Month: January 2014

Oh Weather Channel, you crack me up. Let me start by saying I do not have DirecTV and I still have The Weather Channel in my house. I have Charter Cable, which can be a whole blog of its own, just ask me about how pissed off I am about the whole FXX rollout someday…

Apparently The Weather Channel and DirecTV had some sort of dispute and either DirecTV dropped them or The Weather Channel pulled out of their deal. Whatever happened, anyone with DTV is no longer getting TWC. I do follow TWC on Facebook for some reason, most likely I was slightly drunk one night and needed to ‘like’ some stuff more like I was a teenage girl.

TWC has had an onslaught of pleas with people to drop their DTV because they are no longer featured there. That is fine in and of itself, but they are doing it in a dumbass way. They are coming out saying that so many people will be in danger without TWC to provide them potentially life saving weather updates. Really? Are you fucking kidding me about that? Last time I looked there were still radio stations weren’t there? What about local news channels providing live local weather coverage? What about that device that damn near everyone seems to carry around on them at all times? It’s like a computer, it can message you when there is bad weather, you can watch live weather on it… oh yeah, a fucking cell phone. The way I see it, nobody is anymore danger from the weather because they can’t see TWC then you are in danger of being catfished because you can’t see MTV.

Let’s mention the other big part of this whinefest… reality TV has destroyed another channel. MTV isn’t about music, TLC isn’t about learning, and TWC isn’t about weather. They would rather show you Coast Guard Alaska, or Prospectors or some other bullshit reality TV show than the weather… although to be honest, can you really fill 24 hours a day with weather? I’d rather sort my sock drawer.

Even though I still have TWC, I hardly ever watch it. In the summer when I am experiencing some awesome severe weather, I’m certainly not watching TWC. I’m in my basement with my TV on local weather channels, I have my iPad on checking out radar loops and I’m listening to my police scanner. Do you know when I am watching TWC? It is when some town far away from me is being destroyed by storms and they are showing live coverage either via storm chaser or local news affiliates. I don’t want to see that if you ever covered my area. Wow, that tornado is going right for that house, hey that looks like my car parked in front of that house… oh shit.

I have come to the realization that I’m old. For further proof I only need to look at my driver’s license and see that I turned 40 in 2013. Now I’m not Centrum Silver old, but if I believed that vitamins were beneficial in any way, I would at least be regular Centrum old.

What has really gotten me down this revelation of my oldness has been my odd renewed interest in this little site that I let suffer for quite some time. I imported all my old blog entries and realized that I’ve been writing blogs since 2002. I wrote my first blog ever on August 16th 2002. However, I had been around for about 6 years prior to that in one form or another with a website. I know what you’re thinking, he’s going to bore us with a story of the old days… I would but my memory isn’t that great anymore, did you forget I’m 40 now?

I was here before Facebook & MySpace, I was posting irrelevant bullshit before Twitter was a twinkle in some twit’s eye. I have been around longer than YouTube and most other social media sites out there. I was grumpy before the cat, I was an ass before Daniel Tosh made it popular, I’m just plain old.

What the hell is up with the weather? I get it winter, you can suck monkey balls if you want to. Enough with the snow and wind and other shitty conditions already. Do you realize that the sun can shine in the winter? I miss the wintery sunny days. It seems like I am either wrapped up like Ralphie’s brother in A Christmas Story or it gets a little warm and we get a bunch of snow dumped on us. Will it ever end? I only need to remember we got over a foot of snow the first week of May last year… so the answer may be no.

So for the past year or so I’ve been entertaining the idea of buying myself a 27″ Apple iMac. It all started when I bought the iPad for myself back in October of 2012. I still love using that and I followed it up by joining the millions of iPhone users in May of 2013. Of course every time I hit Best Buy I’m in the computer section playing with the Apple products.

I still am not sure why I haven’t purchased it yet, I am pretty sure it isn’t if but when. When I was younger I once spent over 3,000 on a computer that outdated after the first boot up. My current computer is a little over 6 years old now and it hasn’t lost much of its ability. That is the sad thing about being a “Responsible Adult”, I can make better cases to not buy than to buy. I think the deciding factor will be that I am not impressed with Windows 8 at all. I’ve owned every version of Windows so far going back to the times that DOS was the way to go. I hated ME and wasn’t really impressed with Vista at all. I just know that with them it is same shit, different OS.

I’m just hoping that someday soon I can say I’m posting a blog entry from my new iMac. If not for any other reason than typing on an iPad kinda sucks.

Who would have thought that it would have taken me until 2014 to finally do something with this dying website? I was running on some old outdated Movable Type platform for the blog, cleverly (in 2004) integrated with a website design I created using Dreamweaver CS3. Unfortunately my lack of giving a shit compiled with purchasing a new home four years ago not only limited my logging on to write a blog, it also pretty much ensured that I would never update the guts of the site either.

All of that changed today, and honestly it started a couple weeks ago when I had Christmas week off from work. I started doing my backups and playing around with WordPress to see if I could master it. So yes, the blog has been built on the WordPress platform, and instead of integrating the rest of a website made in Dreamweaver, I built the rest of the website with WordPress also. I went back to basics here, I completely deleted everything on my server. Cartman website, gone. My blog, gone. All non-blog pages, gone. Guestbook, gone. Of course everything was backed up, so most everything is back up and running already. I need to crawl the blog and restore any pictures that I would like to see in there. I think I backed up my guestbook, if not it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. There is a comment section all over this website now. Probably won’t bring the Cartman thing back, that was old as shit.

Benefits I will enjoy now include a website that has links to my DisgruntledHuman presence on Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the actual Twitter feed on the right side of the screen. I also have a website that doesn’t look broken, and actually looks about the same whether I look at it on my Dell in Internet Explorer, or on my iPhone or iPad using Safari.

Hopefully my peaked interest in WordPress means I will actually write blogs on occasion. The fact that I have an App on my iPad for WordPress might help make it happen, because that thing is like my third hand.

This is the longest I have sat at my home computer in 5 years, although the last time I did this manually I was probably looking at another 6 hours of messing with CSS and uploading. This was the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.