Yes, it's true -- aside from setting out on my own, today I also turn 36.

Happy Fourth of July to all who celebrate it. Have a good Wednesday to everyone else.

This story made me laugh a lot.

When I get a good head of steam going on a particular storyline I often find it difficult to switch gears and head off into another direction after the story is wrapped up. For the last two weeks or thereabouts I was having an awful lot of fun with the Job Interview storyline, but on Friday I decided that it was time to wrap it up (for the moment) and move on.

So on Friday I wrapped it up.

On Saturday I tried to think of a new storyline or one-off gag.

On Sunday I tried to think of a new storyline or one-off gag.

On Monday morning I tried to think of a new storyline or one-off gag.

On Monday afternoon I tried to think of a new storyline or one-off gag.

In other words, after going full-tilt on a storyline that had given me quite a bit to work with, I found myself unable to come up with anything else. So Monday was, I'm sad to say, an empty space, filled with nothing but the sound of crickets chirping.

I have two dogs: Pandora, a mix between a Labrador and something else (possibly a Chou), and Cheyenne, an Alaskan Husky. This is Cheyenne:

Cheyenne is a very, very, very bad dog.

This is a Treo 680:

A Treo 680 is a smartphone that is, in my opinion, a nearly perfect fusion of phone and PDA. It works almost exactly the way I want a smartphone to work. I'd like it more if it were a little bigger (to incorporate a slightly larger screen, keyboard, and battery) but all in all I'm quite happy with it.

This is a picture of a Treo 680 after Cheyenne decides it is a toy:

From the front it doesn't actually look so bad -- it's scratched up, the screen has bite marks on it (which makes it difficult to use the stylus, by the way) but it's still mostly intact. This changes as soon as you flip it over on its back:

The top of the Treo has been peeled open. Apparently Cheyenne thought there was something REALLY GOOD inside:

It still works, after a fashion. It still turns on. It's still quite functional as a PDA. However, the introduction of Husky saliva and teeth to the Treo's internal workings has rendered the phone mostly useless -- I get just enough reception for the phone to tell me someone is trying to call, and then I loose reception when I try to answer.

AT&T has informed me that this kind of damage is not covered under the phone's warranty. One of their out-of-warrantly replacement service representatives has informed me that replacing the phone will cost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS MORE THAN I PAID FOR IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. For an extra fifty dollars over the "replacement price" I could buy an unlocked version of the phone directly from Palm that I could use with ANY PHONE COMPANY I CHOOSE.

Damn expensive dog...

You are a very bad dog, Cheyenne. Bad, bad, bad, bad dog.

For some reason my Konqueror browser has decided I've done something wrong with my front page:

Does anyone know why? This is only on the front page -- all other pages on the site render fine. The front page looks OK in Firefox, Opera, even -- dare I say it -- IE6.

I don't particularlly think of myself as a "proper" webcartoonist. I come from the Punk Rock School of Doing Anything: experience is less important than enthusiasm, and finesse is unnecessary when brute force and loud noise will do just as well. That said, even though I don't seek artistic perfection in myself I do admire it in others and I'm interested when people talk about they things they do to get better.

Scott Kurtz (PvP), Kris Straub (Starslip Crisis), Brad Guigar (Evil Inc) and Dave Kellett (Sheldon) are all cartoonists who are serious about cartooning. They've started a podcast called Webcomics Weekly where they talk about problems and give cartooning tips to aspiring webcartoonists. After listening to their first episode I learned that there is no way any of these guys are regular readers here -- I am guilty of every single one of the "webcomic pet peeves" they discuss during the program. :) I compound my transgressions in Episode 2, and dig myself even deeper in Ep3.

That's beside the point, though... the four of them have some really interesting things to say about what people can do to make webcomics work. Some of it is general (i.e., don't worry about how to set up your internet store when you only have three episodes in your archives) and some of it is very specific (i.e., suggestions on how to handle the flow of dialog in a panel, or perspective changes from one panel to the next, or the advantages of hand-lettering vs. computer fonts.

The recording is pretty clear (except for Dave Kellet's line, which seems perennially cursed by connection problems) and it's engaging listening. All four are good cartoonists with useful and interesting things to say.

Not that it'll do me a lick of good. Drawing. Pfah.

Via Slashdot.

MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video

My brain... it won't stop bleeding...

...damn you Slashdot, you did this to me.

As chronicled elsewhere on this site, my Alaskan Husky Cheyenne destroyed my beloved Palm Treo 680 smartphone to the point where it is no longer usable as a phone, period. I've been doing without since then and I have an impressive amount of rollover minutes to show for it.

But now we've decided it will be more economical for us if we drop our land-line and use cellphones exclusively, so God help me, I need to buy a cell phone. And it looks like it's going to hurt my wallet something fierce.

Cell phones aren't cheap. You can get a cell phone for free when you sign up for a service plan, but that's because cellular companies are trying to suck you in to their ridiculously overpriced world. When you already have a service plan with them, they're not interested in giving you a discount on anything. You have to pay full price.

So I went into the AT&T store wondering how much it was going to hurt. The answer: the cheapest phone they had in the store was $220.

The cheapest. The little phone with no camera that looked like it would fall to pieces after being opened three times. $220.

"But," the guy behind the counter said, "for only $130 more you can buy an iPhone."

The cost of replacing my Treo? A little under $500 when you factor in tax.

"The iPhone would cheaper," the salesman said helpfully. I think they get bonuses for every iPhone they sell.

I didn't buy anything, but I'm going to have too pretty soon. Argh, that damn dog...

In only two days it will be time, once again, for National Novel Writing Month. On November 1 hordes of enthusiastic and at least partially-crazed participants will be attempting to churn out 50,000 words in a single month.

I've been doing this since 2003 (though I've only won twice -- once in 2003, and once in 2006) and I plan to do it again this year, so I thought I should post something about it here. This year is going to be kind of tricky -- I'm not really in a position to devote a great deal of time to it at this point, and I don't have any kind of grand project in mind, so it looks like I'm in more danger than ever of this project fizzling halfway through the month. But I'm going to try to fit it in and see how it all shakes out.

I probably won't be doing a running NaNoWriMo storyline like I did last year, but I'll try to post something about it from time to time...