Author and Thinker
I just got a call from the company I was trying to recover the files on my USB drive from.
Apparently the memory chip is shot and they weren’t able to recover anything whatsoever.
I almost feel like someone closer than I would ever let anyone get has died.
One problem (possibly) gets solved, and another crops up. So soon after finding out I could be getting a real battery for my laptop, my USB drive stops working. Because my last USB drive got lost, and both were my only means of backing up the contents of my old hard drive, and the one before the last one stopped working when the USB connector started sliding in and out and I was never able to get my files off it, if I can’t recover the information on there I have effectively lost everything I had worked on that’s not on the Internet or my desktop dating back at least to April of last year.
Sandsday will still go up as normal, since I work on those strips on my desktop, but there were some updates for the web site that were saved on the USB drive but not uploaded to the site that will now have to wait. I should be able to re-upload my street sign images from my trip to Whidbey Island earlier this month, but I will also have to re-write the applicable section of the street sign gallery, which will be a pain. Especially since my dad could be taking me on a road trip as soon as this weekend, which will be a street sign bonanza.
More distressingly, if I can’t recover what’s on the USB drive (or find my old one) I will have to abandon the 100 Greatest Movies Project and take the preview site offline. I worked on writing up a major chunk of the movies for the Project last summer (at least a third), and I also collaborated with a second on a few, and now all I have is what’s on the web site (i.e. nothing, really), the sample(s) I sent to the second, and the ones written by the second only when we weren’t together. Among the writeups lost are fairly lengthy ones by me that I can’t really palm off to anyone else because they contain analysis of the list itself.
Damn it.
To the extent Blogger really has much of a feature request, it appears to be inaccessible other than people going to the help group and reading threads pointing to it (has the “wish list” been replaced by Blogger in Draft?), and it doesn’t really support requests that require some description or explanation that aren’t among the defaults. So: When Blogger introduced the ability to autosave posts, it ditched the “recover post” feature, where posts in progress were automatically saved to a cookie on your computer, and if your browser crashed you could open a Blogger window and click “recover post” and your post would, mostly, return. I can see that it would be unnecessary when posts were being autosaved as drafts on a regular basis anyway, but that only works when you’re online for the duration.
I would like to see it made easier to work on posts offline, perhaps by bringing back a variant of the recover post feature. That would be useful for people who are working on posts that don’t require a lot of checking of web sites, so they can be worked on on a laptop that’s not connected to Wi-Fi, or people on Internet connections that aren’t always on. Working on posts in an external text editor isn’t really practical, especially with some of the wonkiness of the current main post editor. In Notepad, you essentially have to hand-program the HTML and paste in Edit HTML mode, and even then who knows what the post editor will do. I haven’t tested working on posts in Word, but considering Word 2007 defaults to inserting spacing as though you’re writing a double-spaced essay, I’m not optimistic.
My dad called me earlier today and wondered if, if he wanted to advertise on Da Blog, if he had to go through Blogspot, apparently mixing up Blogspot and Project Wonderful. They have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Speaking of which, don’t expect much in the way of non-Sandsday web site updates until a ways into the week, because my conversation with PW on my ad strategy seems to have stalled. Also, I see I appear to be getting some non-webcomic ads, which is nice.
In the past, I’ve complained a little about my downstairs neighbors having loud parties all night long. Since I’ve complained about them, they’ve basically stopped, but my front apartment neighbors are still a bit of a problem. They don’t play music loud enough to be heard from across the house (midway through the house, sure), and they don’t really even have big enough of a house from what little I could tell to even hold parties, but they do play music intermittently at all hours of the day.
My bedroom is on the far side of the house from our shared wall. The room with the TV in it is in the near side of the house, with the couch flush up against the wall. Those are the two places where I can sleep in the house, or at least where I used to sleep until I had to deal with the guys downstairs and up front. Until recently, I never slept on the couch anymore because the people downstairs tended to play their music closer to the back of their house, which would be the front of the house overall, since their front door was in the back of the house overall. It didn’t always help to sleep in my bedroom, because the people downstairs tended to have people congregate in the parking lot, partly the result of Mom’s request that they not smoke inside. Well, I probably could barely smell the smoke anyway, but I did have to bear the full brunt of the noise with my room flush up against the parking lot. But I digress. The point is, I was at least able to drown out the noise of the parking lot because the clock in my bedroom is a clock radio, so I was able to turn on my own kind of music to drown them out and get to sleep.
But since the parties stopped, possibly the result of my mom calling the police a couple of times (dialing 911 to do so!) I had started drifting to the couch more often. Which brings me to tonight, or last night rather as you read this. Between the men’s basketball final (I erred in reporting in Sports Watcher that the basketball final would be delayed on the West Coast; NBC’s own web site was either not up-to-date on Friday or just plain wrong) and the closing ceremony on CBC, I could only give myself a little less than three hours of sleep, and with the music playing quite a bit louder than I would otherwise desire, I found myself pounding on the wall quite a bit more than I otherwise would during the basketball final, hoping it would get quiet enough for me to sleep on the couch but dreading it wouldn’t. When the music continued and wearing earplugs didn’t muffle the sound enough even with my ears facing away from the wall (I wouldn’t say no to an iPod with pre-loaded classical music and noise-cancelling headphones for Christmas), I decided to see if the fact that I could only have (at this point) two and a half hours of sleep, thus needing every minute of that sleep, because of events whose time I couldn’t change, and that I couldn’t simply move to my room, might produce just TWO AND A HALF HOURS OF QUIET, STARTING AT 2:20 IN THE MORNING, ONCE.
Instead the person who answered the door berated me. He seemed to start going on about a “job” and I was prepared to ask him when he worked and determine if having a bunch of music playing at 2:20 in the morning was not more of an impediment to that job than whatever I did in reaction to that music, but instead he demanded to know how old I was. He then told me that when he was my age (this guy can’t be older than 30, and I’m 20 already) he had to wake up for a job at 7:30 (I still was not able to ask whether he had to listen to music at 2:20 in the morning) and how dare I pound on the wall and come over and ask them to turn the music down for the sake of watching TV!
I started to walk back, slowly – well, I think that was what I was doing – but he had more: the people in both the front and downstairs apartments had resigned the lease, and they knew my mom wrote complaining letters every month about the noise, and apparently the landlord – I’m going from half-hour later memory here – came over every once in a while and laughed with them about it! Keep in mind, our family has lived in this house since like 1996 and this problem only started last year!
It’s at that point that I had to cry out in anguish to the heavens and anyone who would listen. HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE MAD? IS IT SUDDENLY NORMAL TO PLAY MUSIC IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AS THOUGH AM HAS BECOME PM? But no sooner had I finished than this guy was brusquely shoving me down the path and wanting to have my mom come out (who wasn’t there at the time) and let me tell you, dear reader, if I wasn’t the proverbial 90-pound weakling I’d have started a knock-down fight with that guy right that instant. Hey, it’s 3 AM as I write this, you gotta excuse my potential windows into my more seedy side, but raise your hand if you’re just going “hell yeah!” instead. So he wanted to see my mom, and he was threatening to send me to the crazy house (for my little scream about how THEY were crazy) and that if I didn’t get back in that instant (he was standing in the way between me and the door) he’d knock my teeth out, and ditto if I so much as talked to him the rest of the night. And when I finally started heading back to the door he kept shoving me several more times in quick succession, apparently because my sleep-deprived body wasn’t jogging back to the door in fear.
I’ve gotten the impression that not just the multiplex I live in, but several more houses right near the closest arterial I live near, have become home to party-friendly, up-all-night, college students. Even ones way up on a high ridge. I’d say this is among the many reasons I can’t fathom how I could possibly be more motivated to get a real job, so I could move away from these people (or at least fix my reputation at school enough to move back to the dorms, which is sure to be made a lot harder by having to deal with this stuff and being sleep-deprived as a result), but that would essentially be admitting defeat. It would be giving up the neighborhood, which for over ten years was fairly idyllic and, well, livable, to the forces of unlimited beer, smokes, PARTY! and all sorts of other unseemly elements.
To paraphrase Mike Gundy, I’m a college student! I’m 20! I don’t subscribe to the theory that the night is a time to pump up the music (and, my mom suspects in the case of the people downstairs, smoke drugs so sleep literally becomes an unknown concept), I subscribe to the theory that it’s a time to sleep! Catch some Z’s! I actually care about getting my studies done! I have to wake up for a class that starts at 9 AM this coming quarter! I’m going to have to wake up at 7 AM or earlier to get ready in time! I can live a perfectly fulfilling life by being completely unconscious for, ideally, seven or eight hours a night – or at least I could, if I didn’t have to deal with people who feel differently! Perhaps, if these hooligans maybe tried shutting the music off once in a while, and put their head in their studies, or in the case of the people who have already ditched college or graduated with probably-grade-inflated scores, got actual jobs (because there’s no way they’re old enough and non-brain-damaged enough to have graduated and deserved it), they’d discover it to be at least as if not more fulfilling than throwing your f’ing life away every night!
EDIT: I forgot the part where this guy suggested I move my 27-inch TV that’s hooked up to a cable box, two VCRs, and a DVD player, and sits on a 36×48-inch piece of furniture. NOT gonna happen.
The MySQL database is giving me a “too many connections” error, so hopefully when the error lets up you’ll be able to see today’s strip (and yesterday’s) on the site. Mom tells me she intends to buy a battery on Friday, so I might be able to return to some semblance of normalcy after that.
After what’s seemed like ages off – months, really – Eric Burns(-White) has been surprisingly active recently at Websnark. In fact, one recent post had all the trappings of Websnark’s heyday, complete with “click for full sized (insert description relevant to strip under discussion here)” and short, snappy description of the strip in question. (And he’s done another one since then!) I don’t think he dipped very far into the lexicon, but it was a far cry to the more in-depth analyses of the “State of the Web(cartoonist)” series, and a welcome change of pace from the lengthy exegeses on non-webcomic-related Internet controversies that had marked the last few months of seeming hiatus. Eric Burns’ audience was built on webcomics, and I think a goodly number of people reading the RSS feed probably read these exegeses and thought, “That’s great, but when are you going to talk about webcomics again, Eric? When are you going to talk about the Ctrl+Alt+Del miscarriage storyline? Or the recent racheting tension at Order of the Stick? Or Girl Genius? Or whatever the hell happened to Penny Arcade? Or or or…”
Well, on the aforementioned harkening back to Websnark’s heyday, I had left a comment saying as such. And on a recent strip marking Websnark’s fourth anniversary, Burns(-White) referenced that comment and referred to me by name.
Okay, so maybe this is a narcissistic, ego-stroking post. But if he’d bothered to link to Da Blog, it would have been an acknowledgement of a traffic bump! But it points to a reason why I’m doing webcomic posts: Websnark has loosened the slack, Tangents basically doesn’t exist right now, and I don’t know of another active site that’s really a close equivalent to either. (Okay, so Burns(-White) tells me there are “a f***ton of blogs about webcomics”, but damned if I know what they are.) But I can’t pick up the slack too much because I have other interests as well and I don’t have that kind of time.
I do feel this line may be relevant to me:
Well, for one thing, it means we can all stop taking things so fucking seriously all the time. I gave up drama a while back, and I’ve mostly stuck to that, and I’ve found I enjoy things a lot more than I used to. It means that the chances that Websnark — or any largely webcomics related blog — can claw up to almost six figures of readership again are pretty damn low. There’s too much out there, which means there’s too little need to congregate at one writer’s doorstep. It means that there’s no need to do this kind of thing… except of course if you enjoy doing this kind of thing.
Except. It’s still worth it to make sure everyone’s doing everything right, to keep webcomics honest, to show who deserves a biscuit and who deserves dog s**t, because market forces are the only way comics get forced out on the Web. That’s the stated goal of the site I intend to look at in my second webcomics post of the week. Whether it succeeds – and what its unwanted success in terms of readership numbers really means for the future of webcomic blogs, and webcomics – will be among the topics I intend to look at.
Couple of notes from last night at the Olympics.
First, showing events live on both coasts isn’t the only thing the CBC beats NBC over the head with. I watched both networks’ coverage of the 1500 meter freestyle, and even though CBC was a complete homer for Ryan Cochrane, they still ran circles around NBC, who took until five minutes into the race (after a commercial break) to mention him. Were it not for the occasional check-ins on the status of Larsen Jensen, I might have thought I was hearing the Australian broadcasters, so focused were they on Grant Hackett. In the process, as they called Hackett’s doomed-to-failure chase of ???, they missed a pretty good chase for the bronze.
Second, I was probably the worst track athlete in the world in high school for two years, stumbling to Charlie Brown-like finishes in the most junky heats of the 100 and 200 (the latter of which I only raced in because I needed a second event), but I still consider that enough experience to put my TV analyst cap on regarding the 100. Usain Bolt may have cost himself more than a more unbeatable world record by celebrating several meters short of the finish. He may have made himself some enemies as well.
If other sports like basketball, but especially sports with a lot of tradition (and at over 2500 years, there’s no sport with more tradition than track and field), are any indication, there is probably an “old guard” who stands for doing things “the right way”, which at least in the eyes of some, usually means “don’t have fun”. I don’t know this for certain, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t some people who will say of Bolt, “he’s too cocky” – regardless of whether he is or not – “he’s too showboating, he let up with 15 meters to go in the 100, he’s too Hollywood” – you’re nodding your head, Tom, you know what I’m talking about!
If you’ve been following Da Blog over the summer, you’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve been diligently looking for a job, without success. As I mentioned in a previous post, that’s largely because Da Blog has sort of been my job. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing some sort of due diligence.
For a while, I looked for jobs at CBCampus.com, the college-student-oriented arm of job search site CareerBuilder. But it became apparent that beyond the first page, CBCampus only had the exact same job search engine as CareerBuilder, with the exact same jobs. It didn’t even search by default for, say, jobs I could get with just a high school degree. It and other sites also didn’t allow me to add criteria such as no experience required, even when flags indicating such that should have been searchable without keywords existed. I wondered if there was a job search site that was really geared towards students. The closest I came appeared to be Student Central, which didn’t seem to have any jobs in my state, which seemed kind of pointless.
Well, today I recently got done meeting with a therapist which I meet with every so often to work on some of my issues, and he suggested that “job search sites” are a waste of time for everybody, not just me. Monster, CareerBuilder, you name it. He’s known maybe one person to get a job from those sites. Well, that was certainly useful…
But it seems that that condemnation could be used against just about anything else, including the classified ads in the newspaper, which are now often searchable online just like a job search site. So it begs the question: How does one really find a job, anyway?
So I’m turning this open to you: How have you found your jobs?
I haven’t been able to get a job (and not for lack of trying, as I have had no less than four interviews, but there really is very little in the way of real job search engines for students). Despite my money being incredibly tight and Mom pressuring me to get some sort of job if only for the work experience.
The battery on my laptop is virtually nonexistent, thanks to, from what I have read, being seemingly designed for obsolescence.
I can’t put it on standby or hibernate if just about anything is open, lest it fail to do so and force me to completely shut down, which defeats the purpose of putting it on standby or hibernate.
(If I could change standby or hibernate in any way, I would make it so there is always a way to get out of it right up until it actually finishes entering standby or hibernate, or alternately, until the “Preparing to hibernate” screen disappears. Barring that, I would make it so that Windows inserts a marker the instant it’s done saving the computer’s state to disk; the next time Windows boots up, you have the option of loading from that marker, so if something goes wrong and you have to turn off the computer, you can recover from the marker anyway. If it doesn’t detect the marker, you know the problem came before Windows finished saving the state of the computer, and the end of any escape should come after the marker has been saved. But for reasons I describe below, I now suspect the real problem may be the fact that Windows turns off the keyboard and mouse at all.)
I have no real internet connection, not even one I can steal from inside the house, so I have to run outside a few paces to get anything done online if I don’t want to run about seven blocks (a 10-15 minute walk) to the library. That includes every single night I post the strip.
Which requires the use of my nonexistent battery.
On Saturday I was told I was being kicked out of the library until Thursday because I had been in the library late on Wednesday, the result of my laptop going into a coughing fit (as I described in my Savidge v. Obama post) and me not wanting to take it away from an Internet connection.
So for the next three days I’m going to have to spend some of my precious, sparse dough to use the Internet at a cafe. And walk for a longer distance.
I have a ridiculous backlog of posts I need to get written. My usual Tuesday webcomic post will probably be late this week.
And then last night I head outside to use the Internet, in the act of trying to post the strip, just trying to verify that the strip actually got posted before I created the page (Freehostia’s new file manager is a bit unacceptably slow and had a bug when I tried to post something, but the word is it should be fixed when I reboot), and as I head in the computer starts going on hibernate.
It’s slow enough in doing so that I can plug it back in and hit Esc a lot and get it to stop hibernating, but my jubilation is short-lived. My touchpad and keyboard stop working.
And they don’t come back when the computer mostly ends its latest coughing fit. Among other things, this causes me to lose two of the posts in my backlog (as well as my planned challenge to my “exclusion” from the library). One of them wasn’t going to get posted until after my Truth Court announcement anyway, and required a lot of expansion, but the other is time-sensitive, was all but finished, and is due to be posted at the end of this week. And it presages more posts that will add to my backlog.
It’s enough to cause me, an agnostic-athiest, to want to start screaming at the heavens. WHY ME! WHY SHOULD ALL THESE PROBLEMS STRIKE ME! WHY HATH THOU NOT BLESSED ME WITH WORK ETHIC SO I COULD GET A JOB! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe I can answer part of that question, actually. One reason I haven’t been working as hard as I probably should at finding a job is that I’ve spent so much time on Da Blog.
In some sense, Da Blog has been my job this summer, so I might as well make money off it.
So effective immediately, advertising is coming to Da Blog, courtesy Project Wonderful. (I also applied to have advertising on Sandsday and the web site in general, but the latter was rejected for “lack of content”, and I want to have a uniform look across the web site, which means no ads on one part if there aren’t ads on the other part. On the other hand, I also have such a breadth of stuff on the web site that I’d like to be able to split it up across several “sites”, but I don’t really know how to work that. I could put a horizontal ad space below the strip instead of in the sidebar as I was intending…)
PW essentially uses an auction model for ad space; you stipulate the most you’re willing to pay per day, for how long, and how much you’re willing to pay total. Because you’re charged by the second if your ad is the high bid (and you’re only charged just enough to beat the second-highest bid – so if you’re the only bid you get advertising for free), you could say you’re willing to pay less than you were willing to pay per day. Ads aren’t served up semi-randomly like Google Adsense, which means I can screen the ads, so no porn ads or anything like that. My income isn’t dependent on people clicking on the ads, which makes it easier to make money (and recognizes that just having people be able to see the ad is valuable). And if I make, say, ten dollars in Project Wonderful, that’s ten dollars more than I would see with the equivalent level of activity in Google Adsense, where I wouldn’t be able to see one red cent until I made $100.
There will be two ads on Da Blog, at least to start: one “premier” ad at the very top of Da Blog and also appearing on the RSS feed, and one “standard” in the sidebar. For the first week, the ad space will advertise the ability to advertise if there are no bids; if there still aren’t any bids after a week I’ll put up something of my own. If you’re really interested in advertising for the long haul, subscribe to the new “advertising” label and stay up to date on traffic spikes and changes in the ad model. As soon as I clear the backlog of posts I’ll have a short FAQ on the web site for people wishing to advertise.
I would ask you to donate to me to fund anything to help my situation (I’M REDUCED TO BEGGING DAMMIT!) – a new battery, perhaps, or books for my upcoming return to school – but I have heard a LOT of bad things about PayPal and I don’t know of any competition for it.