Home page for Douglas Kiesling

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.

Ok for those of you that have found the temp page for my website, here is what is happening.

First off, the old site setup was a total disaster. I mean TOTAL DISASTER!!! A SQL database nightmare. The old website grew over the year’s from a site that was setup wrong in the first place back in 2006/2007 time frame and was moved to different hosting servers over the years.

The first part of the site actually dates back to 1996, yes, that old when it was part of the SCC.net hosting that outgrew the tiny storage of the shared hosting setup and over the years it grew and grew then BNVN came into the picture in 2001. BNVN or Breaking News Video Network took over all of my free time. Now over the last 18 year’s, the personal page has been called Lightnningboy.com and then morphed into WeatherPaparazzi.com and was neglected, forgotten about, put on life support and tried to make a come back but it just took time I did not have.

Now in 2019, I was trying to get this site back up and running earlier this year but again, time was short, work was plenty and my family came first so it again got pushed back.

I’m back trying to get all the data transferred and here is the deal. I need to get this thing rebuilt for several reasons.

A) I want to have something for Laura to read about when she is older to know who Daddy is and was. Money can come and go, but time, you can never buy more time in this life. Once it is gone, it is gone. You can buy things to replace things but you can never buy more time to live.

B) The lightningboy.com website blogs and the WeatherPaparazzi.com blogs data became corrupted over several database transfers and hosting platform moves. While the images were mostly still there, the links to all the videos were blown out. Total mess.

C) I want to bring my personal site back to life. With the amount of time and energy that is sucked up by other social media websites that don’t pay for content (except for Youtube which pays nothing near what it did five year’s ago) and all the websites that are freaking out about censorship and demonetization of content.

And last but not least, there are people that just don’t use social media and refuse to get a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account just due to privacy. I can respect that so basically I’m still working on bringing the content back home now that I have my own servers. This move is still underway, just longer then expected.

Just something for my fans on Youtube as the storms this morning really did not produce the severe weather that was expected but their was “SLCs” or Scary Looking Clouds.

Honestly the forecast models nailed this storm perfectly but even though it did look scary, it was just your average Minnesota thunder storm. We started out by testing the drone in Class G airspace in Wright county near Clearwater, MN and got an amazing visual of the storm looking to the south.

Ok, I have said it before and will say it again but this time I heard a new term that is going round, “attention mining” to gain the attention and to keep people stuck on a social media site.

While this page is not a social media page, it is an old school blog and more like a look inside the creative mind of a photographer and videographer and business owner and it is my personal way to say what I want without any fear of it being censored by any social media company. This page is on my server.

So over the last month and a half, I have been stupid busy with several things. The weather was rocking with back to back winter storms. It was as if winter finally came back with a vengeance.

The other has been just trying to get the SCV pages up to date and working with clients for archive footage. We have a new partner in the footage industry that will be announced soon to help move material to clients and take a load off of my back.

Distractions? Yes, lots of them from having to repair stuff around the home like learning to rebuild a washing machine to the major news about a huge lawsuit involving one of the clients that we are not a part of but I still have received numerous phone calls about it. My short answer is my company had nothing to do with it and that is what lawyers are for.

Speaking of lawyers, it looks like we will be going down that road with several companies. I’m not naming any names as of yet but if I punt this to the attorney, I’m sure that a press release will come out. Turns out other footage companies that let anyone in to sell footage without researching who they are and where their content comes from are allowing others to pirate and resell copyrighted stock footage as their own, until they are caught and then try to hide behind the DMCA or Digital Minimum Copyright Act.

The only problem is these companies are NOT hosting companies that the DMCA protects but actually profit from the sale of stolen material that is also a crime.

The storm chasing business and video business is about to get a lot more interesting. Okay, time to get back to editing and finish this one project then back to the website and the 50 other projects I have to do…

Yesterday I was up in Clay County, Minnesota to document the start of the massive flooding from the melting snow pack.  The snow from last weeks blizzard and the large amount of snow that has fallen in the area all winter long is not rapidly melting and turning fields into lakes and small run off creeks into rivers.

I also uploaded the B-Roll package that I shot for The Weather Channel.

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What a day, it was pretty intense with the bulk of the snow in the northwest metro to Saint Cloud, MN again. Here is the footage I shot in the Twin Cities.

Winter storm hits the Twin Cities Metro area during the evening hour’s and causes numerous spin outs and crashes around the metro area.
Shot Description

Clip 1 Skyline with snow falling

Clip 2 Someone in their SUV stuck on Interstate 94 after a plow came by as they were trying to get on the interstate and they spun out into the snow bank and got stuck.

Clip 3 POV shot pulling the vehicle out of the snow bank.

Clip 4 Vehicle smashed into the cable barriers on Interstate 94.

Clips 5-6 Pickup truck stuck in the snow bank on the side of the interstate and looks like it was plastered by snow by several snow plows.

Clip 7 Vehicle spun out on the interstate.

Clip 8 Passing vehicle spun out on the interstate.

Clips 9-12 Minneapolis International Airport Control tower and aircraft de-icing.

Clips 13-16 Snow plows Gang Plowing.