Orson Welles scaring the crap out of us. He didn't applaud until his movie Citizen Kane.

A guy who's just bought a new mast because of a comment a stranger made on our web site. Neil Pryde 550cm Mast: MSRP $746 18 ft of carbon fiber love.

When you connect any device to the internet, you can expect visitors. If you have a web site, especially one that's been up for years like we have been, lots of visitors stop by. Some visitors, like the folks that log in, we welcome and enjoy having. Guests like Google and Bing have open invitations as well. Not only do they help people find us but offer us a way to search our own site and produce some analytics that we use to find broken pages and what people like to view on the site.

Then, there are the other visitors. They range from the annoying, to the rude to the outright criminal. Unfortunately, in terms of knocks on the door, they are also our most numerous. If you've ever noticed the stats in our "Who's online" box on the right side of this page, you'll see maybe a couple or handful of registered users and from 20 to 60 or more guests. Of course, some of those guests are members who are dropping by without logging in. We have some pleasant foreign visitors and appreciate that they are part of our community.The rest hail from all parts of the world - Russia, the Ukraine, China, the Phillipines, Romania - places where a lot of people really give a crap about what the wind is like in Atlanta.

The reason we bring this up is that there was a strange confluence of events here around the week of Sandy and lot of local wind. The web site started to bog down when it usually works reasonably well despite being a rather complex site. The front page alone contains elements of what would normally be three different web sites as well as pulling in information from weather and video web sites.

There are a number of things we do to speed up the site. We also do a lot of things to dissuade unwanted visitors. Some want to post a comment, story or whatever to sell you pills that make your mast bigger. Others want to take over the web site and send you emails trying to sell you pills that make your mast bigger.

Last night, 64.120.63.94, knocked on our door 34 times in ten seconds. If you look up the ip address, it might have come from either Virginia or Arizona. Most likely, the address was spoofed. The language of the request was Russian (yeah, we can tell stuff like that). They were looking up a two year old post - concerning our server status, nothing windsurfing related, to post comment spam. If you are looking for a bigger mast, we're sorry but we can't be of any assistance. They didn't get through to post anything.

That's the typical stuff. Annoying but, if you've done your preparation, nothing to be worried about. So, that week, we had the usual scumbags and suddenly a whole bunch of windsurfers realizing they could almost windsurf a week straight in Atlanta (we emphasize the word 'surf' as opposed to plodding through the water). Then the third thing that started to kill the server: Orson Welles.

We'd posted an animated gif (image) of Mr. Welles clapping on a post. Google found it. Quite suddenly, people all over the world began hotlinking it in their posts on their own favorite forums. Everytime, someone read a certain thread on, say, espn.com, it would suck the image off of our website. Even with the image blocked and no longer appearing on Google, it was requested 143 times yesterday. Being an animated image, it is amongst the biggest of the images on the website, about 2.5-3 times bigger than a normal image its size.

Every time it was linked, it would rise in the Google rankings until, to our horror, it was the first image that came up if you googled for an image of Orson Welles clapping.

People have directly linked images before, one of the earliest was this one that a girl in Brazil was using:

Normally, we don't care - share and share alike but, in this case, it was overwhelming.

So, since then, we've renamed Orson and told Google and Bing to ignore it. We've also tweaked who we block and our server configuration. The website should load even faster than before.

We hope that you were able to enjoy the winds we had that week and keep the people in the Northeast still struggling in your thoughts. And remember: your sail probably rigs just fine on the mast you already have.