Stop spamming my blog

Every day, I get a bogus comment from a creature that calls itself Alanna Gracia. Alanna Gracia is not a real person, Alanna Gracia is a leech, a parasite. It is the product of a sleazy website called Kitchen-Remodel-Ideas dot US.

Alanna Gracia leaves the same comment every day:

I found this article very up-to-date and informative as it provides excellent ideas for kitchen remodeling without breaking the bank. With this handy information, you are able to make your decisions more wisely and obtain the best kitchen re-modelling plan for yourself. I would like to add more information about kitchen re- modeling that can help you build your dream kitchen.

It doesn't matter what the topic of a post is, that's the comment it leaves.

I found this article very up-to-date and informative as it provides excellent ideas for kitchen remodeling without breaking the bank. With this handy information, you are able to make your decisions more wisely and obtain the best kitchen re-modelling plan for yourself. I would like to add more information about kitchen re- modeling that can help you build your dream kitchen.

Every day without fail, I delete it as soon as I see it and then I go to the parasitic website that spawned Alanna Gracia and I ask it to stop spamming me. It never does and every day I get a new comment from Alanna Gracia.

If you ever see a link for Kitchen-Remodel-Ideas dot US, don't follow it because it's a scam site. Unless of course, you'd like to leave a spammy comment for them. Leaving a spammy comment for a spammer would be pretty poetic, don't you think?

Now if I link to Kitchen-Remodel-Ideas dot US it will only help their SEO so I won't link to them. But remember to include the hyphens if you'd like to drop them a love note. And Alanna Garcia, I'm looking forward to deleting your comment after this post in particular.

A little bit of autumn

Although I live in a tropical climate now, I remain a Yankee at heart and for as much as I enjoy the fact that it will be 80 degrees today, there are times when I miss a bright autumn day in Pennsylvania. Maple trees get all the praise for turning red but it was the gingkos that always got my heart racing. Gingkos turn the most joyous yellow I've ever seen and they are the perfect respite from the winter everybody knows is coming.

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Gingkos hail from China originally but they've been naturalized in temperate climates the world over. They're a fascinating tree with a natural history that won't quit. So even though I never get a chance to see them anymore, I found something the other day that might bring a little of that gingko yellow into my otherwise tropical existence.

These brilliant leaves are printed so realistically I had to look twice to make sure weren't really gingko leaves.

These gingko post-its are from the South Korean design firm Apree and so far as I can tell they don't have  a US distributor. Hey US stationary and gift people, wanna make a whole lot of money? Get hold of Apree!

And for the rest of you, it doesn't stop with autumn gingko leaves, check out the rest of their stuff.

Tile of Spain asked me "Wanna go to Spain?"

And I responded with a resounding ¡Claro que sí!

Play this video and then read this post as the video plays.





Spain has to have the liveliest national anthem of any I've ever heard. That's the Marcha Reale if you're taking notes.

I've been asked to go on Tile of Spain's Reign in Spain Tour in 2011. I'm one of the journalists who'll be accompanying the lucky winners of Tile of Spain's Reign in Spain Contest. I wrote about the Reign in Spain Contest around two weeks ago and if you're a US-based architect or designer who hasn't entered yet, please do! You can find all the information you'll need and an entry application by following this link.

Madrid's shining Quatro Torres, via Flickr

On February 4th, 2011, I'm getting on a plane bound for Madrid.





View spain trip in a larger map

From Madrid, my traveling companions and I will board the Ave, Spain's high-speed train system.

The Ave will take us to Zaragoza.

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Zaragoza is the fifth largest city in Spain. Caesar Augustus established it some time around 25 BC. It remained a population center and rose to power as the largest Moorish city in Northern Spain in the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. It remained a Moorish city until the early 1100s. I am salivating at the chance to get up close and personal with Spain's surviving Moorish  architecture and from what I can tell, Zaragoza will deliver more of it than I can imagine.

From Zaragoza, we're heading to Teruel. Teruel is the smallest of Spain's Provincial capitals. It traces its beginning to the latter days of Moorish rule in Spain in the 12th Century. It's a Unesco World heritage site for its many examples of Mudéjar architecture.

Mudéjar was a style of Moorish-lite architecture and arose at around the same time that Gothic architecture was coming to be in France and Germany. Mudéjar was an important transitional style and its contributions to the great cathedrals of northern Europe has been largely overlooked.

Teruel promises to be an architectural wonderland. In addition to the great examples of Mudéjar, there are a variety of buildings in Gothic, Baroque and early 20th Century styles. Any time I can look out over a thousand years of development in one sight line I'm a happy man indeed.

From Teruel we're off to Valencia, Spain's third-largest city. Valencia also started out as a Roman outpost and they called it Valentia then. Then being in 137 BC. It's since been occupied by the Visigoths, the Moors and finally the Catalan and Aragonese. Every one of those cultures has left fingerprints all over the city and I can't wait to see as many of them as time allows.

For all of Valencia's history, it doesn't seem the least bit shy about embracing not just today but tomorrow as well. The City of Science and Arts shown here is a pretty loud announcement of the Valencian peoples' belief in their future.

While we're in Valencia we'll attend the actual reason for this trip, a trade show known the world over as Cevisama. Cevisama is a world showcase devoted the best and brightest in the worlds of tile, bath fixtures, kitchen fixtures and natural stone. Spanish industries are on the march and it's going to be a real thrill to see these products on their home turf.

All of this is being made possible by Tile of Spain, an umbrella brand for ASCER, the Spanish tile Manufacturer's Association. I'm honored and grateful to have been selected for this once in a lifetime opportunity to experience the culture, food, architecture and industry of Spain. ¡Viva la España!

A Blog Off post: Thanksgiving's coming, what's it to you?

The following is a Blog Off post. A Blog off is a biweekly event where bloggers of all stripes write about the same topic. You can learn more on the Let's Blog Off site. As the day progresses, a table will appear at the end of this post and it will list all of the participants as well as link to their posts.

Oh man, it's Thanksgiving next week. How on earth did that happen already. This year has shot by with a speed that's making my head spin but now that Thanksgiving's around the corner, I suppose that means things'll be winding down on 2010.

What a year it's been. Everybody was telling me at this time last year that 2010 was going to be my break out year and in more ways than I can count it has been. When I look back on the last 11 months and think about the people I've met and the places I've been and when I add that the last two years' worth of people and experiences and wow. My life's unrecognizable from how it looked three years ago. That's fantastic of course and I am deeply, deeply grateful for how things look today.

But I was deeply, deeply grateful three years ago when everything I'm up to these days wasn't even on my radar.

Around 15 years ago, someone very wise told me that I should "choose what's so." It made no sense to me at the time, I was somebody to whom life happened.

Back then I was unhappy and ungrateful. I was waiting for the next big thing that never seemed to arrive and I couldn't figure out why I was so miserable. I thought that the key to happiness was to do the stuff that would help me get the things that would bring me the happiness I was looking for. A lot of people lead their lives that way, I can see that now.

It took me years to see that the do+have=be happy equation was a recipe for continued misery but eventually I did see it. Once I started to really think about that wise man's suggestion that I choose what's so I figured out that I had it all backwards. The answer wasn't do+have=be happy and that the answer I was looking for wasn't even an equation. The key was to be happy first. Once I was a happy, grateful man I'd do the things that happy, grateful people do. Once I was doing the sorts of things that happy, well-adjusted people do I'd find myself surrounded with the trappings of a fulfilled life.

It worked and it works. When I start out happy everything falls into place from there and it's absolutely unrelated to the circumstances I find myself in. If my default mode is grateful then everything's a gift. Since life is a series of stories I tell myself why not tell an empowering story?

Thanksgiving always gets me present to this stuff and I think it's absolutely fantastic that in the US we have a specific day set aside to be grateful. Five other countries around the world also have a day set aside called Thanksgiving but a day to be grateful goes a lot deeper than that. Human cultures have had harvest festivals for as long as there have been human cultures and something tells me that I'm not the first person to trip over the idea that being grateful is a good thing.

Maybe someday I'll find an excuse to prattle on some more about how to be grateful to nothing in particular.

So happy Thanksgiving folks. The assignment was to write about what it is to me and everything I just wrote is it. What's Thanksgiving to you?

Watch this space, I have another big announcement to make tomorrow

Or should I say, Miran este espacio, tengo noticias importantes para anunciar mañana.