by Brian Gott
News Archives
April-June, 2004
May 1, 2004
CONFIDENTIAL TO MY FORMER EMPLOYERS
On this second anniversary of the untimely demise of my IT career, I'd like to take a moment and say hello to the so-called "company" that (to borrow from Scott Adams) masqueraded as my employer from 1999 to 2002, while sucking the life-force out of my body. (Then they wondered why morale was so bad among their programmers...)
This is the company that watched two out of three programmers quit in disgust within a few months of each other, and who subsequently dealt with their IT morale problem by firing the one remaining programmer before he could follow suit!
Confidential to the Undisputed Master of Time and Space Who Was Not My Boss But Still Overrode Anything I Was Doing: Look, I'm doing stuff that's not for you! And I don't care if you're "getting some error!" I ain't dropping everything to solve your problems for you!
< /rant >
May 3, 2004
MORE LINKS!
I don't so much sit down and update my links page as add a little to it at a time. I've added new links to the Active Web Comics section, moved a few things there from the Inactive Web Comics section that had become active again, and I'm pretty sure there have been new or restored items under "Random Bits and Things" since I last posted it.
Take a gander.
May 18, 2004
HORSE RACING -- IT'S A FUNNY OLD GAME
So I saw the tail end of this year's Preakness last weekend while checking to see if there was going to be a network newscast. I found it amusing that one of the sponsors was Goodyear Tire! I'm not sure about the logic of a tire company sponsoring a horse race . . .
For that matter, I've long wondered where racehorses' names come from. This year the big winner was "Smarty Jones." Last year all the buzz was about "Funny Cide." I'm old enough to remember hearing about a horse called "Spend-A-Buck." Just once I'd like to see a racehorse named "Bob" or something.
(Then there was the guy who bet on a horse named "Perfect Gentleman." The horse reached the finish line first, stopped and said, "After you!" But seriously . . . )
NON-SYNDICATION UPDATE
Over the course of this year, I've sent submission packages to eight newspaper syndicates. For my efforts I've received four polite form rejection letters, one notice that the Washington Post Writers Group is not currently accepting submissions, and one non-response from a syndicate that I should have heard of sometime in March. We're now down to two that I can reasonably expect to hear back from.
(I suppose I should've expected this from an industry that still thinks Garfield and The Family Circus are funny!)
Now, I'm not looking for sympathy here. Nor is this some sort of veiled demand for money. After all, Keenspace's hosting is free. And I produce the comic using software and hardware I already had on hand. Dodo has not been a great financial drain for me.
But I don't know how long I'll be able to justify putting the time and effort into drawing this comic purely out of a love of the art form. With the exception of a short-lived part-time job, I've been unemployed for some time.
Those syndication hopes were the main reason I was able to get the comic this far. Dodo is going to have to start earning its keep somehow.
What I will not do is hold the archives hostage. The current comic and the archives will remain free for as long as the strip is here on Keenspace. That's a promise.
But you might see a PayPal button appear somewhere on here in the near future. I'm also thinking about a Kevin & Kell-style sponsor-the-strip-for-a-day-and-put-up-a-short-message program.
Merchandising through CafePress is another possibility if it becomes apparent that there's a demand for such a thing.
May 21, 2004
IS THERE A WINDOWS ME USER IN THE HOUSE?
Thursday morning, my PC started acting strangely. A few moments after booting up, this error message appears:
As soon as I close the message, Windows goes down like a house of cards. But here's the crazy part -- if I just ignore that message, shove it to the side and carry on regardless, the machine appears to work just fine.
(I've found that Temp file. Windows refuses to allow me to delete it. All I get is an error message claiming that the file is in use by Windows.)
I'm concerned that this may be symptomatic of some deeper problem. I'd prefer to avoid having my hard drive suddenly roll over and die again without warning like it did last July. (Twice.) Has anyone seen a problem like this? What, if anything, fixed it?
Confidential to my former employers: You will observe that I am providing not only the actual text of the error message, but a detailed description of what's going on, as opposed to just saying, "I'm getting some error!"
Confidential to my brother: Yes, I know you like your Mac. You've mentioned that a few times. Pointing it out again doesn't really help.
June 7, 2004
THIS NEWS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY OVERZEALOUS ADVERTISING, INC!
I followed a link from the Website of advocacy group Commercial Alert to this USA Today article. It talks about the increasing omnipresent onslaught of advertising in our society. (One small example: I didn't know that Earthlink had gone to the extent of placing ads in public restrooms. Talk about ad campaigns going down the toilet -- but seriously...)
This advertising creep is a major concern of Commercial Alert's -- and to an increasing extent, of mine. Heck, if I could afford non-free hosting I'd get rid of those Keenspace ads up top and run a 100% ad-free site! But that's another rant. Getting back to my point . . .
I found it amusing that when I went to read an article about incessant advertising, I got hit with a popup ad on loading the USA Today page -- and another on leaving it!
June 18, 2004
"CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?"
Following a system reinstall, my PC absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the Internet. No matter how I jigger the zillion and one different settings, all I ever get are "Server not found" error messages.
By contrast, the used Mac G4 that my brother gave me for my birthday has no problems.
A word to all you OS zealots -- Mac AND PC -- out there: shut up. I don't want to hear about how I've either Finally Opened My Eyes or Sold My Soul to the Devil, depending on your point of view. Besides, the Mac is every bit as capable as the PC of being a pain in the backside!
So for now, since my software is all PC, I've got to finish the strips (or modify HTML pages or whatever it is) on the PC, put them on a CD, and port them over to the Mac. (Right now the Mac has no floppy drive; as time and money permit I'm going to see what I can do about that.)