So she is paying attention!
Yearly Archives: 2006
Time to sink or graduate
Picked this one up off of Fark, about students who can’t graduate until they prove they can swim 4 lengths of the pool, and I have to say I’m amazed.
Granted, I was raised by a man who spent four years in the Coast Guard, and who quickly taught me that learning to swim was critical to safety.
Despite a plethora of lessons when I was a kid, I also didn’t learn to swim myself until I was about 8 and my parents put a pool in the back yard. (Motivator!) I didn’t learn how to dive until I was about 13 and I’m not sure I could swim properly for four lengths myself.
But there are so many situations where knowing how to swim is critical here in the States. Too many pools, ponds, oceans, boats, etc.
If you don’t know how to swim, I urge you to learn how — especially if you plan to have kids of your own — you don’t want to be the helpless person standing on the shore while someone you love is in trouble.
And I applaud MIT and other universities for maintaining this graduation requirement.
See, this is how things get out of control.
So I have a new teeshirt idea, and it’s about 2/3 of the way finished. But I don’t like any of the fonts that I have with the teeshirt. So instead of settling on any of those fonts, I go font hunting.
Two hours later, I still haven’t found a font I like that can be used for commercial purposes. So I decide I want to make a font.
But just finding the right software to do that has been a trick, and now I’m downloading a demo for software that I don’t know how to use, which has already said it’s going to mark up some of the characters because it’s a demo. Whee!
I should be drawing comics right now. arrgh.
A bit of a procrastinator, this one.
OCD 2006 update and soon sleep
So, it’s 2 AM and I’ve been monitoring the Online Comics Day spider (which checks the fidelity of links and linkbacks) for the Online Comics Day hub since about 9:00, taking over for Aric, who’d monitored it prior to that.
Midnight EDT resulted in a whole bunch of comics updating (ah, chron jobs) and it took a while for the spider to churn through, so that by the time everything updated and everyone was notified, it was time to run the spider again. Whee.
1 AM (when I originally planned to go to bed) resulted in almost as large an update, plus by then the comic checking code borked the status of 3 comics and I had to manually log into the database to fix ’em. Oh yeah, that’s a lot of fun, by the way. I’m pretty good with mysql through phpMyAdmin, but I’d never used a pure command-line to update it before. Honestly, I think it was actually easier than phpMyAdmin for the small changes I was making. Then again, it’s 2 AM, I might just be delerious.
Anywho, by the time I got THAT straightened out it was almost 2, so I figured I’d run the spider one more time before I go to bed. Strangely, no updates. I guess nobody in Mountain time decided to run a midnight update.
The comic creators that I’ve spoken to via email have been friendly and helpful for the most part and really, despite the late hour and the crash-course in database-thwacking, this has been a lot of fun.
The chron job to check links that we’d hoped to have running for the spider doesn’t appear to be – we’re doing manual kickoffs and then verifying the results – so the site will be quiet until Aric hits it again in the morning. We’re up to around 40 active sites and a handful more that are choking the spider. (No, that’s not a euphamism.) Not bad for an event that almost wasn’t last year.
Online Comics Day 2006!
The art in panel 1 is definitely more my usual style than the art in panel 4, but I wanted to do something special for Online Comics Day, which is technically tomorrow, but which starts at 7pm (here – midnight GMT) on the official website.
Celebrate Online Comics Day on May 5, 2006 by saying thank you to your favorite comic authors — and by finding new comics to enjoy!