If you subscribe to the site and received a bunch of notifications from old posts today, that is because I’ve just updated 50+ stories where Google Indexer found issues with some of the videos, most of which are no longer available at their original source.
I’ve deleted the offending links and corrected a couple of grammar issues.
I managed to register both shadowscope.net and shadowscope.us; Both should forward here (along with richiemiles.com, which I have owned for several years. the subdomains which redirect to my BBS that’s hosted here, should also forward correctly. You can now access the board through:
bbs.shadowscope.com, bbs.shadowscope.net, bbs.shadowscope.us and shadowscope.noip.us
I have also upgraded my weather station and will be putting it back online soon. With the move to the new town it’s been down for a couple of months. I will be back online at villaricaweather.com and villaricaweather.us once it’s up. Full weather report, forecasts, and a couple of webcams.
Should be transparent but I am moving my last two domains (the original shadowscope.com and another one) over to Google Domains from register.com; It’s cheaper and it’s a hell of a lot easier to manage domains through Google than it is register.com
Apparently my web provider decided to restore something from backup and when they did it messed up my domain forwarding that I set up in the zone editor. When I asked them to restore all they did was add a 301 forwarding rule, which pretty much does nothing unless you are accessing stuff with a web browser.
Between the move and holidays and work I haven’t had the time to fix. Since it had been so long since I added the CNAME in my zone editor I forgot how to do it lol. Looked that up (Thanks Google) and fixed it late this past week. You should now be able to access the BBS however you were doing it before.
Regardless, should the forwarding go down you can always access it at shadowscope.noip.us which is where bbs.shadowscope.com is forwarded to.
So I logged in this morning to clean up the several hundred spam comments that have collected over the last few months and realized it had been five months since my last post. DAYUM! I don’t normally neglect the site quite so much. No excuses. I guess between the crime site, work and Facebook I just haven’t gotten over here. I can’t promise but I’ll try and rectify that. It’s not as if I don’t enjoy writing here, as a matter of fact it’s a nice break from all the douchebags I get so much enjoyment making fun of.
So what’s been up since I posted in February?
Still trying to get my pay cut promotion. I’ve applied twice this year so far. The first time I was put on a development plan. I’m currently waiting on my SVP and AVP to interview me again. Hopefully they’ll put me on the list this time. That doesn’t mean instant promotion but it does mean that should something come open it might be offered to me. There are currently about 25 people company wide that are on the promotable list for that level, so I actually have a good chance. Quite a few of them aren’t willing to move anywhere, which narrows the playing field a bit. While I won’t move across country I am more than happy to take anything within about three hours from the house.
My district has been realigned since February, which means I have different restaurants than I did this time last year. It looks like they’ll move me around again at the end of the summer. Doesn’t mean much in itself.
I did get a new mode of transportation though!
2010 Dodge Challenger SE. Just the base model but I’m damn sure loving it. 3.5L V6, Automatic, black interior. I’ve always loved classic cars but with all the mileage I put on them it doesn’t make sense to have anything that’s not 100% reliable. Not to mention the fact that as long as I have less than 100k miles the company pays my maintenance costs, tires, oil changes, tune-ups, brakes, etc… Can’t fucking argue with that. The RT models have a few bells and whistles that they leave off the SE such as fog lights and wide rims. I’ll add that later. As long as I have the dealer do it they’ll add it into the warranty.
I’ll try and stop back in tomorrow or Friday if I get the chance.
When I am writing a bunch that’s the sound my wife makes. I don’t exactly type. It’s more like I bang the keyboard to death. I can take one of those extremely quiet keyboards and make it sound like an instrument of torture. I type so-so. I used to do the two fingered typing although now that I have been paying attention I see that I am using four or five fingers. I am somewhere around 50wpm I guess and I only have to look at the keys about half the time.
So what the fuck got me to thinking about how I type. I’ve been writing pretty much non-stop since I got home. Not here obviously although I have been needing to get back into postme. No, it’s mainly on my other sites where I am still posting for $$$. I discovered that since we’ve been home from vacation that I could use the extra bucks. I enjoyed that extra twelve grand I made last year and I fully intend on making some more between now and Christmas. I’ve written probably 15 posts since I got home this afternoon and I fully intend on writing about 15 more before I go to bed. Maybe even one or tow that actually make some sense over here 🙂
I am also available on a contract basis to the CIA if they want. You know, stick me in a room with some fucking towel heads, blindfold them and let me blog for ten or twelve hours at a time. They’ll get so fucking sick of it they will tell you anything you want to know…
Want to know something else that’s funny as hell? You know fromt he little ‘reblog’ link that’s in the corner of my posts that I have been using that Zemanta stuff for a few weeks now to suggest keywords, tags and photographs for my blog posts. It comes in a plugin form for my browser as well as one for MT. I use the one for my browser because it works in ALL my blog formats. Anyhow, since I mentioned the word ‘torture’ the first keywords to surface were ‘John McCain’ and ‘George Bush’. Bwahaha. Only if money-grubbing stealing bastards is torture, but then again that applies to Obama and the rest of Bozo’s clubhouse as well.
Well, the Marine caught the Greyhound yesterday morning. He was supposed to ride to Raleigh, NC to the airport and then was going to catch some Z’s at the USO until his flight to Palm Springs, California left this morning. Long flight as he had a two hour layover in Chicago as well. He’s supposed to check in at Twentynine Palms by midnight tonight. There’s a glitch now. NO UNIFORMS, thanks to Greyhound Lines.
Apparently his bus broke down in Norcross (about 20 minutes after it left the station). When they got another one there the driver would not allow anyone to get their luggage, claiming that it was too dangerous. He said that Greyhound employees had to do it. When my son got to Raleigh he found that his luggage had not come along for the ride and stayed up all night trying to locate it.
He let us know this morning and my wife has spent something like twelve hours on the phone with no results. Some woman finally told her she would put a ‘tracer’ out for it, not that it does the boy any good. Upon checking in at Twentynine Palms he’s going to have to buy new uniforms. He probably had over a thousand dollars in uniforms, knick knacks and irreplaceable stuff from his mom inside the things. It’s a damn good thing that he decided to leave the X-Box 360 here for me to ship to him.
So far their customer service reps have called my wife “baby” “and honey” and some of them have been downright rude to her. As someone in the customer service industry, this is a no-no. If anyone knows the email address for the CEO for Greyhound, Dave Leach, please email or contact me. I have already tried the obvious ones so maybe one of those will work. Also, Digg and Fark this if you guys have accounts. Thanks!
Currently the wife is discussing with a woman on the phone about his luggage. She says that the best they can do is send his luggage to Palm Springs. They won’t even send a courier to Twenty Nine Palms if/when they find the luggage. No refunds, no delivery. Fuck them. I have emailed about 40 Greyhound employees so far as well as folks from parent company Laidlaw, Inc and hopefully will get an answer tomorrow.
All I can tell you is unless you want to get ass-fucked, DON’T leave the driving to Greyhound.
Here’s the body of the rude-ass email I am sending to everyone with any vested interest in Greyhound I can find.
“The party that was traveling was my son Marine Pvt Christopher Miles. His bus out of Atlanta broke down in Norcross, GA yesterday morning and when they transferred everyone to a new bus they were not allowed to get their luggage. It was shipped back to Atlanta and no one has seen it since. My wife (contact information above) has spoken with at least ten different people who were no help whatsoever including one that was entirely rude. I expect this to be dealt with in a timely and efficient manner. I can understand things being lost but your customer service is clueless, understaffed and filled with people that don’t even have ‘stock’ answers, much less the real ones.
My son checks into the Marine base at Twentynine Palms, California tonight. If they let him check in at all without a uniform, since they are at an undisclosed location, maybe on a bus, he will be forced to purchase a new set of uniforms. which is quite expensive.
I’ve now been told by a gentleman named Jeff in your Raleigh, NC terminal that the next step is to file a claim. That certainly doesn’t help my son who is going to have to purchase well over a thousand dollars in uniforms, a laptop, camera, various odds and ends and keepsakes from his mother. I do not have the time to drive to the nearest bus station which is 40 minutes away in Atlanta, just to help your employees do the job they should have been doing in the first place.
Please contact my wife or myself at the soonest time that you locate my son’s two sea bags and his large clothing bag. I fully expect reimbursement for the expense incurred as a result of not having proper uniform upon showing up at the Marine camp, as well as a refund or an airline voucher, not a greyhound voucher, as we will not be using your service ever again.
Richard Miles
address and company information removed.”
Apparently quite a few people have been having problems with Greyhound. Check out this article from ConsumerAffairs.com (in the extended entry because it is so long)
That’s how much sleep I managed to get last night.
I can’t remember the last time I was able to sleep in until quarter of nine in the morning.
It must have been back before the holidays at some point I suppose.
Each time I have had a day off I have always had some place to be or something to do that kept me from actually resting up from the previous week. Today I don’t have anything to do until this evening. The engine light on the wife’s car keeps going on and she called the dealership to make an appointment. As long as they have a loaner for her we’ll be leaving her’s there tonight. I have to pick up the Oldsmobile anyway and get it home. Rather than sell it to Carmax I decided to sell it cheaper to one of the guys that works for me. The guy is married with a new baby and has no car so he will get more use out of it. I cut what my asking price would be in half for him. He should be able to pay that off in about three to four weeks, although he does have to get insurance and tags so if it takes longer, no big deal.
Well, the Starbucks is finished making. I need to get a cup and try to wake up a bit.
While Shadowscope the blog doesn’t celebrate it’s blogiversary until June some time, Shadowscope the web site his nine years back on Christmas Day. I started out running the site mainly for BBSing and Skinning news back sometime in ’98 and installed my hit counter on Christmas Day, which is why I use that date as the official birthday.
I guess I was so busy working through the holidays and spending time with the family that I completely forgot about that.
There is another weird anniversary of sorts going on as well. I started getting paid to blog this time last year as well. Over all I think that it has improved my blogging as a whole. While there are some posts that I look at and say “?” and “why the heck did I write that?” I have been blogging more regularly, writing longer and more thoughtful posts (sometimes) and just had a good time doing it.
Up until this time last year most of what I did the first three years was post links and one-liners with an occasional rant thrown in to mix it up a bit. I really didn’t write much and the thought of writing a post of several hundred words just would not have crossed my mind at all.
Now it’s just not a big deal at all to whip out a post of several hundred words. Are they more entertaining? I guess that’s all in the eye of the beholder but I am certainly more entertained, which is why I started this dog and pony show to begin with…
BTW, I got the weirdest text message the other day..
“HELLO HOW HAVE YOU BEEN? WE HAD A FABULOUS MEETING TODAY! WE SURE MISS YOU BEING THERE”
?
What fucking meeting? I left the name off but I know at least four ladies with that name. I suppose I could call the number on the text message and see what it’s all about. I was afraid I had missed something that i was supposed to be at, so if you sent me this text message, send me a friggin’ email or something.
…
Jut finished boiling some eggs. I think it’s time for a nice little egg salad sandwich. Enjoy your lunch if you are eaiting.
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The wife and the Marine had to run to Douglasville this morning. They are going ahead and getting some Christmas shopping taken care of this morning at the Mall. She hates going to the mall even more than she hates shopping but it’s one of those things I suppose.
I was reading this story over at CNN last night about one mall where the police are really creating a presence and they had some news crews out there filming some of the things people would do. Purses and phones in plain view in their cars, expensive gifts left in eyeshot and even worse, some of them wore open.
Even if you keep your stuff locked in the trunk there is still the danger of it coming up missing. This time of year criminals are out because they know that people hide stuff in their cars. That can make a car more of a target and even effect your car insurance policy.
I had to get online last night and renew my car insurance. The company had called me day before yesterday and told me I had underpaid them by $15 by mistake so I had to get on their site. Most of them allow you to pay online which certainly makes life easier. Fifteen years ago it would have just been canceled and I would have had to deal with going out and getting car insurance quotes and renewing the policy. Cheap car insurance is easy to find but I prefer to keep the same company rather than having to switch every couple of years.