with nice graphics and I like looking at it). I guess I’ve become a Barack Obama junkie as well.

The coolest thing in the world happened to me today. Well, it happened to my kid. But what’s the difference?

You see, I bought this road bike years and years ago when I was 19. It had a classic, beautiful but pretty rare frame and it was made in Japan and, well, it was the first present I ever bought myself when I got a REAL job. And it was this dark ruby red color. And it weighed almost nothing. It was a work of art.

I was in love with this bike. And I rode it a lot. And then I stopped riding it. And I started just moving it with me wherever I lived and storing it in my garage. Boy did it look good hanging on garage wall though. I would ride it once in a while and be happy. And the rest of the time I would just walk by it and be happy.

But then we decided to move to Mexico. And I had 3 bikes at the time. And I rode 2 of them, but I didn’t ride the red road bike. So my husband INSISTED, in that way that only a husband can insist, that I really should sell the bike to make room for other stuff on the moving truck. And the very sucky thing is that he was right.

So I did sell it. To some Mexican guy. And I’ve regretted it ever since.

Now my daughter has a mountain bike, she rides it to school in the middle of snowstorms and everything. But she’s been wanting a road bike. And she’s been volunteering at some kind of bike exchange program where volunteers pull apart donated bikes and make whole working bikes and give them to people in need. And as a volunteer for this bike exchange my kid gets to build herself a road bike from the available parts.

So tonight she calls. She’s put together her road bike. And the frame she’s got is the one from my old bike!!! She’s got my beautiful deep red tripled-butted gorgeous road bike frame. Her dad, my ex, remembers that bike and he identified it when she came home with it. I can’t wait for them to send a picture.

And I can’t tell you how happy I am that my bike is back in the family, where it belongs! Yay!!

I woke up yesterday and thought I was going to die. Pretty soon I figured out that it was *simply* a terrible allergic reaction to something airborne. I had every pollen allergy symptom in the book: dry eyes, massive sinus headache and lungs that felt like they were turned inside out. But today I’m fine. And all I took was tea, honey and one dose of generic Advil. Weird. Must be a short-blooming flower. Or something.

While I was dying yesterday on the couch I got out the laptop and made a list of the top 50 celebrity-frequented detox centers in the U.S. It was actually not very hard to find these places thanks to the fact that celebs have no privacy at all and the press blabs about where they end up in treatment. In theory I could make a lot of money because of this list. If that happens I’ll let you know. For now you can just wonder.

One interesting thing was that most of these treatment centers have little “should I be institutionalized for this hourly crack habit” quizzes that you can take FREE on their web sites. So in the course of the day I took about 18 of these “am I a junkie” quizzes.

And I can say with certainty that I am not a junkie. Phew, really good to know because I sure as hell can’t afford any of those places. One of them charges $75,000 USD per month, but most of them only charge around $30,000 USD for 30 whole days. Some of them charge less but you have to bring your own team of doctors! What the hell is that?

Whatever, just be glad you aren’t Britney Spears. That poor girl ain’t right.

I was just cleaning out and organizing my Google Documents. But I came across this, which can’t be cleaned out or organized. It’s just perfect the way it is.

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose
A list of thirty writing “essentials” from Jack Kerouac:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I was just reading an interesting blog article titled “Forgotten your password? Google can find it for you. Unfortunately“. The article discusses a potential security vulnerability having to do with the way that passwords are stored in many of the databases of the various web sites we all visit. Now I’m not technical enough to explain this properly, but I “get it”. And what it boils down to for me is that this is yet another reason not to use the same password over and over for all the sites you visit.

Personally I’ve always been paranoid about relying on one password. This is because I’ve been witness to organizations with very lax data security standards; I’ve seen databases that held usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and expiration dates along with billing addresses but which were unsecured and free to be copied by any employee in the whole company. One disgruntled employee who copies a database like that could do a great deal of damage to the people whose data resides there. I’m paranoid about that one disgruntled employee.

As the computer industry, and especially the web, ages and matures we see a greater attention to security, and disgruntled employees can do less and less damage. But still, it seems there’s always some new threat that some brilliant hacker has just figured out.

So what I do is to use a different password for each site I visit. And then I keep track of those passwords by writing down codes for them which no one but me would understand. For example, if I used the password Purple890 I might code it for myself as notRedX09. And then when I see notRedX09 I would associate notRed to mean Purple and I would know that X means the number 8 and then I would know that the last two numbers are simply reversed.

If you are confused that’s the point. The point is that I encode my passwords so that the associations to the encoding are mine and mine only. I encode them using connections to concepts or numbers or patterns which occur in my head alone. And that means that unless you plan to torture me you are not going to figure out what all my passwords are.

When I get bored, as I just did this evening while waiting for a boatload of monstrous PDF files to upload to a client’s server, I look at MetaFilter. You should too.

Some of today’s MetaFilter findings:

• Gilmourish - If you love David Gilmour (must I date myself by saying he was in Pink Floyd?) this is for you, and the web design is just luscious. When my design skills get that good it will be time to jump in front of that ever-present Cancun taxi cab. There will be nothing more to live for.
• Chat Noir - That means black cat in case you live at the bottom of a barrel and never took French. It’s a game, it’s addictive, and I keep losing.
• Lucky Dube is Dead - If you don’t know who Lucky Dube was then you probably do live at the bottom of a barrel. How’s the light down there? He was one of those critical, seminal reggae musicians. And I’m so out-of-touch that it took me a whole month to find out about his death…
• David Byrne Narrates A Bike Ride Through NYC - That’s The David Byrne to you. Gawd I miss New York.
• TED Talks - Well this isn’t a find for me, but could be for you. The TED Talks feature some of the most important speakers around (yes, like Al Gore, yes, I know).

Oh crap, it’s raining, gotta run…I have clean sheets (formerly dry) on the clothesline.

I’ve been tagged by Cancun Canuck to play a little blog game. Here are the rules: when tagged link to the person who tagged you, then post the rules of the game, then list eight random things about yourself. At the end of the post link to eight other people’s blogs.

8 Random Things About Me

1. I can’t sleep with either of my ears exposed to the air. Short haircuts do not work for me because I then have to sleep with a pillow or an arm slung over the exposed ear. If I feel air on my ear I wake up. I’m sure this goes back to the recurring nightmare I had when I was 2 years old about the gorilla that would hide in my closet and then come out when it was dark and bite off my ear. I could get therapy for this, or I could just not wear my hair short.

2. When I was a kid I wanted to be a clown, or a detective, or a spy.

3. Now that I am an adult I want to get a Master’s Degree in Application Usability.

4. I secretly like pictures of cherubs and angels, even though I think they are tacky and I would not be caught dead putting that kind of trash on my walls.

5. Within 5 feet of me right now are: a poster from the Pearl Jam concert which took place on November 7, 1996, a book titled “the zen of css design”, a 17 year old cat whose hobby it has always been to throw up daily and a plastic wind-up penguin who hops (but only when you wind him up).

6. I like to do sit-ups. In fact I like to do at least 100 per day, but that doesn’t happen usually.

7. There is someone that I hate.

8. I just, today, named my most recently acquired street cat “Emma” (she is our 10th cat); Emma being short (in my mind) for Clementine or Clementina (have not decided which).

8 Other People’s Blogs

• Hell’s Half Acre
• Yucatan Living
• My Magic Roundabout
• 1603 Katrina
• Cancun Blog
• Julie Zickefoose
• La Gringa Mas Bella
• Dropped In

Lots of unrelated and discordant thoughts are running through my head. Sorry for sharing the chaos.

First, my friend CancunCanuck has FINALLY started blogging!! It was a good thing waiting (and waiting) to happen. Watch her, she will need only moments to find her “blog voice”, instead of the full year of suffering it takes most bloggers. She is a sensitive and skilled writer with a big heart. (You rock Girl!)

Oh, and one of my cats is driving me nuts. He just wants to go out all the time and he cries sometimes for hours. But each time I let him leave he’s gone for days, and comes back with 3 or 4 ticks on him; not to mention that I have to listen to the husband whine the whole time the cat is gone. So it’s one whiner or the other. Jeez. Get over it guys.

I posted a while ago that I was worried that someone living nearby the condo we bought was a hit man. Well, he was, just like we thought, he got busted, he was forced to move out…so we are no longer watching for bodies falling from the roof. Now someone just needs to get rid of the drug dealer who lives nearby and fills the courtyard with pot smoke 18 times a day.

The condo is coming along. Our renter comes tomorrow to finalize contract language and see the changes. One change being that today we had a stationary gas tank installed on the roof. I hope no one steals it. The stationary gas tank will save our tenant money, since it’s cheaper to fill than the small portable dangerous tanks that most people have in rentals here. And we won’t worry about her blowing herself up hooking and unhooking those portable tanks, the only people messing with the tank will be the guys from the gas company.

And in other news I’ve fallen in love with that orange cat that I took off the street a couple of months ago. My sister agreed to take her, and I could let her go within the family. But I’m about sure that this is one of the best cats ever to walk this planet, so if she doesn’t go to someone in the family, who can continue the love exactly where I leave off, then I won’t let go of this cat.

It’s stunning to think that this amazing lovely creature was starving and alone and dirty living on the street. How could the universe leave her out like that? I can think of some people who might deserve to live under a car in the dirt like that, but not this magic cat.

And that leads me to my motto of the day, and it’s only for today, because it’s mean, and I try not to be mean, mostly. “A friendly cat is better than a catty friend.”

I received some lovely gifts for my birthday. One of them was a pot of lilies from my husband. He likes to give me live plants, rather than cut flowers.

My mom grew lilies like these when I was a kid. Just looking at them takes me back to 1974 in New England. Lovely. (Thanks Viejo!)