Now, we must be patient. The site is up in preview mode. The first strip won't be posted until Monday, Jan 3rd. But, to appease all of our rabid fans, I have included something special. All 70+ strips I drew for Fuzzy Comix are archived out there as a feature. It might take a second for those strips to load five at a time for those of you still on dial-up, but I hope you enjoy them none the less.
I'm pretty excited about this. I have just about enough strips drawn to get me through April Fools day. I have been over flowing with ideas. The site is clean and simple, I think I did a decent job on it. I have ads all over the place! It's a good start and I think it will only get better - ya know, once there are strips out there and stuff!
And, before I catch shit, yes, there's a FAQ out there filled with questions no one has ever asked. Yes, I'm wishful FAQing. Just be nice - it's not hurting anyone. BTW, there's something in the FAQ for certain members of our readership (Laura! Hint!!)
Go check it out already and tell me what you think. Don't be shy, not that any of you ever are ...
The following started out as a reply to this comment on the last post;
Stereotypes exist for a reason. The further from the coasts and the further from the large cities you get, the more the population shifts toward the right. Large cities tend to be more diverse and tend to harbor more left wingers. It's a generalization, but it's an acurate one. Is everyone like this? No. I don't think most people would say "if you live in the burbs, you must be a christian fundamentalist." But, I think a lot of people would agree that the average fat, happy, christian, ugly American lives in middle America in a suburban or rural location. I live in a blue state, but it's just barely blue. Not everybody here is a liberal - do you remember the "Battle of Seattle?" But, for the most part, Cupie and I and the majority of Seattle are looney libs. Go east of the Seattle/Tacoma/I5 corridor, get a lot more red.
Laura, the only time we think you are an ignoramus is when you take something not aimed at you and make it personal. But, power to you, my strong, blue sister. Fight the power! Better Dead than Red!
BTW, you are certainly right on the principals this country was founded on. Our fore-fathers, the framers of our Constitution were thrown out of every decent country for their looney beliefs, or were sent to prison here. Now, we want to do the same to everyone else. Sad!
Typical for me, I overdid it and decided to just turn it into a post.
Actually stereotyping is a survival tool. We touch one hot stove, or even hear that hot stoves burn, and we assume that all hot stoves will burn us. Replace hot stove and burn with a racial, religious or ethnic grouping and some trait and you have the exact same dynamic.
The thing is, hot stoves being a hazard is also intellectually sound and supported by the laws of science. The difference between a useful survival tool and civilization destroying stupidity is the application or not or that other survival tool, reason. We have the advantage of being able to balance out both cold reason and animal survival instincts. My dog freaks every time she hears the word "fuck". She can't reason that "fuck" is not always used in anger. Neither can she reason whether or not she is actually the target of the expletive. On the other hand, if all we had was reason and no assumptions, we would start at zero in every situation. We wouldn't get very far very fast if we had to reason through getting out of bed in the morning. And when bullets are flying, reason might not lead us to conclude that ducking might be a good plan until too late. If fact, without assumptions about the nature of flying bullets, we would not be able to begin to reason about a reaction until we have a bullet hole or two in us.
It seems the animal instinct is plenty strong on its own and requires little support. Reason, however, is under constant assault. I once read a book that argued that the European "dark ages" were in fact the enlightenment because the Christian bible was almost universally taken literally. What we generally call the elightenment was the beginning of the true dark ages because it was the snuffing out of the light of Christianity by Demon Reason.
It is that sort of religiosity led the well off scion of one of the wealthiest families in country to become one of the most hated people in the world, to cause the deaths of thousands who never did him harm. There is no rationality, just the unquestioned - unquestionable - truth he reads in his holy book.
But enough about Shrub...
In this country there are people who want nothing taught in the schools that contradicts the Christian bible. That is somewhat hilarious given how much the Christian bible contradicts itself. Elsewhere in this world blind dictatorships driven by religion and ideology regularly crush people beneath the weight of official beliefs. And viewing the historical record and the current results of such governments we seems keen on recreating it here - to protect us from non-believers, to protect us from "them".
I saw a map a couple of weeks ago that broke down the partisan results of the last election by county. On that map, we saw that blue states weren't all that blue, red states not so red. Of course, there were blue people in the red counties and red people in the blue counties. And there were blue people who voted red and red people who voted blue for their own reasons. Or lack of reason.
It comes down to those who want to think and know versus those who want to believe. At this point in history, other differences are of nowhere near the same importance.
"Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide poll."
Damn Straight! We should restrict the civil liberties of anyone who shares religous or ethnic identification with anyone who has perpatrated a terrorist act on US soil.
"'This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill or destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation,' he said.
'Whether we should survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt we shall survive al-Qaida. The Spanish people have not said that what happened in Madrid, hideous crime as it was, threatened the life of the nation. Their legendary pride would not allow it."
Can you imagine any "leader" in Washington saying anything vaguely resembling this?
Independent invention have it's low points. I'm sure I've mentioned before that I seem to be running on a string of ideas for product and other things that other people get to market at just about the time I think of them. It might have something to do with the fact that there are millions (even billions) of people out there who are thinking everyday. My silly ego has trouble accepting that.
This idea, however, just isn't that big of a deal. I've been thinking about web comics a lot recently as I am about to post mine. (Sixty one strips! Woo Hoo!) It occurred to me that the terminology we strippers deal with could use a little pruning.
What am I talking about? Well, I am about to set up a site for an online comic strip or a web comic. These words are kinda bulky. Shouldn't we have a term or a bit of jargon to shorten this up? I mean, right now you are reading an online journal or a web log - these are called blogs. The term blog has gotten used so much that most dictionaries are now including it - it's a legit word.
So, as I showered Sunday, I came to a bit of a thought. "Blog" is merely a contraction of "Web Log" - why not contract "Web Comic" into "Womic?" I'd love to be the guy that came up with a new computer term. I mean, someone out there came up with "blog" - right? Max nearly coined the term "turkey bacon" - he was beat out by only one person we are aware of. So, great, womic!
I went out today and discovered, while not very well known, "womic" has been around since at least 2002. I'm not the first. It's not like the term is all that hard to come to - "blog" uses the last letter of the first word of the contraction - this is a little brainier than my contraction. But, "bomic" just sounds like shit!
Either way, I think I'm going to start using the term more often. You'll see it bounced around here plenty from now on. You have been warned.
I'm sure that I have previously mentioned that I have been working on a web comic strip for quite sometime now. My intention is to launch the darned thing on January 1st. As it stands, I have 50 finished strips and about ten more in the works. I plan to put up the strip five days a week.
The strip is all photos of some cheap action figures and other toys that I've found at outlet and dollar stores. The story line chronicles the adventures of a guy who has adventures and does stuff - sure, it doesn't sound very interesting, but the laughs generated by my crappy photography will be huge!
Okay, fine, I just don't want to give anything away. You all will get a chance to read it soon enough. I will say that those of us that grew up in the 80's watching cartoons and buying action figures might get more laughs than others. You all are my target audience.
My biggest worry in doing this comic is just staying with it. You all know how bad I am about updating this site. And, as I said in my last entry, my job has just gotten more and more intense as I've gone along. I'm sure I mentioned before that I used to draw a different web comic, but I stopped doing that comic due to the stress of my previous job and the demands of this job when I got it. I have grown to just hate doing anything half-way. I want to make a go of this comic, make it something to be proud of. I'm not even happy that I'm only doing the strip five days a week, all the best strips do seven a week. I just don't have the time. It's taken me a year to get the strips I have.
It sounds stupid, even to me, to start a web comic with 50 strips that took a year to write and hope to be able to keep going. But, those strips put me out to just about three months from now. In the last three or so months, I've gotten pretty good at my process. My hope is that I can keep up and maybe even increase my production as I go along. I guess we'll see. I could end up with a lot of missed strips very quickly. The writing doesn't take a lot of work, the photography doesn't take a lot of work, the Photoshop work is pretty simple, it's when you combine all of that time that it suddenly adds up.
In the end, I think this project is going to be a load of fun and I can't wait to put up the site. That's the great thing about this project, it's taken me a year to get here, and I've dropped the project twice, but I just keep coming back to it. I get easily excited about it and want to keep working on it. And when I am working on it, I spend half the time laughing myself silly. I also have an excuse to be a thirty year old man buying and playing with toys! I'm worried about failure, but my successes with it make me simply giddy.
I'll update as soon as there is more to say. The domain will get purchased sometime next week. Wish me luck.
Jericho: From Phoenix Arizona all the way to Tacoma
Actually, it was beyond Tacoma, to Seatac, and that was actually my starting point, but no one has written any songs about Seatac, not that there is much there to write about, just the airport and whatever the Green River Killer left behind, but I digress.
I want to apologize for not putting up a post sooner, but I'm not gonna. I was busy and it's not like you people are paying for this stuff, huh? I mean, if you were paying, we would have gone broke a long time ago because we suck at updating. But, again, I digress.
Like I said, I've been pretty busy. I had a week long trip to Phoenix. We have an office down there now, we merged with them over the summer. I got to go down and install a new voicemail system for them. It was okay. The trip was fine and easy. The work wasn't hard and frankly the system came up with only a few minor coughs and pains - nearly painless when compared to some other systems I've worked with recently (more to come on that.)
What stunk about the whole trip is the fact that my job has become a real pain in my tush. This isn't hard work, and I actually like a good portion of the stuff I do, much to my own shock. My immediate co-workers and boss are all a bunch of control freaks. But, so am I. They're good people and being a control freak I understand them. We have a good thing going on. It's the people in the rest of the department.
My department (Telecom) is a portion of the larger department of Systems. The people at the head of the Systems department have steadily gotten more and more involved in Telecom's affairs as our devices have begun to depend more and more on the IT network. In tandem to this process, the hierarchy of Systems has become more and more filled with people who treat us like children and act as if they have not a social skill in their possession. I realize these are people who talk to their computers more than they talk to their friends, but, still ... I feel like I work with computers all day, play with them a good portion of my time off, yet I still manage to treat others like people. Why can't they?
This job started off demanding and has gotten more and more demanding as the last four years have gone by. In the last three months, those demands have nearly doubled and there doesn't look to be anything slowing these demands down for the next three or so months. I don't know how much more I can take. The only reason I haven't walked away from this job is the fact that if I go out and find another job, I will be starting all over again and I will be right back where I am now three or four years from now. I just can't do this again.
So, in essence, I'm stuck, trapped. I have no alternatives. Joy.
Luckily, we have gotten over one of the larger hurdles. After I got back from Phoenix, I got to work on the Seattle upgrade ... for the third time! I think this will illustrate just what I'm talking about. When they installed the voicemail system here in Seattle four years ago, it was instantly under ported. In other words, we simply did not have enough ports to handle all of our incoming calls. The system was slow, futzy and not satisfying. In that four years, we have asked to update the system as often as it came up. Finally, we got our approval. It turns out that Microsoft has end-of-lifed WinNT, it will die on Dec. 31st, so we had to replace it. The fact that the box is a 500 Mhz processor with 250 MB of memory, it supports half of the firm with a mission critical application, and wouldn't qualify to be used as a desk top didn't seem to bother any one - *sigh*
I went to my vendor, whom I have worked with for quite some time. We started this process in, like, May or June. We decided to order an HP server through our vendor. Telecom decided on HP because Systems uses only HP. Our vendor doesn't deal in HP, so this was a special order. We looked together online and picked out a server. We had this server originally delivered to the vendor. Systems then decided that they wanted the server before our vendor. We got the shipping changed and sent here. So, in mid-October, after all of that hassle, the server arrives. It sits next to my desk. And it sits there and sits there! A thirty thousand dollar server that Systems just HAD TO HAVE first, just sitting next to my desk. Finally, the Wednesday before the Saturday install, they come get it to get to work on it. They open the box and discover a problem.
My voicemail system has to be connected to the phone system, called a PBX and to the computer network, the LAN. To interface with the PBX, we use cards that fit into PCI slots in the server. To connect to the LAN, you need a LAN port. We need six cards for all of our ports, so we ordered a server with six slots. Almost every computer built today has a built-in 10/100 Ethernet LAN port. It's something like belly buttons, kids come with one whether they need it or not. Except this one. We managed to order THE ONLY server HP makes without a built-in LAN port. But, HP knew that we needed access to the LAN, so they shoved a LAN card (called a NIC) into one of the six slots. Now, I only have five slots and I need six. So, instead of my vendor getting this server, discovering the problem and fixing the problem WEEKS before the install, I had to delay the install just a few days in advance, after it had already been announced. Further, HP didn't want the server back. We had held it for too long. They wanted to charge us a $2k restock fee. To say the least I was furious. To add to this, the Systems person responsible for most of this tried to blame my vendor for ordering the wrong server! Oh, but he'll soon get egg on his face, too.
So, we get the Systems department to order a server, mainly the puke who wanted to blame my vendor above. I mean, they couldn't fuck it up nearly as much as I did, right? The server arrives and it, too, sits by my desk. Now, I have two servers, $60k sitting at my desk. Finally, they come to grab the new one. They do their deal on it. Meanwhile, Systems has decided that it wasn't happy with how things came out last time, so they want me to put together a task list and assign those tasks out to the people that need to do them. Fine. The list is generated, tasks are assigned and the date for install shows up - my birthday. I got to spend my whole birthday at work. Double joy.
We banged on this brand new, jet fighter of a server all day, and for the next two days for that matter. Basically, the server could not bring all six of the cards up at the same time. We tried every permutation and fix and patch we could find. Finally, we heard from the manufacturer that another vendor on the east coast was having a similar issue with an HP server. We think (think!) that the PCIx slots are not stepping down enough for the older PCI technology used on the cards. Silly us, we bought what we needed instead of what HP wanted us to use. In the end, I wasted my birthday and still didn't have a working voicemail system upgrade - back to the old Compaq box!
Systems now decides that something must be wrong with my project management skills since they didn't do half the tasks I assigned to them and the HP server sucked. So, we had a much larger design meeting ... meetings actually. My task list now looks like instructions for disarming a nuclear bomb. It's completely silly. I went to Phoenix, with the first server we bought for Seattle (our Chicago office wants the second one, we'll see). They only needed two cards down there, so the LAN card sucking up a slot didn't hurt anything.
While down there, one of the social-skill lacking big wigs in Systems asks for a teleconference. I try to arrange this with my busy schedule and all the other people's busy schedules. I warn the Systems person that the meeting will be late, then I send another note with the time I arranged. I immediately get a flame email - the email yelled at me for a whole lot of really dumb stuff, but it mostly yelled at me for not reading the last email this person sent. Funny, I didn't get any email, I'm used to this person not sending me replies to my mail. None of us are important enough, apparently. I informed this person of this fact. He included my boss in his mail, so I included him right back. My boss writes back just how sorry he is and that he will work to see that I'm not treated like this again. A few minutes later, the Systems person sends a note saying that no, the email didn't go through for some reason (Systems has been working with email recently, no shocker to me) and that he was sorry for flaming me. His bad!
However, when I returned to Seattle, this pattern continued. On the Monday and Tuesday after Thanksgiving, I got yelled at by different people in the Systems department. One apologized, the other one has probably never apologized for any action they have taken. On Wednesday I commented to Steph that it was a good day, no one in Systems had yelled at me.
My vendor delivered one of the servers they typically sell. We installed it and other than a few minor glitches, it was up by 7 PM on Saturday. If I had not had to deal with Systems, I could have done Seattle, Phoenix and our three other offices that won't get touched until next year, before the end of November. To say that I am tired of my job and pissed at the people here is an understatement.
Anyone looking for a pissed off voicemail admin? I'm not cheap but I'm good!
As to my diet and all of that, well, I haven't given up. When I'm in install mode I rarely eat. But, if food is at hand, you take what you can when you can. While I was in Phoenix, I tried to stay good. But, room service only had one decent low-carb dish. "This is room 517, I want the steak, but hold the potato, the rice, the high carb veggies. I don't want the dinner roll, keep the noodle filled soup, and hold the little bottle of catsup and steak sauce. Yes, just the steak. Yeah, I'm the same freak that ordered this last night." The third time I ordered from room service, that would be the fourth night in the room, I just didn't eat the third night, I decided to go with double fries and a big slice of chocolate cake. Ya know, I think my order arrived faster.
From then on, I ate what I ate. Whenever the group went to lunch, there was always a sandwich. I tried, but I failed. On Sunday, after the install was done and all was well in the world, I just had to get out. I picked a direction and went walking. I passed office buildings, a hospital, more office buildings. About six blocks from the hotel I found a KFC. I grabbed a bucket and went back to my room - so much for tourism in Phoenix.
Coming back to Seattle on my carb high, I ran directly into Thanksgiving. Steph has been doing much better on this diet recently than I have. However, since I had already pooched this deal, she decided that potatoes and dressing would be served at our little private feast. That's right, four tiny spuds were mashed with butter and sour cream and stuffing made of low-carb bread completed the meal. Steph needs a text book on how to be a cheater - I thought I had taught her better.
On Saturday after Turkeygiving, I saw doughnuts. I wanted doughnuts. So, we bought and consumed most of two dozen. I'm sure I did more than she, but she did her share.
Since then, we are back on the diet. I have gone the other way - I got sick two days ago and I haven't been eating much at all. I'm pretty sure my ailment is more about stress than a stomach bug, but there it is. I'm sure after the first of the year all thoughts of cheating will be behind me - we'll see.
