Look at this picture:

Nothing strange right? Cars parked on a street, pines on the side.

Look better...

Doesn't the tree in the middle look weird to you???
It is a fake tree! I have been driving here at least twice a day for more than a year and I only noticed it recently. This "tree" is an antenna used for wireless communication. Now you know it, it looks obvious it is fake, it is abnormally straight, it is not of the same kind as the other ones but I guarantee you that if you don't know it, you do not really notice it. Even when you are close, it looks like a real one, the trunk texture is well reproduced.
Wireless operators finally realized the standard antennas, high metal towers are very ugly. They started to use those camouflaged antennas that blend better in their natural environment. That' a great idea, but there are still 3/4 of antennas in the US that are standards ones.

This article shows a few examples of antennas, it seems the pine is a classic, they also have fake palm trees, barns, and even cactus depending of the region they are installed in...

My credit card number has been stolen :-( It finally happened. I have been using it online for over 4 years but this is the first time it happens.

I don't understand, I have been very careful! I shred most of my credit card receipts; whenever I submit my credit card number to an online merchant, I always make sure the information goes over the network in an encrypted way (https). This was my yahoo card that I use for most of my online shopping, I suspect the number was taken because of one of the numerous internet purchases I made...

Anyway in the end, it is no big deal, the expenses that the thief made have been reimbursed by FirstBank, and they already mailed me a new card... It is kind of humiliating though and you lose a little of the trust you may have with credit cards and online shopping...

Surprisingly, FirstBank were the one to detect the fraud, not me. I received a letter telling me they wanted to check the validity of certain purchases that had been posted on my card recently. I called the number they provided and with a customer service representative we went over a my recent card activity, 3 purchases were made by someone else than me!

Stuff the crook used my credit card number for:

I don't know how they detected it. Maybe because the number of online purchases was unusually high... Anyway it is good they did, since all of them were small amounts, done every 4 to 5 days, I do not think I would have seen it myself. Yes I admit, I don't really read my statements unless the balance is not in the vicinity of what I am used to pay on my monthly bill.

The good thing it that Citibank started to provide free one-time credit card numbers and it is great. You run their piece of software, you log-in with your username and passw ord and you can generate a temporary credit card number whenever you need it. You use it as if it was the one on your Credit Card on no one can reuse it. Since I also have a Citibank card, I am definitively going to use one of those from now on for my online purchases.

Geocaching has a new adept. This is definitively fun. I found my first cache today. My first treasure: a small pin...

What is geocaching? As they say on their website, www.geocaching.com:

"Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache."

If you own a GPS receveiver, I advise you to give it a try. It is a good excuse to get outside to hike or bike. I started with an easy one, in sycamore canyon park in Riverside California, check it here. On the logged Visits section, I am geoseb:-)

You are young and hot, a blonde (or a brunette), a swim-suit top model or an actress but rich anyways. You own a GPS receiver and you know how to use it (ok definitively brunette then), please take note:

N33°56.666' W117°18.102'

This is my bed GPS coordinates:-)

First concrete use of my new gadget, a GPS receiver, Garmin eTrex, simple and cheap. Perfect not to get lost in the wild and for GeoCaching.

PS: if you have a girlfriend as hot as you, you can bring her.
PPS: A small detail before I forget, the GPS cannot tell you that, I live at the 2nd flour:-) !

While reading Pierre Carion's blog (one of my favorite blogs, if you speak french), I had the idea of making a google experiment that will probably bring science to new horizons.

Let's start with a fact, this small website (www.windal.net, blog included), is visited by around 70 different people every single day. Most of them find it with google, about 60%. The remaining visitors are accessing it using another search engine, directly i.e. by typing the URL or using a bookmark or come here following a link from another website.

A quick stats analysis shows that a non negligible number of visitors are actually lost. By lost I mean People brought mistakenly to this site by google (or another search engine) because google indicates a page of this website even though it is not really related to the search they are doing. Nobody is perfect.

For instance, until recently, I had many hits due to the search 9 9 B B because I had a picture of Philadelphia on my album with a name containing the word 9 9 b b... After investigation, it appears 9 9 B B is indeed a porn Japanese website. Some people must have been very disappointed, the Philadelphia skyline is everything but exciting...
Another example, many hits I have are a result of the phrase php thumbnail maker, I am number 4 on google on this one. I indicate on the mkthumb page that mkthumb is a tool that can be used to generate thumbnails if you can NOT generate thumbnails using php, exactly the opposite of what they are looking for.

Any ways, Pierre Carion was mentioning on his blog that because he once posted an entry with the words "Chasey Loves Rocco", he had many hits from google, people looking for, well, porn... :-)
So the experiment is the following one: I wonder how many hits I would get from google if I added a post containing some of the most searched words in the internet: Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton (if you think I am talking of the hotel, sorry buddy, it means you are getting older and older). I would also add some words such as naked, photo, photos, picture, pictures and the name of a few pornstars like Rocco, Kobe, Devon, Jenna. That will help.

And voila! The experiment just started. This post contains everything needed. I have left the title fuzzy enough "The Experiment" so that it looks kind of mysterious and people will click on it.

It usually takes between 2 and 4 weeks for googlebot to read a new page and for the new stuff to be correctly indexed in their database. Just wait for a month, we will see.

Since my readers (about 3.8 people including me) have been asking me how my orange tree was doing, here is the latest news: It is great thanks.
Little reminder: it is a dwarf "Washington Navel", the most common variety in southern California. It is quite young and does not look like a tree yet. It has been happily living in a pot on my balcony since February 2003.

After a stunning start last spring, it was covered with flowers, something bad must have happened and it lost all of them except one... Since then, it has been doing very well, the remaining flower became 10 months later a big fat orange. It was still green just a month ago and should be ready to be eaten in mid-February if everything goes well. Yummy.

A mountain lion attacks mountain bikers in Orange County:
1 dead 4 injured, not to mention the lion that the rangers will probably terminate. NBC4 Article. The lion attacked twice in a row mountain bikers in the Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park. I am used to bike in Casper Park, pretty close to this place. I will probably think twice now before going back there.

In socal, there are many mountain lions (aka cougars or pumas). Until now I had not heard about adult casualties resulting of attacks in socal, but I know young kids were attacked in Casper Park a few years ago and that resulted in the park being closed for a long time. Attacks usually happen when an animal has rabbies or when a female protects cubs.

They live in the mountains around LA and San Diego which is quite surprising since this is one of the most urbanized area in the US.

Web site transfer to a new host (1&1) successfully completed. Ehostsource, my previous host, decided to disable shell access for security reasons. Shell access is a big plus if you are a webmaster, being able to run your own scripts, editing files directly on the server is so much faster and more convenient. Anyways the 1and1 promotion (3 free years of hosting) was also very tempting.

The change was completely transparent, the new server may be a bit less fast, but 1&1 has a couple of nice features, like being able to configure your own cron jobs. The control panel and webmail look more professional too. Their stats page sucks though but that gave me the motivation to set up the latest awstats which is great...

My god, I had forgotten how small cars are, how cold winter is and how much hair women have over there.
This is a joke of course these are sheeps.

I am back to Uncle Sam after a short and nice vacation in France. A little of skiing, a lot of good food, cheese, bread, cakes and a cough... It is nice to see your family once in a while let's admit it. :-) !

Vacation pictures:

• Paris
• Bruges
• Skiing, family reunions in Grenoble and Lille (private albums, password required).

For the 5th time, my suitcase is missing after flying to or from Europe, this time with American Airlines. They delivered my suitcase 4 hours late at home so this is a minor inconvenience for someone used to lose my baggages all the time... This gave me the idea of making this summary table of my baggage losses history with transatlantic flights. This includes the flights I have taken and the flights taken by my family visiting me from France.

First, congratulations to Northwest and Sabena, I had no problems with them even with connecting flights. It is really too bad Sabena is dead, used to be my personnal favorite.

Second, I am probably cursed with baggages, 5 missing baggages at arrival out of 17 possible ones is a lot.

And last, SHAME on AIR FRANCE:

• I never flew with Air France w/o having a baggage problem
• The only company that has ever LOST one of my baggages, not delayed like the other ones, and getting rehimbursed was a pain in the a**.
• The only company that has lost or delayed my baggage on a direct flight
• The only company that has lost or delayed my baggage twice on the same trip

Last time I flew with them, on January 2002, it was so bad that I decided it was the last time I would ever fly with them for a very long time!