Blogging

It seems as though perhaps I fell prey to one of the downfalls of social media. The end effect of that is that I have been spending all of my computer time on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (yes, that is shameless linking to my profiles) not to mention a few of the other sites. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself but I feel like I have lost a connection. Not to my own self but to other people, mainly those that are linked in my sidebar as well as a few others I may not have added yet.

There’s something about blogging (and participating in other’s blogs) that is much more personal than the one or two line posts on the social networking sites. Obviously I have gotten out of the habit and it may be another nine fucking months before I write another goddamn line but from here on out I think I will at least attempt to revisit some of the sites I love to read and perhaps start writing here again as well.

Don’t fucking hold your breath though…

In the wake of all the bullshit surrounding the OWS and the 99%ers I realized on my last bi-yearly visit that my tagline was misleading and felt the need to share a little bit about what it is and why it has nothing to do with the protesters.

While I may be part of that 99% in fact AND I believe that some of the stuff being protested is a good thing I am not a supporter. Just as the Tea Party has moved away from it’s grass roots and way off into right wing lunacy so the OWS has done the same thing just in the opposite direction. I would hate to be identified with either fucking group.

Anyway, politics aside the tagline at the top of the blog has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

Once up0n a time there was a blogger named Rob Smith (Acidman). I was an avid reader at his site and while I had been running my original site (Shadowscope, now just an aggregator <sp?> for all my sites) for five years prior to that he was one of the people that I looked up to in blogging. Once I saw what that whole blogging thing was about (sometime in 2003) I moved away from manually updating a web page on a daily basis to something a little closer to what it is now.

Getting to the point….

In 2005 Rob posted this little gem,

A lot of blogs are personal journals and about 99% of them are pure bullshit. But some can remain personal and still be entertaining.

Fucking perfect and that is the 99% I consider myself a part of.

So up until the previous Wordless Wednesday post I put up a few minutes ago this is the first time I’ve blogged since April.

April?

Holy Shit.

So why do I even bother to keep my site(s) online?

Good question.

I won’t even apologize for the lack of posting. That’s pretty fucking lame. Suffice it to say that I have been busy with other pursuits. Work, work, occasional sleep, work…I think you get the picture. That and after twelve years of blogging it just hasn’t been quite as important.

Twelve years. That seems sort of amazing to me and it’s one of the reasons I am online typing this right now. Quite a bit has changed for me over the last twelve years, both online as well as in real life.

Originally I mainly wrote about techie stuff, mostly Windows customization. Then I started drifting into crime as well as personal updates. I drifted into the whole social media thing. Twitter and Facebook  as well as a few others. I used them along with about fifteen or twenty other sites mainly to promote my web sites but over the last couple of years Facebook and now Google+ have pretty much replaced the blog as the place to post my thoughts. It’s a hell of a lot easier to type out a 140 character soundbite to tell how I am doing than it is to actually put down what’s going through my head…

I enjoy blogging though and while I may or may not continue to blog on any type of regular basis only time will tell. Don’t know about the crime blogging though. My crime site is still online and will most likely remain so since I still have advertising income coming in from that but I don’t know if I will return to it. I plan on at least putting out an update over there today but I don’t have any regular plans to update the site. Perhaps one of the folks that occasionally stop in will also put out a story or two. You never know. All total I have five different domains I still own (I let the other five lapse). This is one, the crime site is another and Shadowscope (my original blog) is still there too. I have it up to syndicate and pull in my posts from both sites because it’s been up so long. I also own a domain I used to put tech stuff online but am not currently using it or my daughter’s site which has also been pretty much abandoned.

Whatever. So how about an update or two?

I am unfortunately getting older every day and things that were important to me a decade ago no longer seem quite so important, having been supplanted by other new crap 🙂

My son who I have posted about in the past finished his time in the Marine Corps and returned safely home to us in June. He is currently working for me until he starts school in January. He’ll be going to Columbia University in New York City. We are very excited about that. It’ll be a great experience for him as well as open a lot of doors. He’s considering getting his degree in Economics. We’ll see.

The girls are busy as well. The youngest is right and my eldest daughter will be fourteen next month. Fuck, where does the time go. She’s involved in music and most likely this will be the path she will be taking. She plays in the band at the middle school but is also one of a few middle school students who get to play in the local high school’s marching band.

Of course I am still doing the same old shit. I have been moved around to different stores several times and now have the exact same district I was running five years ago. Of course it’s in horrible shape so I get to spend the next six months getting shit right. I have pretty much quit wondering why some people in management don’t give a fuck enough about their job to actually do it as they are asked. It’s pointless. All I can do is go in and be an asshole and make whatever changes are needed to get things back in line. It’s going to hurt my paycheck for several months but in the end it’s the right thing to do.

I had some other shit I wanted to write about but that train of thought has completely derailed by the ramen noodles my daughter just made. Guess it’s time to sign out.

I will be switching this site as well as Shadowscope from Movabletype to WordPress shortly. I have run MT since 2002 or 2003 and while I really like the extensibility of it MT has become more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth. Comment spam has become overwhelming and the only way to keep from having it is to force people to sign up as members. For awhile I used Disqus as my commenting system as I do on Sick Crimes, but MT and Disqus don’t seem to play very well together, thus the fact that you couldn’t get to my posts for a while. My web provider basically refused to help out, just telling me I had to edit the php, which I don’t know shit about.

That’s another story entirely but considering the fact that I pay them $350 a year to host my fucking sites the least they could do would be to fix the fucking problem. Instead I am forced to switch to a blog software that at least I know works very well. MT development is slow anyway and it’s difficult to get the plug-ins to work together at times. As much as I like Movabletype it’s only with a small bit of sadness that I dump it for something modern and useful.

Sorry if the site was screwed up for a little while. I managed to hose some of the code in my header and it caused everything to disappear. Shit happens. It’s fixed.

I should be in bed by now but I made the mistake of lying down for a short nap around 4PM this afternoon. Apparently my ten year old came in and asked me at some point what time I wanted to get up and I must have told her not to wake me up. BAD mistake. She let me sleep until the phone rang at seven. I may end up drugging myself tonight just so I can go to sleep. As opposed to drugging myself so I can stay awake I guess 🙂 You know what they say though, sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute…

So I think I mentioned yesterday the Temple PD was out raising money at one of my stores this weekend. Either they must have hit the $5k mark or they just decided to throw in the towel early because they cleared out around 3pm today. If they just decided to shut down I don’t blame them. The weather this weekend has been pretty crappy and it’s been pretty darned slow this weekend as well.

The girls have left for South Carolina. I spoke with the wife shortly after I left work this afternoon and they had just gotten to Bluffton. I guess they will be back later in the week. I have Friday off so I think they are planning on being back by then.

I unfortunately have to go back to work tonight. I was supposed to be working a double shift today but with the wife and kids leaving town I decided to come home for a while to let the dog out. They are fine anyway and don’t need my non-smoking stressed out personage up their butts all evening.

I think I will spend some time surfing a couple of blogs I haven’t had the chance to visit in a few days. Speaking of blogs I like to visit, if you go to Parkway Rest Stop on occasion tell the guy with the big hair my fucking IP address is banned and neither myself or my wife can get to his site from here. I need to just get Jim’s email from someone else I guess and send him a not but I just haven’t had the time.

I never did get to go to the gym today. I had every intention of getting started, I even got there and two women were already there using the equipment I was going to get started on. Rather than hang out as well as being embarrassed because I really don’t know what the fuck I am doing I feigned a cell call and beat it.

If I can manage to get my ass out of bed on time in the morning I will try and get there between five and five thirty tomorrow morning, that way I can get a shower in afterward, prior to heading off to work.

Speaking of getting out of bed on time, I didn’t wake up until shortly before seven this morning. That’s like two hours later than normal. I think part of it is because of my sun burn and the rest is due to the fact that my body is just pooped. I have worked something like six weeks with five days off, maybe six. I am supposed to be off Thursday and Friday this week and had planned on being off two days the next but since one of the other district’s and myself seem to be overlapping again I don’t think I will get both Friday and Saturday. I have already told her I am willing to give up my Saturday that week but I get the following weekend off. We’ll see how it goes I suppose.

That’s about it for tonight. I spent a few minutes working on this logo creator thingy that I have to write a review for on another site, that was pretty cool. I’ll post some screenshots later. How about some of these taglines…

Shadowscope…better than the bomb

…sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute (of course I’ve been using this one for several years anyway).

Shadowscope…better than a fart in a hot tub!