So...

Or at least it was...

If the missing images on this blogspot page and the fact that websurfnicaragua.com now leads to random advertising haven't tipped you off, strange and terrible things have been afoot with my internet websitery provider. After a couple of attempts to pay for hosting with no "thanks for your payment" or "dude, you haven't paid us" emails, I get an email from the guy that runs the place, telling me that my card (which was full of money at the time) was rejected and that I need to call. So I call like a hundred thousand times and never get through, and the site gets taken down, prompting me to call a few hundred thousand more times, and still just get prompted to leave a message, and I don't, because I'm weird about not just leaving a message in matters of serious bidness. Anyway, I said to hell with it and tried to pay through the company's website again, this time with an actual credit card, as opposed to debit, and a couple weeks later no charges have appeared on there. I guess the next course of action, if I ever manage any sort of contact with these people again (Oddly enough, I'm not sure if they can actually contact me now, because none of the websurfnicaragua.com email addresses seem to work) is to just warp back to 1987 and send a check, and see what happens.


Anyway, I'm going to try to not be a dick about the whole thing, because a lot of this could have been avoided by me actually checking my email more than once a week or sending one from time to time. Then again, ALL of this could have been avoided if my host (who I'm not going to name in a post as bitchy as this one, because I really am trying to not be a dick here) ran things the way every even semi-professional website of any kind has been running since everyone noticed that the internet existed, probably sometime around 1996 or so. So far, only one website I've ever encountered that sold a good or service of any kind has had a payment system set up where not only do credit/debit card payments not go through instantaneously, but they can take weeks or even months to be processed. Hell, in that time, I can actually forget that I made an attempt to pay earlier - Especially because when a card gets rejected, as was apparently the case with me, whatever system may or may not be in place never told me. I didn't know of any card rejections until months and months and months had passed, and the host owner just emailed me himself. (Which was actually kind of cool of him to do, for the record) Seriously. Go to any commercial-type website out there and try to buy something, but intentionally fudge up something like the expiration date or security code and see what happens. Half a second later, (or longer if you're on dial-up, all putting the phone receiver on a cradle, watching some VHS tapes on your black-and-white TV while it connects) you'll get a message telling you that your card won't work. So yeah, the system in place here is not so good. I'd jokingly say that their online credit card payment system is just a regular old email form that someone has to check and then enter manually somewhere else, but I can't do that jokingly, because I'm pretty sure that's how it actually works. Once again, I am trying so hard to not be a dick, because the rare actual contact I've had with company has been pleasant as hell, but Jesus, just go get a PayPal merchant account or something.

If it's on a bus, you know it's secure.

Anyway, I'm going to find some way to actually get these people the $60-something I owe them, but after that, I think I'm going to just wash my hands of the situation and start afresh somewhere else, once situations in real-life world calm down enough for me to type words for the internet on the regular. New place, new time, new host, new address, new everything. This blog is still going to be here in the meantime, and I'll probably throw something up as sporadically as I've been doing, but nothing major, probably for a while. I'll keep you people that I don't know in person who actually remembered to bookmark the Blogspot address updated on any developments, and if you care about freedom and therefore football, it'll mostly still be business as usual over at Armchair Linebacker. (NFL labor dispute aside) But yeah, all good things must come to an end, but unfortunately for Web Surf Nicaragua, that rule also applies to somewhat above-average things. "Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back."

R.I.P. October 27, 1998 - May 19, 2011

Messing with some stuff...

So that's why you got weird color thingies for the background and such right now...

Well, alright then.

Soooo, pretty sure it's time to find a new server to host this website. A week ago, it was asking people for a password to enter, and now, I've lost FTP access, meaning I can't actually do anything to the website. What that means is that if this blog page wasn't hosted at Blogger, I'd have no way to affect what shows up at websurfnicaragua.com any more. Meanwhile, looking to Chamber Gates (the people to whom I've been sending thirty bucks every three months for this thing for the last few years) for some kind of support, I've learned that their website has not been updated since 2006. So either this happened to them four years ago and they never figured out how to fix it, or they just don't care one way or another. So, anybody got any suggestions on where I can take this thing?

Past, present, future websitery

Hi. You might not remember me. I run a website. This one, actually. Crazy. I don't think anyone actually comes here anymore, but to the seven or eight of you who still do, I'm sorry I haven't done anything on here lately. I mean, I'm sure the internet is ablaze with furor about updates on the health and quantity of my aquarium fish, but updates regarding anything else have been sparse lately. As in maybe two in the last six years or so. Sorry, my bad. On the other hand, I suppose you can't complain, because aside from the one or two people who sent me five bucks back in 2004, (thanks dudes~) it's not like you're paying for this or anything. But you see, that's the thing: I AM paying for this thing. I pay like thirty bucks every three months for this, (actually, about 45, when I forget and pay on the fourth month...) and lately, I really haven't been giving myself my money's worth.



And the course this website has taken is, by any standard, absolutely retarded. It started off in 1998 as a free 10-megabyte Geocities page , (which I eventually outgrew, and with visions of taking the internet by storm with my musings on Mr. T and the newest GWAR album or whatever, I signed up with ChamberGates abandoned Geocities or Tripod or whoever I was using at the time, and Websurfnicaragua.com was born. Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if the internet's shopping capabilities hadn't gotten me fully exposed to Sacred Reich's back catalog around that time. Thinking about the way smaller size of my CD collection at the time, there's a chance this could have been named something like "www.thistoiletearth.com" or "www.selftitledsuicidaltendenciesalbum.com" now, or something else along those lines. In retrospect, I should have just registered something like "sextits.com," and made it a blank page full or banner advertisements, and I probably would have spent 2006 through 2008 typing this crap from a mansion in Hawaii, instead of a leaky shithole on Eufaula Street. Live and learn. But anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah -



I started this thing as a free website that I updated constantly, then turned it into a paid-for website that I never update at all. And to make matters worse, it's now mostly just a placeholder for this here blogger.com blog-type page, which is actually something that you don't fucking have to pay for. So I pay 120 bucks a year to put a fancy address on a free-ass blog that I don't even use. This makes no goddamn sense. But to make it make even less sense, I actually have been typing crap for the internet - on someone else's dang blog. You see, I was disturbed at how Chicago Bears-centric that this website had been getting, so when Raven Mack or Mike Dikk or whoever it was got all "hey, who wants to type up hopefully-amusing stuff about your chosen NFL team," I was all "okay, sure," and have spent the last year or so as somewhere between the first and third best Chicago Bears contributor to Armchair Linebacker. I think we've only got about ten teams covered now, but the Falcons dude plays it too straight and the Patriots dude is an absolute homo, so I would ask you, the gentle reader, if you'd like to try your hand at that sort of thing, but I'm too low on the totem pole to make that sort of decision, and if I know the internet, it's full of people who want to write things but suck at it, so not to be impolite, but screw y'all.



So I got a free website, started paying for it, stopped updating it, then started updating someone else's crap. What sort of maniac does this? Holy crap. So yeah, I now fully announce my intention to actually do some crap around here. What it will actually be is a whole 'nother question, and I'll figure out something eventually. Maybe something about how the country of Japan and jazz music need to be eliminated, or a 15,000 word essay on how the Maniac Cop films have changed my life. Who knows. I know every other time I get ~BIG PLANS~ for this thing, I tend to get hit with at least eight months or typist's block, as shown by this website title image thingy I was going to use in 2008, but just never got around to redesigning the site, and is now being seen for the first time ever in public:



Hopefully, this time, it'll be different and I can come up with something amusing. As some sort of empty gesture to fool my mind into thinking that I'll actually update a website that belongs to me from time to time, I just signed up for a Twitter account, and if you sign up as a follower, you'll get a tweet every ten months when something drops. I also went ahead and got a personal type one, and if I've learned anything from Facebook and Myspace, it's that I'll probably never, ever touch it again, but you an go ahead and follow it if you want to. I'm not gonna say what it is, because you internet types scare me, and I've already had to protect it, because I got two porn spam followers I had to delete within ten seconds of creating the account. It frightens me deeply to think of what the unprotected website one is going to get. Especially considering that back when I still had my web statistics turned on, it turned out that most of the people who come here from search engines show up looking for incest photos or something else along those lines. And it's funny to think about, because I'm sure this very post will get at least one person searching for that sort of thing. So to that guy - YOU ARE MESSED UP, DUDE. But yeah, to anyone else who wants my real Twitter account, (which I'm assuming will be my mom and maybe two or three other people) just ask me for it somewhere other than this website, or you might be able to find it on there searching first and last name. (and it's under the actual FIRST name, and not the middle one) Anyone else who doesn't know my real name or can't contact me through other means, be it phone, email, other internet social type crap, or just coming up to me going "dude, what's your username" can probably fuck off. Not saying that you ALL can fuck off; just the vast majority of you. You internet people are usually terrible.



Summing up, I haven't been updating, that's weird, I've been doing some stuff at Armchair Linebacker, I'm hoping to do stuff on here, I got a website twitter thingy you can follow, I got a personal Twitter thingy that most of y'all need to stay the hell away from, and you've probably spent like five minutes reading a post essentially about nothing. Wow. I feel kind of bad now. Here's a dollar:

So yeah.

Messing with some stuff here. Sorry~

2009 Omnibus Blog Stimulus Post

Okay, haven't posted since the last week of February, so I figure I better update on the happenings and goings-on. Busy month.

- Remember that post about how I cured fish disease by just letting the tank go and letting the fish get all unstressed and such? Yeah, so it ended up being kind of bullshit in the end. Without getting into the sad details, adding two new barbs to the tank stressed everybody out, everybody got sick, and this time, even with a hospital tank coming into play, everybody died.

So now, the ten gallon pit of disease has been abandoned, a new 14 gallon tank has started up, and hopefully, it doesn't turn into a pit of despair like the first tank did. R.I.P. Larry, Darrell #1, Edgar, and Bubba.

- Gonna mess with some website-based stuff, so this might look all weird for a while. Right now, it's running where I type stuff in at Blogger.com, and then it posts to my website. Thing is, you lose a whole lotta capabilities and bells and whistles that way, ("Older/Newer Posts" links) so I'm probably going to just go back to hosting this page at Blogspot. You'll have to deal with their stupid navigation bar at the top of the screen, but eh, you're not paying for this shit. And I'm not paying enough to be able to install my own blog software on this site, (and I wouldn't know how to anyway) so there you go.

- I put a bow on my cat. I don't know why. But whenever that thing is on there, she acts all chilled out, like some sort of reverse Mr. Hyde serum, so on it stays.

- Mastodon put out a new album, and it's the first time a CD has pretty much blown me away since the last time Mastodon released an album. Unfortunately, this is also the second straight time that a new Mastodon CD has made me all but forget about the existence of a pretty good new Sepultura CD.

- I'm still doing occasional Chicago Bears-related posts over at the Armchair Linebacker blog, and maybe when it's easier to do stuff like that, I'll put a link to it somewhere on here that's not just part of a blog post. The life of a Chicago Bears fan is a life of pain, but for real pain, check out Neil's posts there. He's a Lions fan. Yeah.

- On the 19th, me and my special lady-friend Sarah celebrated our one-year anniversary. Hopefully, she doesn't wise up any time soon, but if she hasn't gotten sick of my football card addiction, failure to consistently keep dishes washed, and general weirdness by now, I should be in the clear. Here's to many more years of lazy snuggling, trips to Souper Salad, and being able to tell people I'm not gay and having them actually believe me for a change.

In other news related to people in my family not being gay, my brother Jack and his wife Amanda just had a whole bunch of babies. Well, in the name of accuracy, she did most of the work of having them, and it was actually only two babies. But that's still twice as many as most people have, so it counts. Crazy shit. In my new-found role of Crazy Uncle, it falls to me the responsibility of teaching them how to do amazing things with boogers and fire. Hopefully, I am up to the challenge.

Updates regarding websitery

• As you may have noticed, stuff looks different around here. I'm still working on changing things around, which means that this place is more than likely going to look exactly the same for like eight more years.
• Scheduling being the way it is, I'm now back up to one day a week with nothing to do but lay around being idle and worthless. So updates might happen more than one a year eventually. I'm actually thinking of doing some sort of once-a-week update schedule, which isn't likely to actually happen, because I'm lazy.
• When I do update things, it's going to be a lot less of a Chicago Bears only blog. Mainly because I got recruited to go clog up someone else's blog with that sort of thing. I'm "LB" on there, and it's a pretty major coincidence that those are my initials. Huh.
• I was going to do one of those "check out my fish tank" posts, but I'm pretty sure I killed the one really cool plant in the 2-gallon betta tank today, so I'm all pissed and not in the mood to take pictures of my failures. Here's an old picture of Picasso, though:
  
  I'll get pictures of Larry, Darrell, Darrell #2, and Algae Crumpler in the ten-gallon up here someday.
• I'm seriously going to finish that "Ten Things I'm Going to Make Illegal" thing someday. Actually typed about half of a second entry. Someday.
• After recently viewing the entire Maniac Cop trilogy, I'm in the mood to bring back the Discount Rack Video Review. Or maybe just erase the entire site and replace it with a video clip of the scene from Maniac Cop 3 where Maniac Cop manages to take part in an entire car chase while completely on fire.
• I just noticed that my text and link colors are too close for anyone to be able to tell the difference. Since I'm not in the mood to fix that right now, I'm just making links larger.
  

Yeah.

Gonna try and redesign some stuff, and it would be easier to just start fresh with a generic Blogger template, so things are going to look odd for a while.

Is this thing on?

Testing some stuff.

UPDATE: Hmm. Blog stuff is on the home server now, instead of blogspot.com, but archive pages for June and July are nowhere to be found. Uh oh.

RE-EDIT: Fixed~!

RE-RE-RE-RE EDIT: Huh. The other two blogs can only be set to upload to websurfnicaragua.com if I get rid of all the extra little crap Blogger lets you put on there. Guess those'll remain external.

CARDBOARD DOWNFALL

I figured since I've been doing so much talking and obsessing over stupid little pieces of cardboard lately, I'd go full-tilt and make another blog, just for that kind of stuff. There, I'll share the tales of the last twenty years of wasting my money on this crap, maybe give my opinions on new brands or whatever, and if it's anything like the music review blog I started late last year, it'll start with a flurry of updates, only to scarcely ever get touched again. But yeah. I really need to mess with the sidebar over there to give some sort of updates on when those get updates. But until then, enjoy my CARDBOARD DOWNFALL.

Here you go.

Here's the new shizzle. Hopefully, I can scrounge up 45 bucks, and this won't be necessary, but I doubt it. Enjoy.