Pye in the Face

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.

An important part of my real job involves analyzing client server logs in order to find out exactly who has been visiting a website, why and from where. It’s easy to examine URLs and search strings to determine what people were typing into Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. when they accidentally stumbled across your site. Here are some of my recent favorite queries which led folks to find Pye In The Face. Those poor, unsuspecting bastards.

• garth brooks french whore
• black wolf the dragon master
• amanda beard doing it
• girl tea bagged
• traci lords facial
• hottie gotti
• prisoners in australia ‘milking’ redback spiders
• paris hilton genetalia photo
• go home and get your fucking shine box
• ebony coochie gallery
• grooveasaurus

Kinda almost makes me wanna re-evaluate just what it is I’m accomplishing on this site. If you want to see what context any of these phrases were used in on the site, either by myself or within user comments, copy and paste them into the search bar on your left. Then, might I suggest a shower?

Well that’s just super. Friendster has started hosting free blogs just like Google does on blogger.com. Thousands more useless wastes of webspace have just been encouraged and will be started up, written in thrice and then abandoned for all time. The blog scrapheap is growing alarmingly tall. It’s tough to keep one afloat, even if you are capable of stringing a few sentences together. Many times when I click through to check out a blog that catches my eye, I find it hasn’t been written in for weeks or even months. The graveyard is chock full o’ bones, buddies.

Starting a blog is kinda like adopting a puppy – you have to know what you’re getting into before making the commitment. Don’t get a puppy if you live in a small apartment in the city and are home less than six hours a day. Likewise, don’t start a blog if you watch the Daily Show instead of network news or have more than one Anne Hathaway DVD in your personal collection. I’d really like to see the next 16 year old girl who starts a blog about Hillary Duff and then abandons it after a week forced to crap on a newspaper whilst being beaten with a rolled up newspaper. On DVD.

Slowly and surely I’ve been devising a way to incorporate photo galleries into this site. There are many easy external/3rd party options, but the trick was to keep the gallery experience as fluid and seamless as possible. I’ve settled on a system that’s a bit clunky, and involves a lot of work on my part, but it looks good. So I’m proud to finally introduce the new gallery section of Pye in the Face!

Fans of the old site are probably wondering: Where all the devestatingly funny captions, you witty bastard? Well that’s easy – they’re on the old site, dummy! You’ll be happy to know, however, that I’m working on a way to allow anyone to caption any of the photos you’ll see in this new gallery. And more than one person will be able to take a crack at the same picture. Click the photo of Katherine’s motorcycle cake at the beginning of the Thanksgiving gallery to see what I have in mind. And stay well clear of my camera. Unless you’re dressed as a topless mime and I’ve already paid you.

Blogger has finally developed a better way for people to post comments – and in doing so has rendered the hack I installed last month for the same purpose completely inoperable. I’ll have to make some changes to my template code over the weekend to get comment functionality back up and running, but it’s good to see they’ve finally started developing the application again. Here’s hoping category tags are right around the corner!

In the meantime, keep your silly thoughts to yourself. Or save up a bunch of them and just ejaculate all over the site Monday morning. Actually, on second thought don’t do anything remotely akin to ejaculating anywhere near me. Thank you.

UPDATE: All fixed! Comment away! (That means you, P-Cips. And yes, you’re a geek.)