Author: Doug

If you are seeing this and the domain name says WeatherPaparazzi.com, you are on the new website home for my website.

First off, MONTHS of repairs, re coding, cleaning, spell checking, grammar checking and editing is completed as of 7/26/2019.

For those wondering if and asking “Do You Still Chase” Yes I do and now that I have this 20 year old mess of website cleaned up and working for the first time in years, I’m going to be a lot more vocal about stuff since I’m no longer going to be depending on Facebook or other social media sites to host my work but only be used as a search engine for my work. EVERYTHING is on my page and images will be clean and uncompressed and points of view will be uncensored!

Oh yeah, “Do I Still Chase? Yes and now that the backlog of office crap is getting caught up, going to be out a lot more later this season and next season.

Here is my news video from just south east of home. I’m working on a blog video to post later tonight.

If you are seeing this on 7/25/2016 at 11:51 PM, this site is gone.  

*** Update *** Well actually, if you are seeing this, you are on the new site framework.

I have spent the last 6 months rebuilding and moving EVERYTHING over to a new system and reviewed the last 18 years of my life… Crazy eh? 

Don’t worry, everything is not lost, but something new, something beautiful, SOMETHING WITH SPELL CHECK AND grammar checking that was about 25 years overdue is in the works.  All the data, files and actual working links are all here on this page you are reading. I did this to preserve all of my old work so that one day when I’m long gone, I will leave something behind for my daughter to review and read that is NOT on FaceBook or some other social media site. I also did this because I wanted to take back MY social media posts and MY content to MY site where I am the only censor and the images and or video posted is NOT in some highly compressed format but the clean pristine clear image quality that we had before Anti Social Media and any advertising that happened to be on this page, yeah, I get paid for it, NOT some social media company.

Now that the site content is all over here, I will be working on moving about 5 years of my social media life from CRACKBOOK, (Facebook) back over here to this site. I’m also going to be blogging and VLOGGING (Video Blogging) a lot more.

Some people thought and have said “Do You Even Chase Anymore” and the answer was and always is, YES but my website sucked so I never posted. Well, I’M BACK!

I’m working on the transition of all the old content from the sand box site, the Dot Net site and working on moving it back to the the main site, the dot.com site.

Right now, if you see this site and it is the WeatherPaparazzi.com site, and this is NOT the top or current blog, you are on the new setup. Otherwise, if this is the top post, you are on the www.weatherpaparazzi.com site

Thank you,

Doug

Just got back home and edited the video for the local news and the Youtube Channel since I have a large local following here in Minnesota since I cover more out state then metro news.

I had a feeling that today was going to be one of those days that is just F’d Up. I wanted to work on the website and literally at the point of writing this blog, I have 14 pages to move over and then finalize the entire move for WeatherPaparazzi.com and reclaim my life, content and blog. Unfortunately it seems as though whenever I get so close to finalizing a project, I encounter the greatest resistance to accomplishing the task at hand.

Today, errrr, Yestertday was one of those times where I was all set, making some coffee in the office and had dinner started while Neva and Laura were at the park. I was listening to the scanner when a call came over the radio like something out of a F’n horror movie that was happening in Paynesville, MN. A man was pouring gasoline on the children and pets while the woman was screaming calling 911. The next thing I heard on the radio was that the trailer park was on fire. Then I hear the police were on the scene and can hear people screaming inside but they can’t get inside to help them.

Last report I heard was two children were life flighted to the hospital, not sure but I assume it was probably HCMC or North Memorial burn unit.

Below is the video I posted to Youtube. I could not put too much detail on the Youtube video since the description about what was happening would probably get the channel or video flagged but I did edit in all the audio from the scanner traffic to tell the story about what was happening.

I know I have said that before but now that all of the hurricane blog pages are moved to the new temp setup www.weatherpaparazzi.com, I have 6 menu pages left to clean up and move.

That is about 60+ total more blogs to rebuild and then work on the transfer and recreation and rebirth. 

I can tell you that the hurricane blogs were a total disaster, I mean they were screwed and it took me four hours just to fix all the video and photography in the Hurricane Katrina blog.

I do have to recreate the Katrina Nine Months Later blog page along with the move of all the last of the stuff that is on this site. Then transfer the database then rebuild the .net to the .com and then move the older Facebook blogs to here. 

I’m taking my content back for good!!!

Now that I spent MONTHS cleaning up the mess of my social media life…  God, that sounds like an amazing book title, “The Mess Of My Social Media Life”  How social media almost destroyed my photography and video websites…  

Right now the bulk of the posts are on WeatherPaparazzi.net  Once everything from the old dot com site is moved over and recreated, it will be moved back to this domain name.  

I’m finding so many images that have never seen the light of day while auditing and moving everything. Get ready for a massive update of new photography in August 2019.

I was watching the weather all morning and into the afternoon for the risk of severe weather today. After the severe thunderstorm watch was issued for Stearns County, I started to get ready for the chase.

There was two areas of interest for me, one to the northwest of me with ongoing storms that were severe warned near Alexandria, MN but you can see on the satellite image, there was a second line of disturbed clouds in western Stearns County and northern Kandiyohi County. I was expecting this line to explode into some discrete storms that I could chase close to home.

It did not take long for the storms to start to explode as you can see in the satellite image below.

Unfortunately, work got in the way and had to deal with something before being able to get out on time so I was about 25 minutes behind the time I wanted to leave and the storms got the jump on me.

I did get on Interstate 94 to head the storms off and intercept them near Monticello, MN and was treated to this just south of Saint Cloud, MN.

About as soon as it formed up, it was blown out by the outflow of the storm as it started moving east. I made the decision to get off the interstate and cross over to Highway 10 and follow the storm to the southeast on Highway 10 just to avoid any river crossing issues. The storm did look good on radar for a time but it soon became a rain maker and nothing special.

So pretty much I got stuck in rush hour traffic on Highway 10 and then made my way down to towards Maple Grove, MN. From there, it was pretty much a nightmare of Twin Cities metro traffic with storms at rush hour. So an hour or so screwing around in the rush hour traffic trying to get to different areas that had damage reports and flooding reports that were not there when I finally showed up, I said screw it and drove home. Saw this on the way home as the storm teased one more time but I just said nope, when home in time to get Laura to bed and write up this blog and continue the blog transfer.

The joke is that I should just hit the Casino this year as my luck might be better. Na, it is not a matter of luck or forecasting, the storms this year are just showing up in the wrong areas to chase in and in a couple cases, just days that nobody was even expecting to be chase days. Oh well, back to work here in the office until I get this blog and website transferred completed.

But yes, being stuck in traffic all day in heavy rain in severe thunderstorm warning did feel like being stuck in a stupid car wash all day.

Another pop up storm to chase today and while watching the hype train about Tropical storm Barely, I mean Barry, I needed to get out and cover some local weather and just get out and stay active.

A pop up storm raced across the state from South Dakota to Wisconsin and was warned for most of its life span. The storm was racing to the east at about 60-70mph.

I could not really keep up with the storm and by the time I got in the core, it just out rain me. Here is the video I shot around Belle Plaine and Jordan, MN in Scott County. The owner of the car that was crushed was not even in the car but inside a restaurant with a couple of kids. He said the car was fully insured and were just waiting for a ride from someone. It looked like Lightning was the cause of the tree to come down. It had a tell tale burn mark on the branch and trunk.

Earlier this year I was part of a class at church called Financial Peace University that got me to take a step back and look at everything I have been doing financially with my personal income and with my business.

While working on this massive website fix this week, I have found so many errors in the HTML Code and the old Drupal code from the huge number of changes over the years in Drupal versions and now stuff spread all over the place from Twitter, Facebook, and now unto the Smugmug setup.

With auditing and rebuilding the site, I have been moving all the photography back to being hosted on my servers and websites. I was pretty much shocked to see that over the past few years, I have paid Smugmug $1,747.48 for hosting my photos. In that time frame since I started up the Smugmug account in 2011, the sales have been almost non-existent. In the same time frame the still photography market for storm chasing images has been flooded by micro stock where what once sold for a lot of money is not given away for name credit.

So, now there is a secondary fire under me to get everything off of SmugMug and back on my own site before having to pay even more money for hosting that is not needed in 45 days.

Why did this go on for so long with paying for a service that I never used? Simple, I got distracted with social media and other crap.

So come 9/1/2019 if not sooner, https://weatherpaparazzi.smugmug.com will be done.
As of this morning, 7/10/2019 I have about 180 pages to recreate on this temp site, the Dot Net version and then moving everything back to the Dot Com

One of my goals this week is to be DONE with the move. Right now I am down to just about 200 pages to move to the new setup and to close out the old setup. If you are seeing this now, your seeing the latest blog updates.

Also finding more errors and stuff I forgot about in the source code of the old website setup. It was still linking back to Lightningboy.net Ugh what a nightmare but working to fix it all.

Also, check out the Hurricane Michael blog at http://www.hurricanemichaelblog.com

Doug

Yesterday was pretty much a washout as heavy rain from a slow moving storm that stayed over Stearns County for hour hit around noon. The worst of it was in Sartell, MN which is just to the west of Saint Cloud, MN. From what I heard over the scanner, they called into MPX (local weather service) and reported that their weather station at the police and fire hall building measured 4.4 inches of rain in about an hour.

I had to stick around the house until the worst of it was over as I wanted to make sure our yard and house did not get flooded and since it was just Laura and me yesterday, I was not going to take her out in the heavy rain.

So this was the first real Daddy And Daughter storm chase for us while mom was working all day. It was local and we were able to get out of the house for a little while. She got to watch dad work

The rain did move out and the water slowly drained away so that by 6:00 P.M. the evening was nice and the sky was perfect for fireworks. On the down side, after the rain, their was pretty much no wind so all the fireworks smoke just kind of hung in the air.

This was Laura’s first real fireworks show that she was able to really understand what was happening and enjoy. The ones in the years past she was just to young to understand what was happening but this year she had fun. As soon as the show started, all she could say was “look fireworks fireworks fireworks”

Also if you did not notice, this is a blog update with a recent blog update of recent events. Turns out I was on the right path all along as Facebook had another major outage this week where all the images pretty much crashed. Back to working on the website move and planning the next live stream event. Thinking I will do another funny live stream reviewing all the held comments on the youtube channel.