Category: Journal

8/30/01 (3.5.2.-1)

Right now, tonight, I am lying in my bed, charged up with energy, but not sure if I should try to get anything done. It is long past my bedtime, and just a little bit ago, I was too tired to watch TV. Perhaps TV is just too tiring, too mind-numbing right now. Then again, it is Thursday. There really isn’t anything good on TV on Thursdays right now. I tried to lay down for bed. I took all my clothes off, took my extra garlic, turned out all the lights and lay down in bed.

“My mind is racing, as it always will. My hands tire. My heart aches from half the world away.” – REM

On my stereo right now, on repeat. Track eight, Out Of Time, and I don’t want to turn on the lights to find out what the name of the song is. This could be the saddest dusk you’ll ever see.

Continue reading 8/30/01 (3.5.2.-1)

Slow going

I have mentioned in the forums that I am trying to do seven daily comic strips. Immediately, I planned to (sort-of) cheat by including daily updates of ME2 as one of the seven comics. I have done a goodly amount of scripting for 5 of the seven, and have set myself the goal of having an entire month’s worth of comics for all seven comics completed before I post day one of any of them. I intend to have a distinct art style for each of them, but due to the sheer volume, I do not expect to actually draw and re-draw the characters and settings in every panel of every comic; there will be a lot of cut and paste, but hopefully not as bad as ME2, for most of them.

I have already completed three weeks worth of new ME2s totally done, and I have scripts for a couple of weeks worth of three or four of the other comics already completed. I’ve developed art for one of those, and have begun creating comics for it. It is turning out to be much slower-going than I had hoped. I believe that there are other factors at play, but I am certainly not creating 7 comics a day right now. I definitely believe that after I have a sufficient number of comics done, the sense of completion will boost my production efforts; as it is, I feel so bad about not being further ahead that I work extra-slow.

Continue reading Slow going

My Calendar

For those of you who are curious, I have created two .pdf files with my calendar for this year and for next year. Since this year is one year before The Fall, I refer to it as -1, and next year as 0. Don’t bother asking about that. I have been counting down to Zero since -8, and I have not told anyone what exactly I’m counting down to yet; you won’t be the first to wonder, and you won’t be the first to know. Other questions are welcome, though. Also, as you will see when you look at the calendar, I have not got names for my days, weeks, or months. So, they are referred to by numbers for now (thus, today is 5.4, tomorrow is 1.5, and so on).

I am looking for suggestions for names. Then instead of only being able to say I have 2.6 off, I could say I have after next off. Or off. So, we’re looking for short names. Day names don’t necessarily need to have the word “day” in them, and the same goes for week names. No naming months after Ceasars. Otherwise, have at it – make your mark on the future by naming it now.

This year can be found here. Next year can be found here.

Not a word about pork

My attention span, when doing telephone technical support, seems to be very short. The type of calls I take tend to not be the sort that require any actual troubleshooting. More often than not, the only technical thing that I will go over is some known solution to a known technical issue. This, I have no problem with. I do not particularly like trying to do actual troubleshooting over the phone, especially with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing as the only intermediary between myself and the troubled device. Where the problem comes from, I think, is with the scores of calls that fall on the other end of the spectrum, with customers who call whose only technical interrogative is “Would you show me how to do ?” We have a manual. It tells you how to do .

Continue reading Not a word about pork

ReInventing Everything

Before my browser crashed a moment ago, I was in the middle of posting this, so if this doesn’t make any sense, assume that the thoughts I had already typed in were lost in the crash. Also, before my browser crashed, I had something on the order of 15 browser windows open to various sites, and found myself in the midst of taking on a very large project that, maybe, I won’t actually have to do. There is a thing that I want to be able to accomplish, and some programmers have done a similar thing in a Unix environment, with limited usability, mostly to show that the technology would be useful if developed fully. What I had started was learning several different programming languages and protocols so that I could develop first an understanding of how the existing software works, then develop the software that does what I want to accomplish. So, I was examining the existing software products to understand how the features they offered related to the features I wanted, and the languages that the software was written in, and then, before I got too far, I realized what I was doing.

Continue reading ReInventing Everything