Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

OCD 2006 update and soon sleep

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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.

Gather around for today’s life lesson.

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Last Thanksgiving I got it into my head that I wanted a fresh turkey, so we bought Bob. But we also had a coupon for a free turkey from the supermarket, and free food is free food, so we also picked up Ralph, a beautiful 16 lb Butterball frozen turkey, and threw him in the freezer.

Ralph has been monopolizing the freezer ever since, so last weekend after playing post-food-shopping-Tetris, I declared that Ralph’s time had come, and we stuck him in the fridge to defrost.

Ralph is currently roasting in my oven. Mmmmmm. I’m having turkey sandwiches all week :)

Which means I have about an hour to clean the whole house, because my sister, and Mike and Steen and the baby, are all coming over to dispose of Ralph.

Which means I’m really regretting that while trying to move the cactus a few minutes ago I dropped it.

Today’s life lesson: never try to catch a falling cactus.

Online Comics Day 2006 Is Coming!

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You might remember that last year we celebrated this esteemed holiday, but there were a few bumps in the road when it came to the official website.

Well, I’ve spent the past few days working with Aric Campling of H.O.S.E.R.S to ressurect the Online Comics Day website. I’m really thrilled that Aric and David and Howard and all the others involved let me participate – and I’m thrilled that we get to continue the tradition. Registration could open as early as tomorrow, so if you are a comic creator (or know one) please stop on by!

Now I just need to draw my comic for the event. Heh, how silly would that be, me not having a comic for it?