Morgan Wick

Important notice

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For the moment, and for the forseeable future (possibly for all of July), the strip’s update time is “whenever I can get it up”.

If you want to hasten the day when it returns to 11 PM PT, you can get me a laptop battery for my laptop.

Or you can pay for the first month of Clearwire wireless or Comcast cable Internet.

Or you can move in next to or above or below me and set up an unsecured wireless connection strong enough for me to easily use it. (In the latter case, you’ll have my dual gratitude for pushing out my loud, nocturnal, party-hearty neighbors.)

Or you can get me a job.

In the first two cases, I’ll pay you back when I no longer need the fourth. Contact me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you’re interested.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week:

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Never let it be said that I don’t give you what you want. Since posting my most recent poll, I have gotten a unanimous consensus (okay, it’s only three votes, but still) that among the things I should add to Da Blog is a series of random Internet discoveries.

So we start with TED.com. Such a valuable address was snapped up by an

annual conference [that] brings together the world’s most fascinating
thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18
minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to
the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available,
with more added each week.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

Mm. Interesting. And in no small way connected to my non-random discovery last week.

The conference is actually only moving to Long Beach in February of next year, after spending 20 years in Monterey, and is being simulcast to an audience in Palm Springs. Don’t expect to be able to attend it live – “attendance at TED is by invitation only,” consists significantly of people more famous than you and me, and sells out fast – and the Palm Springs conference is probably equally crowded. But you can still watch the videos on the site.

I was originally planning to make this feature daily, but I don’t think that’s feasible, for the same reasons as Sports Watcher…

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 6/28-29

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All times PDT.

Saturday
9-12 PM: Tennis, Wimbledon, 3rd round action (NBC). The reason why the 3rd round gets this spot and the 4th round doesn’t is because I actually have something to fill this spot tomorrow.

1-3:30 PM: Arena Football, Colorado @ Utah (ESPN). The playoffs are in full swing so the Arena League appears every week through ArenaBowl.

5-7 PM: IndyCar Racing, IndyCar 300 at Richmond (ESPN). Hey, NASCAR causes interference too often and this is the one sport I watch every time it’s on. If you think NASCAR is just a bunch of cars going around in circles, maybe the real problem is it’s too slow.

8-9 PM: US Olympic Trials, Track and Field (NBC). Same on both coasts so it interferes with the IndyCar on the East Coast.

9-2 AM: Boxing, Manny Pacquito v. David Diaz (PPV). Same on both coasts again, so it interferes with the IndyCar – just barely – on the East Coast.
Sunday
9-11 AM: MLS Soccer, Los Angeles @ DC United (ABC). “Soccer is so boring, it’s just a bunch of passing a ball back and — OMG IT’S BECKHAM OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!!!11!!11!111!1!!!!eleven!”

12-3 PM: LPGA Golf, US Women’s Open, final round (NBC). It’s the Annika Sorenstam farewell tour! Those other golfers expected to pick up the slack? Who cares about them? No one cares about the male golfers not named Tiger.

Honorable Mention: 11:30-1:30 PM: UEFA Soccer, Euro 2008, final (ABC). Because Dad will kill me if I don’t mention this at least once. You could watch the soccer and switch to golf at 1:30, but then you only catch an hour and a half of golf. Wasn’t Euro 2004 mostly on pay-per-view? Now the final is airing on broadcast television and the US doesn’t even have a horse in the race anywhere! And last month the Champions League final was made into a fairly big deal on ESPN2!

(The really odd part? The only other game in the tournament on ABC was a quarterfinal last week. And ESPN2 showed one of the semifinals Thursday because of the US Women’s Open, whereas all the non-ABC quarterfinals are on regular ESPN. Huh?)

5-8 PM: MLB Baseball, Chicago Cubs @ Chicago White Sox (ESPN). This is “ESPN Sunday Night Baseball presented by Taco Bell Part of AL/NL Showdown presented by State Farm”. No further comment needed.

8-9 PM: US Olympic Trials, Swimming (NBC). Same on both coasts again, but ironically, that means the Track and Field trials the previous hour interferes with baseball on the West Coast but not on the East Coast!

One last thing… Sports Watcher just might continue past August. I’m starting to get into a bit more of a groove. Stay tuned.

More quick hits

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Last call. Here‘s Ctrl+Alt+Del, and here‘s User Friendly.

And the opinions expressed in this comic are not necessarily those of the author. I’m not familiar enough with CAD, and all I know about UF is I started reading it from the beginning in 2006, and had to pry myself away from it when I got to 2004 because it was taking up so much of my time that I should have been using studying.

And both strips work now. Honest. ‘zojdf  ,.zdM/jivzk.lngdipioads

Keith Olbermann: Worst Person in the World!

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Fast forward to 3:03:

“Obviously, those would have to be the kind of arms in use in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was passed; the musket, the wheelock, the flintlock, the 13th century Chinese hand cannon. Stuff like that!”

Yes, “stuff like that” all right. And when the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”, it’s talking strictly about things like speaking, whispering, shouting, yelling, printing pamphlets and newspapers, and other things in use in 1791. The Internet, television, radio, motion pictures, even the telegraph? Fair game!

I’d like to think Keith doesn’t really mean this, although it’s doubtful since it seems to be making a case that it’s okay to restrict guns today because today’s guns are so much more advanced. It would be insane to interpret the Second Amendment as saying we can’t keep people from obtaining nuclear weapons. But regardless of whether he means it, rest assured the Right will hammer him for it.

The question is, did the Founding Fathers intend the Second Amendment to prohibit restrictions on common ownership of guns, regardless of whether that was for the purpose of raising a militia? I hope to answer that question in Truth Court, if not this weekend, at some point in the future.

Da Blog’s not moving in the near future, and other odds and ends

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Blogger’s Draft feature recently unleashed a deluge of new features for bloggers to try out. There’s things like a star rating system, Google search info, that sort of thing. There’s new functionality to put a comment form right there on the permalink page instead of in a popup or a separate page, which is probably going to be popular.

There is also a new editing window that promises to fix so many of the issues I had with Blogger that it could very well prevent me from deciding to move Da Blog to WordPress at some point down the line.

Of course, I won’t stop thinking tables are an afterthought around here unless there’s a table button in the toolbar, but if that’s my biggest issue it’s a tremendous improvement. Expect to see some changes in the coming months, including the possibility of changing layouts to accomodate wider screens like mine.

Oh, and for the first time ever, I have an actual job interview scheduled for tomorrow.

Could you remind me in the future to mark down June 26, 2008 as a critical day in my life?

An expansion on Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs

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I mentioned yesterday that I had conceived of Da Blog as a series of sub-blogs that could also be read as one big blog. Well, if you’re only interested in my thoughts on specific topics, you can subscribe to specific RSS/Atom feeds for each label, not just the whole-blog feed available at the bottom of the page.

The address is morganwick.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/(label name). Don’t ask me why Blogger sticks that hyphen in there.

Here are some examples for some of my most common, or useful, labels:
web site news
nfl
blog news
about me
webcomic news
my comments on the news
snf flex scheduling watch
sports watcher

If a label you want to follow is not on that list, click on one and replace the label name with the label of your choice.

Quick hits

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Here‘s the strip. Here‘s the xkcd. Here‘s the Dinosaur Comics.

It used to be that xkcd was full of obscure math jokes, though that seems to have transitioned, in some respects, to something called “human relationships”. Either way, I can’t get into it. Meanwhile, DC has shown that it’s hard to really shake out of a routine with a gimmick like that DC has. That, and I don’t think DC‘s sort of humor really appeals to me.

Post frequency is going to go down significantly at the end of the week and I don’t know when it’ll return. I’ll make an effort to get the currently-suspended storyline some approximation of finished over the weekend, so I’ll have a steady stream of strips for a while. My mom is REALLY on my case about finding a job and I need to get a real Internet connection anyway.

Gulp.

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Duh… duh… duh…

David Morgan-Mar actually responded to my blog post on Irregular Webcomic!

I… I’m completely star-struck right now.

(And intensely frustrated with Microsoft at the same time. Would it have killed you to include some mechanism to either kick-start or terminate the stand by or hibernate process in case it got held up at any stage of the process, so I could have some recourse other than just holding the power button until the computer hard-turns off? The reason people stand by and hibernate as opposed to shutting down is because they have work open they don’t want to lose or save just yet, you know.)