Sandsday

At some point down the line, I’ll go into more detail about this. Not right now though.

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Project Wonderful’s top 30 highest bidding sites are all webcomics. That’s essentially every site that’s going for more than 10 dollars a day, and all but one of the over-$9 bidders. This being the exception.

In fact, every one of the top 10 is either a “skyscraper” (like my sidebar ad) or a “leaderboard”. (Somehow Menange a 3 manages to get impressive bid results from a banner, when my banner comes nowhere near competing with my skyscraper even though the former is in a far better position.) That’s got me thinking about potentially changing my “premier” ad to a leaderboard.

I know the really popular sites can afford their own ad services, and that webcomics often need advertising more than other sites, and such, but… damn.

(A skyscraper ad may be coming to Sandsday by the end of the week, though I still need to figure out how I would go about having both a master site and subsites.)

I’ll admit it’s probably not the best ad I could have come up with. But it’s close. Suggest improvements in the comments.

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Editor’s Note: On the day this post goes up, we are exactly six months away from the transition to digital television in the United States, and the outreach effort has been, to put it simply, a fiasco. Even its successes have been failures because it has ended up spreading some inaccuracies. As such, I have taken it upon myself to create a DTV PSA designed to alleviate the misconceptions and spread as much information, good and bad, as possible, in a short, simple, concise form. I timed myself reading it and came out to about three minutes.

(An image appears of a grandfather clock.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to memorize a bunch of rules to figure out what the time was…

(An image appears of a modern digital alarm clock.)

Voiceover: …to simply being able to read the numbers off the clock?

(An image appears of someone surrounded by paper doing a lot of writing.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to do your finances by hand…

(An image appears of someone working on an Excel spreadsheet.)

Voiceover: …to having a computer doing all the calculations for you?

(An image appears of a newspaper hitting a doorstep.)

Voiceover: Remember when your parents only had a few choices for learning about what was going on in the outside world?

(A screenshot of Wikipedia slides in on top of the last image. Other screenshots from blogs, informational web sites, and the like slide in on top of it.)

Voiceover: Now there are literally dozens of options and more coming every day.

(A generic landscape appears.)

Voiceover: On February 17, 2009, TV will make that move, and it will change forever.

(An image fades in of a television broadcasting tower.)

Voiceover: On that day, all full-power television stations in the United States are required to broadcast exclusively in digital television.

(The image now fades to a television set showing one of those stock images used to show how bright, crisp and clear the image is. As the voiceover continues, it shows a NASCAR race and a mosaic of a wide variety of programming.)

Voiceover: It will bring (usually) better picture quality, better sound, and even entire channels added to the current landscape.

(Fade to a diagram of two broadcast towers, highly lit up, with rings radiating from them. The television set continues to flash images in the lower right.)

Voiceover: And it’s actually a very simple switch. Most TV stations are already broadcasting in digital at full strength alongside their existing analog signals; some have already stopped broadcasting in analog.

(A calendar showing the date February 17 appears. One of the towers stops radiating rings and its lights go out. The television set continues flashing images.)

Voiceover: On February 17, the remaining stations will simply shut off their analog signals and will broadcast exclusively in digital from then on. That’s it. Most viewers probably won’t notice the difference, assuming everything goes as planned, and won’t have to do anything.

(An HDTV appears with a NO symbol over it, fading into a chart showing HD -> DTV, and DTV with two arrows leading to HD and SD.)

Voiceover: You don’t need an HD set. HDTV implies DTV, but DTV does not imply HDTV.

(A new diagram appears. On the left side, the words “CABLE OR SATELLITE” and below it, “DON’T WORRY!” On the right side, on the same line as “CABLE OR SATELLITE”, read the words “ANTENNA TV”.)

Voiceover: If you subscribe to cable or satellite, you won’t need to do anything, even if you don’t have a converter box; you’ll get exactly what you get now and might not even notice that anything changed.

(A TV fades in over the diagram, showing the same mosaic of images shown earlier, just barely slower and not as clear.)

Voiceover: Your cable operator or satellite provider will handle everything for you, although you should keep in mind that your cable operator or satellite provider is not required to bring you all the new channels opened up by digital, and may condense the digital signal so you won’t get the clearest possible picture and sound.

(The diagram fades back into focus. On the “ANTENNA TV” side of the diagram, it is cut in half lengthwise. On the top half fades in an image of an HD set; on the bottom half, an old-fashioned SD set. Below the HD set fade in the words “DON’T WORRY!” The SD set zooms into focus when the voiceover starts “even if it’s still SD…”)

Voiceover: If you get your TV through an antenna, you still don’t need to do anything if your TV is an HDTV, and even if it’s still SD you may not need to do anything.

(Image of someone flipping through a TV manual and finding the SPECIFICATIONS page.)

Voiceover: Check the specifications of your TV; they should be in your TV’s manual or on the box it came in.

(A line from the SPECIFICATIONS page zooms in, with “TV standard” in the left column and “NTSC” or “ATSC” in the right column.)

Voiceover: If it says it uses the “ATSC” standard, you’re all set.

(The letters “NTSC” fade in in big white type as the rest of the screen goes dark.)

Voiceover: If it doesn’t, and it only uses the “NTSC” standard, you won’t need to get a new TV or antenna or anything.

(Image of someone setting a digital converter on top of his TV.)

Voiceover: All you need is a digital converter, which you can get at a discount with a coupon from the federal government.

(Diagram of a broadcasting tower slowly moving away from a television set. As it moves away, the image on the TV becomes pixelated and eventually goes dark. The antenna starts to grow in size, and as it does the image comes back pixelated and then clear.)

Voiceover: Note that although any antenna will work with both digital and analog signals, signals further away from where you live will require a more robust antenna, even if you receive the analog signal fine now.

(A camera, a broadcasting tower next to the camera, and a TV appear. The camera shows a bunch of images, and the number 2 is on top of the tower. The TV is off. The 2 slowly changes to 19. The TV turns on, clearly showing the number 2, and shows the same images as the camera.)

Voiceover: Also, although you won’t notice any changes in the channel numbers on your TV, many stations will be broadcasting from a different channel from their analog signals.

(“14-51” appears in white letters on a mostly black background. With each conjunction, the screen changes, first displaying a UHF-only antenna near “14-51”, then to “2-13” near a VHF-compatible antenna.)

Voiceover: Most of these will be in the UHF band and you can get them using a UHF-only antenna, but some stations will broadcast in VHF.

(Appropriate screenshots from the website appear.)

Voiceover: To find out if you need a more robust antenna and if you can get away with making it UHF-only, log on to DTVAnswers.com (or whatever the site of the organization producing the PSA is). There, you can also find out if there are any low-power stations near you that will not be transitioning to digital.

How low a number can the strip get?

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Buzzcomix recently relaunched and I’ve set up Sandsday for the new platform. I kind of suspect Sandsday was kicked off Buzzcomix for some reason in the past, but it’s back on now and I encourage you to vote for it.

I’ve installed new vote buttons for both webcomic ranking services showing Sandsday’s rank on each. Funnily enough, with my one vote Sandsday shot from being just outside Buzzcomix’ top five thousand to being just outside its top five hundred. 5000… 500. Huh.

Note that even with my vote, I did not have quite as much success climbing up TopWebComics. As such, I should note that because TopWebComics’ vote image does not scale the font size of the rank like Buzzcomix, if Sandsday is outside TWC’s top 1000, the vote image will not appear to show the correct rank. Fortunately, you can fix that by, well, voting for it if you like Sandsday, and I would think that with just one more vote Sandsday would hit the TWC top 1000, considering with my one vote it’s inside the top 1500.

Also, I’ve started to fall behind on almost every site I don’t subscribe to the RSS feed of (including Ctrl+Alt+Del and any strip I’m reading on a preliminary basis for the purposes of posting on it), for a variety of reasons, so I’m setting up an RSS feed for Sandsday… sort of. This uses the new function of the Buzzcomix Reader, which basically means you have to sign up for a Buzzcomix account and make Sandsday one of your Favs. And I’m not sure if it would push through to any RSS reader. At any rate, there’s a button for it on Sandsday, for the interested.

No ads yet for Sandsday. Still thinking about the best way to do it…

I’d be more optimistic about the concept if I knew what the heck was going on in the demonstration.

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(From Penny Arcade Bogey Golf. Click for full sized… whatever the hell this is.)

I got an e-mail telling me my Freehostia account was now working shortly after I posted with today’s strip, so I guess that was unnecessary. On to other things.

Penny Arcade, like Ctrl+Alt+Del, has no forum dedicated to its own strips, Websnark has been reduced to Eric Burns popping in once a month to spout off on whatever’s making the rounds in geek culture, Tangents is still a homeless bum, and I know of no other blog that comments on webcomics as up-to-the-minute as those two. So I have no way of knowing for certain if Friday’s news post is a joke or not. It probably is, but it’s nowhere near April.

All I know is if it isn’t, it really screws up my plans, because I had been planning on PA being one of the two posts I was planning to make early in the week to make up for having no webcomic post this week.

Even if it is, I’m only really going to have two strips to work off of, so I’m probably reviewing another webcomic blog for the second instead, reviewing PA next week, reviewing one other comic the week after that, and maybe posting a third OOTS post the week after that.

And that’s assuming I don’t get too sidetracked by other things, like Buzzcomix’ recent relaunch, about which more later…

Hey, everyone likes a good contest!

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Some of you may be reading Sandsday, and if you’re not, you should be. But regardless of if you are or aren’t, I’m giving you an opportunity at a fantastic level of reader participation.

It’s the first annual “Create-Your-Own-Sandsday” Contest! All you have to do is write an episode of Sandsday in script form. Have some way of telling the two characters apart, tell me what you plan to put in each panel (or even leave that up to me if you like), and you’re all set! You can even include that stem-less, larger type of dialogue if you like.

Submit your creations by August 31 at 11:59 PM PT by commenting on this post or e-mailing me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. The best submission will run in Sandsday on Labor Day, and you’ll get full credit in the strip itself.

After all, who doesn’t like winning contests?

PITY ME! PITY ME DAMMIT!

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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.

My indecision could be your gain!

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Doing something different with the strip this week. Today I’m starting a little experiment and I can’t decide whether to do it for only five days or for a full two weeks. I have four strips in the pipeline; I’m not doing a poll, but I do want to hear whether you want to see more of this or go back to video game stuff, or whatever your thoughts are. Leave a comment on this post (remember, Livejournal comments don’t get to me) or e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. Comments will be counted if they’re in by Thursday at 8 PM PT.

More Sandsday stuff later today.

Correction

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So I stayed up until after 3 AM just to try and get my computer to settle down enough to get my Truth Court demonstration up, a half hour after that to get the strip up, and a half hour after that to get this up.

I made an error in the strip that has nothing to do with the lack of sleep, because I made this strip back in February.

As I learned, well, I guess last night now (a guy just ran by apparently delivering newspapers and it’s not yet 4), the Opening Ceremonies do not start at 8:08:08 AM Chinese time.

They start at 8:08:08 PM Chinese time.

Which means I could have run today’s strip on 8/08/08, instead of the less pretty 8/07/08.

Oh well.

Some comments on my street signs, and other webby stuff

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A while back (in the Pre-Morgan-Mar-LiveJournal era) I mentioned Samuel Klein’s street blade gallery, and I e-mailed him about mine, and I never got an e-mail back and I never saw anything pop up on his street blade gallery tag, so I thought it had been ignored and that was that.

Well, today, on a lark, I decided to see if maybe he’d put something up without telling me, and lo and behold he had… but as it contained no Blogger tags (it did contain Technorati tags), I would never have found out by following an RSS feed without subscribing to his site’s general feed. And street signs are about the only aspect of his site I’m interested in.

(And it was only put up on Monday anyway.)

So. I looked into my site’s hit logs. 49 hits so far this month for my street sign gallery alone, 101 in June, 67 in May.

Wait… again, 49 of those hits are coming from the month in which the post was made. The street sign gallery more than doubled that the previous month alone. And I’m looking at a daily average of 408 hits for June (across all pages and including reloads) but only 136 for this month. That includes 1873 hits June 6.

This (scroll down to the comments) accounts for only 148 of the “referrers”, with all the higher ones being either direct hits or coming from the website itself, mostly the webcomic. Again, this is across all page views. So that helps explain the deluge for the web site.

But I last mentioned the street sign gallery on July 17, when I also mentioned Klein’s gallery, and before that it had been ages since I brought it up. So where did 101 hits for the street sign gallery, of all things, come from? The only thing I can think of is that a lot of my referrals come from Google Image Search, and they can’t all be Sandsday.

But it also got me thinking about something else. Subtract any referrers that begin with “morganwick.freehostia.com”, and in July so far, I have a total of 749 hits to my web site, doubtless some of them referring to images, and 15 of them coming from variants of morganwick.blogspot.com. And some of them are probably me. By contrast, I have about 370 hits to Da Blog in the last month and about 640 page views. That’s an average of 25 a day to the web site and 21 page views on Da Blog, with half a hit a day coming from Da Blog to the web site.

It’s not exactly the most popular of sites, but I am thinking of making some changes to capitalize on what little popularity I have. Stay tuned.

(Oh, and after my e-mail contained a lengthy explanation of several signs for someone unfamiliar with Seattle, I find out Mr. Klein had seen many of the signs I had before, just had never taken any pictures of them.)