Anyone who is a fan of the Doctor Who BBC Television Series needs to take a look at Rich's ComixBlog. Rich has been writing a truly jaw-droppingly good fanfic comic featuring all ten incarnations of the Doctor since March 10, 2007. I can't begin to tell you how good it is. He's managed to do justice to every version of the Doctor I've seen on TV (I've seen a little of Doctor #2, a fair number of Doctors #3-6, a few of #7, all of #9 and #10 that have been made available in the US to date), both in the way they're drawn and in the way they're characterized. I'm especially fond of the day he's been writing Doctor #6 (the version played by Colin Baker -- I always felt like that version was under-appreciated during its run).

Anyway, I can't recommend it enough. It starts here and is still ongoing.

It's definitely worth a read.

The move from New Orleans back to Monroe went pretty well. My only complaint was that what should have been a minor cold turned into a minor cold plus a slight upper respiratory infection, which means I'll be taking antibiotics for the rest of the week and using a prescription nasal spray that cost me 40 dollars. 40 dollars! I love the US health care system.

Anyway, updates should return to their normal schedule.

I don't usually talk about webcomics. I've been drawn into "web comics drama" in the past, usually when I was on Keenspot and someone was slagging Keenspot over some issue I considered terminally stupid, but by and large I don't decide "today I'm going to talk about webcomics" and post webcomic-derived screeds on my website.

Today I break from that non-tradition by talking about webcomics on Fleen. Now that I can see it in print I wish I'd edited it a little better, but since it started out as an off-the-cuff email I think it works well enough.

Updated: I've changed the category of this post because apparently setting it to "Miscellaneous" caused it to break the RSS feed. I hadn't actually intended this to be included in the RSS feed, but since it seems to have gone in anyway I guess I need to make sure the feed doesn't break.

Slashdot has a story about how Websiteoptimization.com is reporting that web page sizes have trippled in size between 2003 and 2008.

Here is what they're reporting:

2003 sizes: 93.7K

2008 sizes: 312K

Out of curiosity I used their site analyzer to see how Ubersoft.net measured up:

375K

... that's not good.

Still no comic today (but look back here tomorrow) but I did want to announce that all comics on this site have now been completely transcribed, and the site has been re-indexed. That means the comics are now searchable.

This was a huge undertaking and once again I want to thank all you readers who helped.

My contract in New Orleans is coming to an end and I'm doing a lot of things related to that: tying up loose ends at work, cleaning the apartment, arranging to have utilities turned off, packing, etc. To that end the webcomics are probably going to be shuffled down the list of priorities until that's done.

I still plan to update, I'm just saying it may be hit-or-miss.

Everything should return to normal in May.

My taxes are all taken care of, though I'm still feeling the sting (because renovations to our house and our move last year required that I withdraw from my IRA we were hit with Capital Gains like nobodies business).

Here's hoping those of you going through the most wonderful time of the year (for the Federal Government, at any rate) come out better than that.

I'm happy to report that 89% of the Help Desk archives have been transcribed.

This means there are only 108 comics left to go! There is a block of 100 comics in 2005, starting here:

http://ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2005/01/post-holiday-gaming

and ending here:

http://ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2005/06/imperfect-analogy-continued

And then there are around 7 comics on the tail end of the archives, starting here:

http://ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2008/03/substandard-standardization

Once those are all filled in I'll have to re-index the site (the scripts that update the search engine information don't recognized back-dated material), and then every comic on the site will be searchable.

Thanks once again to those of you who have been helping with the transcripts.

Tomorrow (Saturday, April 5) there will be a new Help Desk and a new Kernel Panic to make up for the missed days this week.

Today is Help Desk's 12th birthday. 12 years ago today, Trevor Smith published the first Help Desk comic in the third issue (I think it was the third issue) of OS/2 e-Zine!, a scrappy little online publication for the not-yet-abandonded-by-IBM OS/2 operating system. OS/2 e-Zine! is now, sadly, no longer in publication... but Help Desk continues its Quixotic windmill-tilt against the computer industry.

Also, I just realized I have been webcomicking for a third of my life. That's a pretty big chunk of my memory devoted to crudely-drawn clipart and dry one-liners. No wonder I can never find my keys...

Update: Help Desk first appeared in the sixth issue (April 1996), though it started appearing in its own archives area at the end of March... so the archives were published first. :)