Pye in the Face

After - no kidding - 2 years of humming and hawing, DavePye.com has finally been migrated from the infantile Blogger to the almighty WordPress platform. The design you see today is not final, and the incredible functionality of WordPress will make this site more interactive and fun for the 13 readers I have managed to retain during this slow summer. It’s time for me to get this old clunker back on the road.

As anyone in the know knows - I am gearing up for a big, and technically international, move. I am attempting to build a department at work, hand off building management duties and financials to the owners, finish taxes, organize satellite internet access to remote wilderness locations, have a tooth replaced, sort personal accounting, get a new laptop and - oh yeah - blah dee frickin’ blah.

DavePye.com will be back - and better than ever when the dust settles in a couple of weeks. A redesign and move to a different backend will follow shortly after. I look forward to documenting my new adventures in Canada, and will not disappoint. Also, if you’re not already on the Evite for the going away party Saturday night, and feel like you should be, spare yourself the wee dejected sniffle - and just email me for details.

Don’t think I don’t know it.

I don’t want to hear myself sing this song more than anyone of you do. If I could truly visualize the audience I have built, I would never dare to take a hiatus. As I once said, a blog is like a puppy - if you fail to give it attention, it will die quickly. Or at least shite all over everything you have. Maybe a blog is like a pimp, or Godzilla, or some kind of giant pigeon. I’m not sure.

It’s definitely like a German dictatorship who have just developed the Panzer. Or Jake Gyllenhall’s nemesis in The Day After Tomorrow. A giant, wet thing that envelops me and washes me out to me sea. Cutesy begone.

I love this domain, this website, this entity. And I will be back when the dust settles over here.

This blog has been sitting neglected for the past week like a red-headed stepchild. And I’m sorry, baby. Of course I still love you. Even though I was stupid enough to create you in Blogger two years ago instead of Wordpress. Even though I use you to annoy people, find homes for roaches and tell far too many dead prostitute jokes. You’re my one and only, and I love your little blue, green and orange ass. No I don’t think you’re a baboon. You’re putting words in my mouth now, baby. Shhhhhh.

No you did NOT see me at the movies last week with Squidoo. That is so over. What do I have to do to prove it to you? Add another bad radio program to the sidebar? How about another guestmap, would you like that? More news about my leaky roof? I’ve got it - another piece about how rainy it is this summer? A picture of my cat? How about another joke about how I’m going to die alone beside a trunk of DVD porn? I haven’t used that one in a while. What’s it going to take?

And… SCENE. This week PITF turns two years old. To help you fathom how unlikely it is for a blog to ever turn two years old, that’s 14 in dog years, - and about 672 in blog years. I’d be giving myself a pat on the back, if I weren’t already giving myself a pat on the back. In honor of this miraculous occasion, I will be updating the “classics” list on the left hand side for the first time in forever to encourage a little nostalgia. Which is a little like inducing vomit, only less potentially damaging to the esophagus.

Last FM is extraordinarily cool. If you’re not familiar with it, sign up now. I have added a chart in the left hand nav where you can see, and listen to, the last few songs I have played for myself. It tracks all my preferences and creates an on-the-fly radio station which has no boundaries in terms of artist catalogues, bandwidth or diskspace. The only problem is it looks like crap.

Do you really care at what time of the day I listened to one of these songs? You probably don’t care that I’ve listened to them at all. If I can figure out a way to get the box narrower, it will be staying. If not, I’ll keep looking for another musical solution for PITF. In the meantime, you’ll have more Pixies, Happy Mondays and Tragically Hip than you can shake a stick at. Just walk away.

First off, right out of the gate, a tremendous thank you to whichever internet ne’er do well took the time needed to put this lovely Shakira montage together. Sincerely. That trunk is full. Put the luggage in the back seat with Grandma.

Next, a few kind words about RSS Bandit. You’re reading my blog, so you probably read a few others. Did you know you can also have your news, stock quotes, movie reviews, gossip, weather and just about every other form of data under the sun delivered via RSS feeds? Download the Bandit - for those of you who are RSS amateurs, or get laid regularly, the greatest feature is the application’s ability to take any URL you give it and then hunt for an RSS feed. Sometimes they can be hard to find. So you just tell it to add a new subscrition, type in the basic site name, and if there’s a feed there it will find it. You can keep your feeds organized in a left hand column similar to IE favorites, and I absolutely love it - and I had tried many aggregators before settling on this one.

Now that I’ve come off like a huge nerd today, let me wrap up by chatting about my weight like a woman for a few lines. I mean, we’ve already established that I’m going to die alone. When you lose weight, even a little when you have a small fluxuation range like I do, your wardrobe suddenly doubles. I am back into 36s and am steadily dropping weight like a hot air balloon headed for a forest fire. If I see another fucking apple I’m going to shriek, but it’s a nice feeling and I missed these pants. Welcome back Perry Ellis.

If I learned one thing from looking at the XMas photos I got from my sister today, it’s that I am a prime candidate for a face tuck. Regardless, my love/hate relationship with the gym is my problem. These photos are still keepers. Keep a lookout for Mamma Pye loving all the attention in the North End, an impromptu Guelph reunion getting all kinds of boozy in Burlington, Billy Frasier restraining me in an attempt to keep me from getting rolled by 6 teenagers and a chick, and a cat that only looks weirder than my hairline.

A grand time, and I wish I could get up there more than once a year. They say it’s easier to get into the NHL than it is to get an advertising job in Toronto. Still, Hal Gill has a job, eh?

It’s been about 6 months since I added the funny little testimonial section you’ll see over to the left there. Every time the page refreshes, a new quote is displayed from a list of about 15 which were submitted at the inception. They’re getting a bit old. A bit long in the tooth. A wee bit stale. If you’re looking for a little interactivity today, email me a testimonial or leave one in the comments for me to add to the fray. I’m not fussy, but the funnier the better. Thy will be done.

Got a second? Good. Want to see something funny? OK. Go to MSN. Are you there? Now type “outside sales calls” into the search box. Got it? Hit the search button. I have to screen-shot this as it’ll undoubtedly change soon. Anyway, for posterity’s sake:

In your face, U.S. Department of Labor. That’s for that time at summer camp you beat me in the sack race and then made out with my girlfriend behind the canteen.

Another whack of photos from my folks’ place in Ontario. Highlights include eerie campfire pics, killer ponies, newfies, funny hats, jetskis and my insane father’s many costumes. Have a wee peeksie and stay tuned for an imminent batch from Triconi’s wedding.

I think we’re taking one last trip up there this weekend, and then I can lay down in a bus station somewhere and expire. I feel like a nomad, a gypsy, a transient or maybe even Roger Miller’s trans-continental-backseat-bus-trip-conceived lovechild. I’m tired, see? And I don’t wanna go nowheres for awhile.

Reaction to the Quotelets was fast and fierce when I started them a few months back. Recently though, the participation has petered out and I can’t help but think it’s because I’d never conceeded defeat. I am happy to announce that I’ve finally been unsurped, and I’m hoping that fact will breathe some life back into these little interactive literary bastards.

Way to go Keo - although only a handfull of us will get the joke, and I am not going to explain it to the rest of you for fear of being convicted of a hate crime, it was fricking hilarious and I’m officially giving you the conch. Your name has been added to the new current champ listing on the left, and I hope you stay there for many weeks. Send me a photo and I’ll add it too. And to the rest of you - this can be a lot of fun, so let’s keep ‘er going. Bragging rights get me out of bed in the morning.

I’m not going to be around a computer, or even resonably coherent enough, to mark the imminent and incredibly unlikely one-year anniversary this Saturday of that strange collection of vowels and consonants that is Pye In The Face. I started this site to learn about blogging as a marketing tool, and simply fell in love with the medium. It’s probably just thinly-veiled narcissism, but I’ve enjoyed entertaining my friends, old and new, for the past 365 days more than you can imagine. I’ve met many people, sparked a wealth of petty debate and spread around a font’s worth of useless knowledge that has hopefully made each and every one of you smile somewhere along the way.

In the past 12 months, 25,750 unique visitors have read my 436 ridiculous articles 78,932 times. I’ve been called an asshole, a pervert, a neo-con and a ‘beautiful man’ - albeit only 3 times in the same sentence. My only running theme is attempted humor, which makes the site a little hard to palate for the masses - but to be honest that’s the way I’d like to keep it. I can think of few things more appropriate than to now recap a few of my favorite moments that you may have missed the first time around. And the award goes to:

- Best unsupervised fight in the comment section.
- Most overtly nostalgic.
- Weakest attempt at keeping the blog apolitical.
- Best appearance on Comedy Central.
- Most meanspirited celebrity rip.
- Worst blog entry ever.
- Best Tall Tale.
- Best Quizzlet & Quotelet.
- Worst attempt at one-upping me.
- Best attempt at one-upping me.
- Best comment by a famous comedian.
- Most incoming links from other sites.
- My favorite Boston-related article.

I’ll leave it at that. For those of you who visit the site daily, it’s been a real pleasure. I’d like to invite you all to share your disgust, praise, favorite articles, etc. in the comments below - especially if you’re one of my loyal readers who never utters a peep. I know from my server logs that there are about 50 of you - who are you people, and what am I doing right?

Oh, and while we’re all here - this is the little belch that started it all.

I went out on the razz last night for the first time in a while, and am feeling a little brain dead today. I wanted to write something, but needed inspiration. After a quick search I found a decent meme to fill out. Brace yourselves and feel free to play along in the comments.

3 snacks I enjoy…
1. Salt & vinegar potato chips.
2. Anything with feta on it. And I do mean anything.
3. A really good chicken pot pie. I consider it a snack as they rarely fill me up completely. I dump vinegar all over the top of the pastry and then crust it with salt and pepper. Tasty, buddies.

3 songs I know all the words to…
1. There Goes The Fear - The Doves
2. The Pixies‘ entire catalog.
3. I watched Morrissey’s recent set at Glastonbury this morning, and he did an old Smiths song I love called The Headmaster Ritual. I knew every single word - and there are a lot of them. Hadn’t heard it in a few years and surprised myself. I once wrote all the words to this song on my desk in Mr. Sarnevitz’s match class (circa 1990) and had to come back after school and clean the entire classroom.

3 locations I would love to run away to…
1. Greece. There’s feta there. Lots of it.
2. My parent’s new house in Ontario. This location in particular is one of my favorite places on earth.
3. Rachel Weisz’s lap.

3 recently seen movies I like…
1. Batman Begins - Apparently Bale didn’t really commit career suicide by starring in American Psycho afterall. But I don’t know if being typecast as a giant bat is a great deal better.
2. War of the Worlds
3. Sin City - I will be racing, not walking, out to get this DVD when it comes out. What a brilliant film. See it.

A fan of Pye In The Face asked me tonight if I was considering adding an RSS feed. If you have no idea what that is, please have a look here for some quick learnin’ - as they are about to change civilization as we know it. I told him I’d actually already added Really Simple Syndication, and that it was available at the far right of the top menu. You can also click here for the same effect.

Now - what in the heck is it, and how does it relate to you? Simply put, it’s a way of tailoring information from your favorite news outlets, blogs, whatever - so it will all appear in one place. This location may be a feed reader program, a web browser, your own website and the list goes on. You can add them to personal portals like My Yahoo and even have them pumped stright into your Outlook daily overview. Vesatility and convenience the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Butter Speed Stick.

A WordPress migration looms ever closer on the horizon. Google’s shares have soared to $300 this week - while one of their flagship properties, Blogger, has continued to sniff furry little mice nuts:

“The launch of Blogger Images required a bit of new code that is causing some users annoying layout problems. Before launch, the templates passed our tests but because of the open nature of Blogger templates, we weren’t sure which kinds of template modifications were going to be affected. We’re hammering out the solution now and we’ll update our help site with some workarounds today.”

And I’m hammering out a batch to the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog. But where is the progress? I mean, besides all over my T-shirt? I’ve been watching the evolution of Blogger since the guy who created it sold it to Google, and it’s being run (into the ground) by a bunch of kids. I should have packed up and moved last summer when I got industrious and almost pulled the trigger one long and sober Saturday night. But I couldn’t get the comments to transfer properly, and I lost my nerve. So if you’ve been wondering why my text has been looking like Camryn Manheim jacknifed onto it off a telephone pole - now you know. Bear with me.

There are as of yet undiscovered tribes in the heart of the Peruvian jungle who’ve developed better content management systems than Blogger. And I wished I’d joined them months ago. Although my head would now likely be very tiny and hanging on someone’s belt.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, I love my new gallery. Then why don’t I marry it, you ask? Believe me, the thought has crossed my mind. Anyhew, one of the things that’s been bugging me (besides the fact that there’s way too many pictures of Monster) is that it was necessary for people to go through a boring registration process before leaving comments. I rolled up my sleeves last night and figured out how to turn this requirement off. And also that I need to spend more time on my forearms whilst in the gym.

Now anyone who may be looking at the gallery can enter a nickname and comment right into an existing box below the photo, hit submit and VOILA. Couldn’t be simpler if you paid a ghostwriter to do it for you. You don’t even need to be taken to a new page first like you do when you leave a comment on the blog. So effortless, a rabid squirrel with swollen paws and a drinking problem could do it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy/squirrely.

So if something crosses your mind whilst perusing all the photos of my silly life - by all means, share. I also just added a new album dedicated to photos my friends have sent me of themselves. So if you’ve got a funny snap handy, or you’ve been somewhere cool on vacation, email away and I’ll gladly contribute 0.2 seconds to your 15 minutes of fame.

* Update: Janet has started her own category.

Whilst hiding from the heat today and trying to get some work done, I stumbled across another whack of photos on my hard drive. Have a look at some VA gallery additions from a reunion a couple of years ago in Saxton’s River, a Thanksgiving 2004 in Concord bunch you’ve seen before in the old gallery and finally a new album dedicated to partyish photos that just don’t seem to fit anywhere else. As always, please email me anything you’d like to see added.

All my plans fell through for today as I still have not received my telephone which my Mother seems to have shipped via The Pony Express. So apologies all around, and I hope to be back in contact with the rest of the world shortly. It’s funny how cut off you get when your cell phone is off limits. And by funny I of course mean extremely fucking pathetic. Technology has taken the land line out of the equation in many households, and it’s a risky prospect should you lose your sqwuaker.

There are hundreds of pictures on my hard drive, spanning years, with more in production all of the time. Gallery creation is a time consuming and miserable process, so I’ve always been on the lookout for a solution - and I think I’ve found it. Back in the david.pye.com days I’d make the photo pages manually and write all of the captions at once which would take an eternity. So I abandoned it in favor of the blog format, much to many of your chagrins. Well I’m bringing it back so we can have the best of both worlds! Introducing the all singing, all dancing:

Pye In The Face - The Gallery!

It slices, it dices. You can vote for your favorite photos, leave comments, upload your own pictures, search and much more. I spent last night uploading and categorizing a ton of old photos from past Thanksgivings, concerts and parties. There will be more on the way as I find time. Have a look - I bet you’ll get a kick out of it.

If you’re a frequent reader/contributor, please register in the gallery section. It takes 5 seconds and you’ll only have to do it once. And - if I can get passive aggressive for a moment - it would be nice if you could all contribute. Comment, send photos, get interactive. If you were there, sound off. If you have pictures you’d like to see added - email them to me. Enjoy, everyone.

The aforementioned new feature is live. Have a look over to your left and dig the new testimonials section. Keep refreshing to scroll through them all. I managed to collect about 12 good ones, but the rest of the submissions really fell a bit short of the mark. I hope that now you’re able to see the feature in action, you can bring your full A-game to the tepid task of testimonial typing - right here in the comments. Help a brother out.

UPDATE: Hey, Losers! I’m not writing any more entries until I get some more testimonials. And yes - I promise. I write for you guys every day. You can grace me with a sentence or two. Now excuse me while I go run around in nothing but a Canada T-Shirt.

Web logs are like little virtual Frankenstein monsters, each borrowing the best bits from the other. One thing I’ve seen a lot of recently are testimonials from fans and loyal readers. When done correctly, these can take some of the narcissistic steam out of feeling important enough to have your own blog, and be quite hilarious in the process. I’m thinking about including a javascript which rotates a selection of them somewhere in the main site template. Simply put, every time you visit the site or refresh the main page, you’d see a new blurb about Pye In The Face, me or whatever.

I have a collection of comments, good and bad, that I’ve been emailed over the last 10 months - and there’s a also a great crop of material here. I’ll probably get to this over the weekend whilst taking a break from far more important projects. If you’d like to take a stab at writing one that might be included, please do so right here. Keep them short, funny and honest. Anonymous posts will be deleted. Now picture me bracing myself.