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I have become extremely disillusioned with massive social-media sites, as well as supporting large corporations in general. I only see them as doing bad and evil in this world and I am done participating in their games.

As such, I have removed all social media sharing buttons and interactions from this site and have also removed all Google tracking tags from my websites. I haven’t even logged in to those Google dashboards in years, so why am I continuing to send those assholes free data? I’m done. I’m pulling out as much crap from Google as I can, they’ve lost the rights.

I will no longer be handing the tech-oligarchy a single bit of traffic. If you’d like to share something you see here some place else, you’re more than welcome to. I’m just not providing you the buttons to do it.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

– George Orwell

I just realized that a handful of old posts on this site still had Youtube videos embedded via a flash object. With Flash’s forced demise last month, all of these embeds broke. I have gone through and fixed them all (aside from one that was linked to a now-deleted account) to embed the videos using Youtube’s html 5 object. So, shall you want to watch a remote control pumpkin drive around my office, or an Acer Predator fail right out of the box, you can once again. Thrilling, I know. I have also fixed some image sizing problems that were making my logo look less than optimal since the site redesign, as well as fixed the automatic icon created if you bookmark this site on an Android or iPad tablet device.

13 years is a long time, especially for something to exist on the internet. 13 years ago this October I launched this WordPress powered blog and began mashing out random rants, raves, musings, pictures, and the occasional helpful bit of information.  This site launched on WordPress 2-point-something in 2007, and I have used the same OLD theme ever since then.  The backend has been maintained and I run the latest WordPress 5 release, but the front end has remained steadfast.  I’m a creature of habit in a lot of ways, and that combined with my free time being at a premium these days resulted in the same theme for 13 years. Over the years sticking with the same old style WP theme created some growing pains, but it was always just easier to patch or hack around an issue than redesign. Today that changes and I am launching a whole new look for my blog. Not out of any particular necessity, but more so I think it’s finally time to grow up a bit. It is time for a cleaner look, and a website with a responsive design that actually looks good on mobile devices. Using a modern theme will also make the site much easier to maintain/change/customize going forward, as well as avoid an potential issues that could crop up in future backend updates.  Really, running the same front end for 13 years, and it still being 99% functional from an ever-changing backend is pretty damn impressive to me. Kudos WordPress, kudos.  All of the original features and my long history of posts are still here and still at the same url’s, so everything should function more or less how it did before. It just looks a whole lot nicer now. I’ve even got a couple new blog posts planned out that I will hopefully be posting soon, so stay tuned!

What’s a Gravatar you ask?

Simply: it’s a universial avatar.  A service that gives your email the same avatar any where you post (that supports Gravatars of course).

I’ve known about them for a while but never really bothered messing with it.

I must admit, the Gravatar Website is ridiculously easy to use.  I mean seriously, stupid easy.  It took me less then 3 minutes to set up an account, upload my image, and crop and size it how I wanted on their site.

Since I figured I have an account, I should use them some how, right?

All comments on all posts now support Gravatars, so if you have one, we’ll get to see it now.

If you don’t have one, you seriously have no excuse not to if you comment on here or other sites a lot.  It is too easy to NOT have one.  Bravo to the Gravatar people.  They put together a nice easy-to-use service.

I have changed the way my blog handles/creates permalinks to my articles.
The new format is much more search engine friendly, and looks better IMO.
My site was having a few issues for an hour or so earlier while I hammered out the precise apache rewrite rules to make it do what I was wanting to.
Everything should be working fine now though.
I also updated the time… apparently it has been an hour off forever.
Carry on.

You can now search this site using the new link at the top, obviously labeled “Search”.

I found my self looking for older blog entries in my own blog and decided it was time for a search page.

It’s pretty plain-jane and straight forward for now.  I hope you find it useful.

I know at least I will!

Things are moving along… still working on making the server perform the tricks I need it to.

Please bear with me!

PewPewPew!

Everything is newly installed so nothing is really working yet.

But keep checking back as I get things running and updated on the site!