Hace mucho tiempo me amigo! ?Usted no tiene algo nuevo para decirnos?

For those of you non Spanish speakers, this translates more or less to, “It’s been a long time my friend! Don’t you have anything new to tell us?”.

How embarrassing that my readers have to give me a verbal goosing to get a blog entry. Sheesh!

The fact is I have been posting regularly to my other blog, and some of those posts, like this one and Part 2, really should have gone on this blog and not that one as those were more personal posts about my life. I try to keep the personal stuff, the rants, and any political junk on this one.

So dear reader Miguel… I needed that!  Thank you for getting me off my butt. I’ll try to do better!

This turned out to be a pretty simple request thanks to the folks at Feedburner, the company that handles my RSS feeds.

To subscribe, just place your email address in the form at the top-left. You will receive a verifying email which you must answer, then you will be all set. The system will send you a copy of any new posts in HTML format. They will be sent at about 6-9 AM CST. No posts? No email.

Prefer a direct link to subscribe? Click Here

I explained to Maria that should Shakira decide to come to Costa Rica searching desperately for a 60+, overweight Gringo with whom she could spend her declining years, I would have to consider leaving my wonderful wife… forthwith. Well I tried to say that, but I didn’t know how to say forthwith in Spanish. For those of you who know not who is shakira, read on…

Skakira is arguable THE sexiest person of the female persuasion anywhere on the face of the earth.

She is about 30, gorgeous, from Columbia, and can do things with her voice AND her body that quite frankly are not normal. It is the body stuff that sort or causes those sleepless nights.

Shakira is actually Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, born in Barranquilla, Colombia on February 2, 1977 of a Columbian mother and a Lebanese father. She is known simply as Shakira (the Arabic translation meaning “Woman of Grace”).

A quick view of the video below will prove this to be 100% accurate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The title of the song is “Hips Don’t Lie”, and I am here to tell you that HER hips will embed themselves in your mind and other locations whether you are of the male or female persuasion. Those hips are incapable of untruths!

You can have your Madonna, Brittany, whom-evers… for they are but pretenders, wannabes, and frankly… not very good ones when compared to the real thing.

Maria seems to not put much credence in my threat to leave her should Shakira come aknockin’, probably with good cause. The odds are a tad low that Shakira would ever become that desperate. That, or maybe she has some secret performer stuck in her mind.

With the enormous popularity if this video come the other pretenders like the foxy lady below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the other hand… perhaps I’ll just stick with what I have.

With that in mind, I am switching to new theme which hopefully will be easier to read. About the only thing I may want to change on this one, is moving the posting information to the bottom of each post instead of having it appear just below the title.

Anyway, feel free to comment on this new design… good or bad.

Looking a my stats for this blog, The Real Costa Rica Blog, and The Real Costa Rica, I found something astonishing!

It seems that the readers of these blogs/sites have been moving away from Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox. This in itself is not news. What is news is that, at least with MY readers, are moving away from IE at a much greater rate than I would have thought. Supposedly, IE still has about a 90% market share, but taking a peek at the chart below indicates that IE may have more problems than they thought.

While the sample size for RCR greater and thus probably a bit more accurate, it is clear that IE is really taking it in the shorts in general and deservedly so for continuing to market such a dated, poorly designed, and insecure web browser. It is also clear that it is Firefox that is eating their lunch!

I have no other reason to post this other than it’s one of those things that makes you go. “Hmmmm!”

Some Blogs add new content (articles) every day. Others maybe once or twice a week or sometimes less often. So the question is whether there is a way to keep up with the blogs you like to read without having to go to that Blog to see if there is anything new. If you have a list of maybe 8-10 of your favorites, that can be time consuming. Well there IS, and this article will teach you how to do it in almost no time, and the good news is you already have everything you need to set it up!

The KEY to all this is RSS or Really Simple Syndication. It is likely that you have seen a link or maybe a graphic on many web sites and Blogs that looks like this or maybe this . Sometimes is is a text link that says: Subscribe to my feed or Subscribe to my Podcast. When clicked, all of them will provide a special web page that is kinda nasty looking, but is not there for you to read. It is there for a news reader to read and THIS is the key to keeping up to date with as many Blogs as you like in one centralized location.

Every time the blogger adds an article, this RSS FEED page is updated. The article’s title is shown and also an excerpt from that article, usually the first 4-5 sentences. They are links, so when clicked, they take you to that Blog or to that article, your choice! Now you have an easy way to see who just blogged something and you can then go to their blog to read the whole article!

Nearly all blogs create this RSS feed automatically. There are also companies like Feedburner who take the RSS feed created by the Blog and make it pretty. They ALSO provide a central link to that RSS feed. I use Feedburner and you can take a look at what appears there by clicking here or here. There are two as I publish two blogs.

OK… so how can you use these RSS Feeds to create a summary of all the blogs that interest you. To make this simple, as promised, I am going to use Yahoo or to be more accurate My Yahoo. Why Yahoo? No reason at all. This whole process is available on Google, My AOL, MSN, NewsGator and others. I happen to use My Yahoo so that’s what you get!

We are going to create a one page location where you can follow two of my Blogs and two others that I like to follow. This post is also available as a downloadable .PDF if you wish to have a printable copy. Click here to download.
You will need a Yahoo login before you can do this. It is painless, but required by Yahoo to use the My Yahoo feature. I am going to presume you have one or will make one for use here.

Here are the steps:

1. Login to your My Yahoo. I use their three column format.

2. On the right side, below the advertising, you will see a link: Add New Page Click that link.

3. On the next page, just below the Yahoo Banner, you will see a link like this: Add Content Click that link.

4. On the next page, you will see a box labeled Find Content and a click box labeled Find. Do NOT click that box! Instead, look just to the right and you will see in really tiny print: Add RSS by URL. That is the one you click!

5. On the next page, you will see a location to enter the URL (page address) of the RSS for the blog that interests you. How do you find that URL? You go to the Blog of interest and look for that little graphic or any of the text links I gave above and you click on that link. THAT will tale you that nasty looking page I mentioned. You then just COPY and PASTE the URL into the box pn the Yahoo page and click ADD.

So, let’s say you want to add the RSS for The Real Costa Rica Blog. The RSS page is: http://blog.therealcostarica.com/wp-rss2.php so you copy and paste that URL to Yahoo and click Add.

6. On the next page, you verify the information is correct and click: Add To My Yahoo.

That’s it! When you return to your My Yahoo, the Blog Title will show and the last serveral articles and dates will be show right there! When the blogger adds a post, the RSS is updated and so is your My Yahoo. When they Post, YOU know it right away.

Now some variations.

Variation 1.

We will next add the Blog Costa Rica Jones. On HIS blog, the RSS link is called: Subscribe to my podcast. BUT, when you click it, you are asks to DOWNLOAD the page. That is NOT what we want! We want the LINK to that page. How do we get it? Simple! Right Click on the link Subscribe to my podcast and select “Copy Link Location”. This may vary by browser, but this is what Firefox uses. Now PASTE that link into the Yahoo page as I described above, click Add, then on the next page click Add To My Yahoo. You’re done!

Variation 2.

We are now going to add an RSS feed to My Dos Colones, another blog I frequent. On his blog, the RSS link says: Subscribe to my Feed. When you click THAT link, you get to his Feedburner page for his Blog. We discussed Feedburner above. That link actually shows his RSS feed all pretty and formatted, but the URL for THAT page is what we will copy and paste into Yahoo. You could, of course, right click to Copy Link Location as we did in variation 1 above.

You can now follow all of the above steps again to add blog after blog to your My Yahoo. When done, you will have a collection of all your favorite CR blogs in one handy location.

And now the cool parts!

Cool thing 1.

My Yahoo will allow you to add these RSS feeds from ANY web site, Blog, newspaper, whatever! Just look for the graphic on any web site and you know you can add that content to your My Yahoo.

Cool thing 2.

Many sites now offer an instant, one click graphic that when click, automatically add that content to your My Yahoo. Here are two examples: For Hisfault – Rants from the Tropics look for this: Now when you click THAT link, it instantly adds the RSS feed for www.hisfault.com to your My Yahoo. you need do nothing! Here is one for The REAL Costa Rica Blog that works the same way:

On various blogs, you may also see: , , and others. These are automatic, 1-click links to add the RSS to the reader specified. In fact I will be adding them to my blogs very soon. All work the same way.

At any time, you can now quickly easily add the RSS feed for thousands of blogs and web sites. Also, if a blog becomes inactive or you lose interest, you can just click the little X and Yahoo removes it from your page.

Here is a link that shows you a screen print of my personal My Yahoo and exactly how this whole thing looks when finished. I have maybe 20 links, but the screen shot only shows the first three.

RSS is really easy an now you can make use of it too.

RSS Links used in above examples:

The Real Costa Rica Blog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/therealcostaricablog

Hisfault – Rants from the Tropics – Costa Rica

http://feeds.feedburner.com/hisfault

My Dos Colones

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DosColones

Costa Rica Jones

http://costaricajones.blogs.com/costa_rica_jones/rss.xml

and a couple more to play with!

http://www.abroadincostarica.com/index.rdf and

http://jacquelinepassey.blogs.com/blog/rss.xml

Supposedly, I can blog from any photo I find in the FlicKR site or the ones I have posted there. I’ll try that later. While that might be OK, WordPress, the software that I use for this blog and for The Real Costa Rica blog, has a cool feature whereby I can actually see the finished product before publishing. I am not speaking of the WORDS, but of the entire page, in color, formatted, as it will appear. I doubt Flickr can do that, but quien sabe?
So, to fool around with this, I have added this photo I took of a Costa Rica Boyero… the guys you see driving the traditional Costa Rica oxcarts.

For those of you not familiar with the oxcarts, these beautifully decorated carts, drawn by oxen, were used to bring the coffee to market in the early days of Costa RicaThis guy came to about my navel, but his face tells more than I can ever write. Today, if there is one symbol of Costa Rica, it is the oxcart.

So now that I publish this. it appears that I cannot set the margin offset and that maybe the letters are coming too close to the photo. Nuts! Maybe WordPress has a setting I didn’t see. Otherwise, I’ll have to set it manually in HTML. As I recall, the code is hspace=”5″, but I don’t recall for sure.

Last edit: Yeah, I needed to add the HTML and I also added a photo of an oxcart as well and adding a border is the shit.  Enjoy!

Update: 21 May.  The HTML code didn’t work, so that meant the CSS (Style Sheet) was overriding.  Changed it to 3 pixels and voila.  I am NOT geek, but I speak geek!

I had the pleasure of meeting Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, Jones, Smith, Heinlein, Kasnowsky, Blah, Blah and Blah, who is the head cheese and main blogger at Jacqueline Passey, Incorporated, LLC, SA, DDS, and BS and 2004 winner of the “Most Affiliate Links on any One Web Page Award”.

Jacqueline has recently made the move to Costa Rica with her (also) prize winning “novio del dia”. I say this because he was the winner of the Big Contest wherein JP went online to solicit a traveling companion and sex A LOVER! Terrence was the prize! How cool is that! I shudda applied!

Actually, advertising works! I met ML when I put an ad in La Nacion for a hot, long legged, beautiful, romantic, Tica with an bent sense of humor. ML applied and regular blog readers know we are getting married in THREE DAYS! ARGH.

Anyway, I generally do not do much in depth analysis of other bloggers (except for the famous Stephanie Klein thing which will never die methinks. Anyway, it is probably unfair to treat her her like someone who had to go to eBay for romance. In person, she is bright and funny… a bit offbeat, and MUCH better looking than any picture on her blog, and always wears big clunky shoes… a habit she will soon probably forego once she knows that wearing those things in the tropics will give her a raging case of toe nail fungus. Ewwww!

JP appeared at the ARCR Seminar and later blogged the experience. Incredibly, she got ALL the names spelled right… except MINE!

Sadly, she only covered Day 1 and skipped entirely Day 2, the far more important (and interesting) day as that is the day I spoke. Dissed me… Snot.

Anyway… we really fooled her! She writes: “(I)…joined Christopher Howard, Ryan Piercy, and Tim (author of The Real Costa Rica website and the blog His Fault and a couple other people lingering over lunch and drinks. I felt so special being at the “cool kids” table of Costa Rican insiders!

Cool Kids? LOL! Chris, Ry and I are about the least cool kids in CR, but cool enough to fool HER! I am guessing we were all nerds in high school, but have been reborn in Costa Rica. Now we are commonly referred to as “The Costa Rica Insiders!” Actually, I think she just felt really comfortable sitting with the Costa Rica geek squad. JP was probably one of those overly bright kids in high school who suffered fools poorly.

She posts to her blog every 90 minutes, and it is clear that she types at around 289 words per minute. I use three fingers, and average 20. This post will be two hours in the making. I have typing envy.

I also have Google Page Rank envy as HER blog has a PR of SIX and mine has been assigned a -3, something Google denies. It happened right after I wrote this. Before then, I had a NINE!

Anyway… her blog is a good read, and she is a nice lady… and if she ever recovers from her current disease, she will be a nice addition to Costa Rica. I have not yet added HER blog to my blogroll cuz she has not YET added MINE!

Oh… and J? I have your phone! Heh Heh… put the link somewhere near the top, OK?

“Google has blackballed online technology news service Cnet News.com for googling Eric Schmidt, CEO of the Mountain View company, and including some personal information about him in a story last month. Google told a Cnet editor that it will not speak with Cnet reporters until August 2006…”. I now expect that bloggers and others all over the world are gonna roast Google’s Corporate nuts for this… I know I am.

The odd thing is that none of the information was really damaging… well maybe except for the part about how he hosted a $10,000.00 per plate fund raising dinner for Al Gore. That sorta tells you something about his politics, and more important, his IQ. So much for Princeton grads. On the other hand, he also contributed a chunk to the Bush fund. Hedging your bets old son? On the third hand, maybe $10,000 per plate to honor the inventor of the Internet isn’t so bad, right?

I guess I should say that I am not a fan of Google. I used to be… back when the search engine could actually be used to find something. Now, the never ending quest for profit has turned it into a pretty valueless product (though it is clear Wall Street does not agree). Searches now fail to provide relevant results and their Pay Per Click (PPC) sponsored listings just make the results more confusing. Click fraud is out of control as well. I stopped using Google over a year ago except for occasional image searches which they have thankfully not screwed up…. yet. I prefer the little known Vivisimo aka Clusty. The best SE I have found so far.

Corporate hypocrisy is not new to anyone, but this flagrant piece of ass-holiness from Google just about has to win some kind of award. It is probably the second worst example of hypocrisy (that I know of) in Internet history. The first, of course, was AOL complaining about SPAMers.

Google’s total lack of regard pertaining to privacy is well documented… and now we have them taking this holier-than-thou approach to invasion of privacy. If I were still using Google, I’d threaten to switch… but as that is now sort an empty threat… I guess I’ll just say Google Sucks.

I really like reading other people’s blogs. Some are just atrocious and get no more than a ten second read. Others have outrageous content and are simply impossible not to read, often so flagrantly politically incorrect, you just cannot believe what you read. Still others are written by people who have incredible writing and storytelling skills. They open windows into their lives and souls that range from the hilarious to the tragic. These, of course, are the best ones! I would love to be able to write like those people. I would love to be able to write like that, but I can’t as I have neither their skills nor the ability to let people see too much of me.

One of my favorite blogs was/is thegirliematters and is still on my read list. Sadly, this enormously skilled woman has posted fewer and fewer times over the past year. She states recently, “I developed personal and then professional relationships with people who I met as a result of having the site in the first place, and I realized that maybe there were some things they just did not need to know (like my innermost thoughts, which are sometimes pretty dark; or details of my sex life)”. I understand this. While I admired how she permitted people… strangers really… to enter her inner circle of intimacy, often I wondered at what cost this. Now, I know.

Finding good blogs is getting harder and harder. The blog search engines are jammed with SPAM identical the the shit that fills my email every day. Once I stumble upon a good one, I always check out the Bloglist with the idea that one good blogger knows another. Though that seems reasonable… it is not the case. Often, the blogs listed are just friends whose skills are not equal.

I get the NY Times by email. I generally hate this leftist rag, but read it so I don’t go to far over the edge watching Fox. A couple of days ago, there was an article about a NY woman and her wildly popular blog, greek tragedy. That was how I got to read the blog of Stephanie Klein who is has turned her private life/blog into a book and television deal. You go girl!

Stephanie most assuredly has writing skills and has seen fit to use those skills to provide readers with a most intimate view of her life, her feelings, and her beliefs. She has gained celebrity as few others in the blog biz, her site being one of the 2,000 most read blogs on the net. Helluvan accomplishment given that there are now over 13 million available.

She is also moderately good looking (except for the hair which could use some serious help) apparently trying to mimic one of the fine “ladies” in Sluts Sex in the City. It then struck me as odd that A. She was getting divorced and B. She frequently refers to how difficult it is to find someone.


Here we have a clearly intelligent, reasonably attractive person, a talented and creative individual with a pretty excellent sense of humor. What is the problem? On the surface, this woman should be prime quality. Instead, she appears more to be a pathetic, sex driven, sadly tragic soul. It took a fair bit of reading to find out why as her site is huge. The answer lies here on the page “men to avoid“. Bloggers often like to make lists. If done well (so don’t look for one here), they can provide a realistic and often humorous insight into the person. This page explains to me why Stephanie is still single and having problems.

At first, I thought this a humorous response to “The Emotionally Unavailable Alcoholic’s Guide to Holiday Romance” published in the blog Manhatten Transfer (itself a great bit of writing), but as I read a ton of her Posts, it became clear this was, in fact, her mantra.

So now I know.

Bluntly, she is perhaps one of the more superficial, immature, shallow, money hungry, status seeking people I’ve met through blogs… and I fear a women seemingly devoid of a value system or boundaries. Her fixation on penis size, while humorous, is distressing as she has apparently not yet learned (at age 30 or so) that the most important sex organ is the heart.

Her lack of understanding of men is truly unfortunate.

If she was as socially immature at Barnard as she is now, I can fully understand why she was the only woman in her class not to be invited to join a sorority. They had her number.

I am not sure why she is even looking for a man at this point. Divorce is ugly, and it has been my experience that it takes a year or longer (from the date the papers are signed) for people to get their lives back together. Often it takes longer. Steph just seems to want to hook up again before the body is cold. I am divorced, and it took a long time for me to realize I had lost a fine person and two wonderful children because I was a complete asshole. I swore I would never be that way again, and with few exceptions, I have not.

Every story has two sides… and I’d like to hear from her ex. If in fact he did cheat on her, especially while pregnant, he is pretty clearly a low life in his own right, but it is not surprising they found each other in the first place. He was “the scholar and athlete of the year”… and I think I recall reading that he is a doctor. More superficial status seeking methinks. No depth… just show.

Poor Stephanie seems to be manifesting the promiscuity common to unsuccessful romantics. As one person wrote to her in the comments, “You are absolutely destined to remain alone for the rest of your life. May god have pitty on your lonely sad little soul”. Harsh. More likely poor Steph will seek and find some well hung superficial soulmate and be writing about that failure sometime in the future. She needs to do some serious growing up.

I think secrets can be good. Perhaps not during a relationship, but I do not believe your partner needs to know everything about your past. Maria Luisa is a 40 something woman who was once married and has lived with and traveled to many lands with the other men in her life. I really don’t want to know the details. Generalities suffice. Too much knowledge can make you vain, insecure, bitter, or arrogant… not for me. I know I was not her first. I just want to be her last.

While Girlie seems to want to pull in the reins on sharing her inner self, to regain her privacy… Stephanie keeps no secrets it appears. She is an emotional exhibitionist… seldom a good thing. There is no mystery. There is too much information. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe having no mystery is good, but I really don’t think so.

I like Girlie. Never met her. Exchanged one email a few years back. I think she is perhaps a first rate person. I think she also has figured out that she should keep some things to herself.

I actually like both these women, for their openness, their writing skills, their willingness to share… but I only foresee good stuff for Girlie.

Tags
Stephanie Klein
Greek Tragedy