Classic Da Blog

Image upload hasn’t been working on Blogger in Draft since at least last weekend’s Darths and Droids post. If they won’t fix it, I will.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized diary of death.)

Well, the idea that every theme would reset to the beginning, and my idea for the last episode of IWC, appears to be dead.

Instead, we get the first appearance of “Me” in over four months, seemingly unaffected by the chaos enveloping IWC in the meantime.

If I may say so myself, I would suggest that David Morgan-Mar would need to do a lot of lawyering to claim he hasn’t violated his original “someone dies!!!” strip. “No ghosts”? “No witty banter with the Head Death before returning”? Well, technically the Me that got killed didn’t become a ghost, and technically this isn’t the same Me that had “witty banter with the Head Death”…

Honestly, I’m not sure what to expect from IWC for the rest of the year, or the rest of its existence.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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Yes, my laptop is back in proper working order.

I was directed to the specific image, not the page itself, and I find it fascinating that there are lights popping up only in what could be called “civilized” areas. Not just localized in cities; almost exclusively in the US, Europe, and to a lesser extent, India, East Asia, and for whatever reason, the southeast coast of South America.

Da Blog Poll on the future of the RID is being extended through the end of June. Someone is going to tell me what to do with the RID if it’s the last thing I do.

I’d tweet this if I had a tweeter. Or maybe comment on OOTS.

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(From Darths and Droids. Click for full-sized old friend.)

Honestly, I don’t understand Sally at all anymore.

A couple of weeks ago she was dismissing not only Jar-Jar but the entire game as incredibly “childish”.

Now not only is she back in the game, but – despite still dismissing Jar-Jar as “stupid” – she’s going back into the same well of incredibly ridiculous characters.

Is she growing up, or isn’t she? And is she just now a device to invent everything ridiculous you can find in Star Wars, whether or not it makes sense for her to have a character from which to do so?

I wonder if the weightiness of the topic, the amount of research required, the stress of it all and all that is related to the lateness of the strip.

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The strip is finally up, and there’s a very good reason it’s so late: I’m just about done with a lengthy discourse that starts with this strip and will ultimately close out the first phase of the argument and carry on into Phase II. (Yes, I know it’s more than a little disturbing that the first phase took a month.)

To celebrate, I’m going to take a full week off from doing any of that sort of heady research and use the time for more productive pursuits, such as working on posts I’ve been putting off (expect at least one webcomic post to actually come along on Tuesday), then spend some time on another research project I anticipate being much simpler, before re-starting work on the Global Warming Series.

I actually think the remaining phases, despite being the more heady parts, could be a little easier for me to write, since they’re less philosophical, less foundational on their own, and could be a little less interconnected. (Famous last words…)

It’s not "swine flu" anymore.

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I want you to book it from this moment: if, in my entire lifetime (indeed all the way until the death of civilization), I see any potential pandemic referred to by a name that names them after an animal you can’t get it from in any way, no matter how much it may make sense in some other way, they should be whacked over the head for their idiocy and proof of the old saying about what happens when you don’t learn from history.

No more calling out the mainstream media for Favremania, mmmkay?

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The Jets released Brett Favre from their “reserve/retired” list yesterday, an auspicious move considering so far as I can tell players on the R/R list don’t count against roster or salary caps, but ordinarily a fairly routine move, at least for any player not named Brett Favre.

So naturally you’d expect plenty of “does this mean he’s thinking of coming back?” speculation from ESPN and the like, and you’d expect the blogosphere to do plenty of “there they go again, obsessing over Brett Favre” and thumbing their nose because they’re so above that…

…hold on, it appears the number 1 topic on SportsCenter’s “Blog Buzz” segment this morning was Favre’s release. Seems not even the blogosphere is immune to Favremania when a plane traveling between Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and back again sends them going “OMG OMG OMG IT ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH BRETT FAVRE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN ALL OF HATTIESBURG THAT EVER HAS TO TRAVEL OMG!!!!!11!!1!!!eleven!”

Why I don’t use Blogger’s on-page comment form

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In my experience, if you’re not logged in – and for whatever reason, no matter how recently you may have done so, on Blogger even, when you go to another blog, you never are – you have to hit “Post comment” and be told it didn’t go through (you’re logged in now), then hit “Post comment” again for it to go through.

So annoying.

(Note: I always use my Google/Blogger account, not anything else, not least of the reasons why being I don’t have much of anything else.)

Now that that’s over with…

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I’m not trying the trick I used last night to post the strip again. Actually I think I got Yet Another reason I need to leave Freehostia. For a while now, for whatever reason, I think they think I have a virus or something because a lot of the images I’ve submitted – images that were created on my desktop and only ever were on my USB drive and laptop en route to their servers – have had their permissions changed so that no one can “execute” them (not the same as “read”). Execute images. It might be something having to do with FTP, I don’t know, but using the trick I tried last night I first had the FTP connection crap out on me (either I hope IE8 fixed how Windows handles uploading to FTP or Freehostia needs to fix their FTP system) then I saw that the strip had been uploaded after all but it was no good, so I uploaded it to the file manager and it seemed to work okay but I find out today that the strip image was completely missing so I had to upload it AGAIN around 7 PM. As far as I’m concerned the strip was up so I’m plowing forward.

So after the past weekend’s expletive-laden rant let’s get into details. My ideal Plan A is to work on the web site and Da Blog and everything from home, but that hasn’t been an option, for whatever reason, for nearly if not over a year. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I go to my Dad’s workplace and mooch off an Internet connection that’s not even the workplace’s. The place itself is supposed to have a connection but that hasn’t worked since virtually the instant it was instituted. So earlier this month the place I normally mooch off of decided to secure their connection, but they’re fine with me mooching off them, which would be great if my laptop could get past the “detecting network type” stage without spitting out a “network doesn’t seem to exist” error despite the fact it’s staying on the list of networks the whole time. So now BOTH my Plan B and C, accessed from the same location, aren’t working, and while both are nominally working on the problem it’s at a glacial pace (and I don’t think it’s a good idea to only have one guy who knows the security code who’s not always working there if you intend for actual patrons to use the connection) and to varying extents I get a vibe from them that it’s my problem, forcing me to use my battery for Plans D and E, which for whatever reason tend to be pretty slow, perhaps slower than normal, at least for Plan D.

On the plus side, those annoying downstairs neighbors are finally gone, so if you move in directly downstairs from me and set up an unsecured Internet connection I can use fairly reliably I’ll give you a gazillion dollars. (Gazillion dollars to be paid in varying amounts at varying intervals over whatever period of time the payer deems adequate including never.) Or at the very least you can chip in your IT expertise at Dad’s workplace or the place next door and get at least one Internet connection working enough to be useful.