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• Personal

  Missing: One peacock. Blue and shedding feathers. Answers to “Pretty Boy Napoleon”

  July 30th, 2007 (3 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump

  For those that may recall, back in February I mentioned the neighborhood peacock that took shelter during the winter on our back porch. Well, it turns out he’s gone missing. A local TV station recently ran a story calling for help in locating the bird, as he has been missing now for over a week. Not that I expect any of you guys to have any leads, but I thought it was interesting enough of a follow up to mention it. Then again, if someone named me “Pretty Boy Napoleon,” I think I might just run away from home myself.

  Then again, the rather morbid part of me can’t help but wonder if Napoleon’s disappearance is in any way related to our other recent wildlife encounter….

  

• Personal

  “We’ve moved into a freakin’ Mutual of Omaha nature documentary.”

  July 18th, 2007 (3 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps

  Back when we still lived in North Carolina, we had the odd encounter or two with wildlife around the house. The back of our yard sat next to a wooded area, and there were plenty of birds and small mammals roaming about but they rarely made an appearance. You could hear the occasional owl hooting and sometimes while driving on the main road you’d see a deer or two gallop across. A couple of times we had little black lizards scramble into the house, much to the delight of our younger cat Kiki (who quickly earned the nickname “the Mighty Huntress”). But aside for these isolated incidents and the occasional “present” left in the yard by a neighborhood dog, that was about it.

  But since we’ve moved back to West Virginia, it seems Mother Nature has been making more and more house calls. It’s not like there’s a big difference between the two locations; both houses are in relatively rural areas, but not all that distant from civilization. Still, we’ve had more critter issues in the year we’ve been back than we had in all nine years or so we had down South.

  I’ve already mentioned, of course, the peacock. Since the weather has turned warmer, we’ve seen a lot less of him. We figure he’ll perch on our back porch again once winter comes. He seems to now prefer a tree across the street to roost in and spends a lot of time in another yard further up the hill. (There are two chihuahuas that live up there, and we often imagine them being terrorized by this great big blue buzzard strutting through their territory.) He has made a few appearances this summer, though, even once walking up on the back porch right next to my wife and Ben as the little guy was playing in his sand box.

  However, it seems our trash has become the neighborhood buffet. I’ve caught a big, fat raccoon rummaging about, leaving muddy paw prints all over the lids and chewing holes in the bottom corners of the cans. One day I left a couple of trash bags on the porch while I went back in to empty the cats’ boxes, only to apprehended a local dog (a liver and white spaniel of some sort) snacking when I got back. But last night took the cake.

  It was getting late, around 9:30 PM. We had just managed to get Ben to fall asleep; he hates going to bed and usually fights naps and bedtime with a passion until he’s collapses in exhaustion. We were waiting for him to fall into a good deep sleep so he wouldn’t be disturbed when he put him in his crib. My wife was holding him on one couch while I sat on the other, watching whatever was on the TV at the time. Then I heard a loud crash outside. Our first instinct was Ben. Yep, he’s still asleep. I then stood up and peeked through the blinds to see what caused the noise. I did a double-take, then quietly jogged to the front door and opened it so I could get a good look through the glass storm door. My wife looked at me with an expression that seemed to ask “What’s going on?” at the same time as warning me “You better not wake the boy.” When I didn’t answer, she eventually verbalized the question.

  I responded, “A bear. A big black bear. Rummaging through our garbage.”

  Sure enough, there he sat. (Or she; there’s no way to tell at that distance.) Silhouetted by the street lamp on the garage across the street, he shoved his big head deep in the trash can, pulled a bag out with his teeth, and sauntered across the road to the neighbor’s yard to consume his dinner. My wife got up, still holding a sleeping Ben, and walked up beside me, mouth agape. We watched him for several minutes as he dined on the contents of one can and proceeded to knock down the other and continue the buffet.

  Well, what exactly are you supposed to do in this situation? We called animal control, but of course their office was closed. My wife then called 911, and they said we should call the Department of Natural Resources. However, the DNR (also closed for the night) probably wouldn’t do anything unless the bear was injured or was a threat to humans. He definitely looked fat and healthy to me, and he was perfectly content to snack in solitude. So we stood there and watched him chow down for several minutes until he had his fill and eventually meandered off. My wife begged me not to go out and clean up the mess, even though half our garbage was strewn across the neighbor’s lawn.

  After the encounter was over, my wife put Ben down and called her mom. The first thing she said when her mom answered was the subject line of this post: “We’ve moved into a freakin’ Mutual of Omaha nature documentary.” My first thought upon hearing that line was “That has to be the subject line for the blog post.”

  I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll end up seeing Marlin Perkins or Peter Davison outside in our lawn soon….

  

• Gadgets, Personal, Technology

  I am now a technology lemming

  May 29th, 2007 (3 years, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  Last week was my birthday. I usually try to keep very quiet about it, and I don’t go advertising it on the GPF site as a way to drum up artificial congratulations from fans. I know it’s always annoyed me when other webcartoonists do that, expecting their readers to all sing in chorus and make them feel self important, so I expect it annoys others as well. Such cults of personality extend into the blogosphere and other similar user-generated realms, of course, but I know I saw it in the webcomicing world long before the term “blog” came into being. But I digress. I don’t do GPF to have tons of people become my personal cheerleaders and gush on and on about how much they think of me and my work; I do it for myself first and foremost, and it’s an added bonus if one or two (or several tens of thousands) of you enjoy it as well. It did kind of surprise me that nobody on the forum mentioned anything, given I know there are a few of you out there who are obsessive enough to keep track of such things, but I’d much rather have a low-key quiet birthday anyway.

  And it was a nice birthday. It started off kind of lackluster, as I had a doctor’s appointment to have some blood work done and had to fast (only black coffee… no cream or sugar… blech), followed by Ben’s nine month checkup (which went very well). We ended up throwing a third doctor’s visit into the mix, as Randi the Wonder Kitty was throwing up (more than usual) and suffering from diarrhea (as if cat feces wasn’t unpleasant enough already). Still, she turned out to be doing just fine, and whatever was bothering her seemed to pass pretty quickly. After that, my wife took me out to finally see Spider-Man 3 (which I’ll agree with most critics that it wasn’t as good as the previous two) and have a nice dinner by ourselves. I received some nice gifts from all my family and nobody made a particularly big fuss about it, which is exactly what I wanted.

  But I will tell you about the most interesting gift I received, which was “from” Ben. (Yes, I’m realistic know that a nine-month-old baby probably would have had extreme difficulty picking out and purchasing such an item over the Internet by himself, so I know he had help from Mommy.) I have finally plunged off the technological cliff with the rest of the lemmings and am now a proud owner of an iPod.

  For some reason, I seem to resist some trends, even when they’re obviously techie. It was years after cell phones became hip and commonplace that I finally caved and signed up for one, and even now my current phone (my second) is rather spartan and utilitarian. No music or video, no Web access, not even a camera; it makes phone calls and that’s about it. The most useful secondary features it has are the contacts list (which is a watered down version of what’s in my LifeDrive) and the tip calculator (which is usually handier to get to than the one in the Palm). I had no immediate interest in MP3 players initially, preferring the permanence of CDs. Even once I started using PocketTunes on the LD, I have never purchased music online; I always ripped my existing CDs and encoded them myself. In fact, with the LD’s built-in 4GB drive plus any number of Secure Digital cards, I never felt the need for a dedicated MP3 player.

  However, I now have some nice discounts with Apple through my current job, so I’ve toyed with the idea of adding some Apple products to our technology collection. While I’ve used my share of Apple ][s and Macs over the years (boy, does that first item date me), I've never owned an Apple product. I've eyed a MacBook a few times to make our little home network truly operating system agnostic. Still, I'm cheap and lazy, which does not make for a good combination for impulsive spending. I waffled back and forth in a similar fashion about purchasing a PDA before my wife broke down and bought my first Palm (a IIIc), and I'm now on my third. Sometimes it takes a good solid shove to get me moving in a give direction, and my wife is pretty good at that.

  So now I'm the owner of a sleek, black, "fifth generation" 30GB iPod. (I understand the "video" part of the name was dropped at some point.) I've got to admit, this thing is pretty slick. There are some very good reasons why these things dominate the portable media market. I had always heard the interface was intuitive, but I didn't realize it was so ridiculously easy to use. I barely even looked at the instruction card (it's hard to call it a manual, when there's only a few fold out pages and very little actual information). I was using it almost right out of the box with no tutorials. It did take a day or two of on-again, off-again syncing to copy all my media onto it, but that was relatively easy to do. It imported my previously ripped CDs without (much of) a hitch and ripped the rest (new CDs I received for my birthday plus a few I never bothered to copy before) very quickly. I re-encoded some of my home videos of Ben into a compatible format and they look awesome on that tiny screen. It took a bit to figure out the podcast subscription setup, but once I got it down I was able to add the few podcasts I listen to with relative ease. The jury is still out on battery life as I haven't been able to listen to it too extensively yet, but it does seem to be holding up better than the LD for extended listening.

  Some of the few caveats I've encountered, which are mostly personal irks than anything else and actually have little to do with the device itself:

  • Charging takes place through a USB port. What the...? Who came up with that bright idea? Okay, yes, it can be a bit unwieldy lugging both a sync and charging cable around like I have to do with the LD, but I know there's been plenty of times I've had to charge the LD away from my laptop (or any computer for that matter). I've also set up iTunes in a rather custom way so that Apollo the ThinkPad runs the program but the actual files are stored on a shared drive off of Diana, our ThinkCentre desktop. (Diana has much, much more disk space.) What happens if I need to charge the iPod while I'm in San Diego in August, and Apollo can't access Diana's share drive? Will iTunes barf? Will my files on the iPod be lost, since my library can't be found? I don't know yet, and I'm dreading finding out. Fortunately, I used my sister's gift (a Best Buy gift card) plus some extra cash to get an outlet adapter so I can charge the iPod without a USB port. Why that doesn't come standard seems completely idiotic to me. (I suspect it's just another way for Apple (and it's army of third-party accessory makers) to get more money.)
  • iTunes, at least for me, is a hog. I don't know if it's my setup (program on one machine, files on another) or just that Apple has trouble writing for other OSes than Mac OS, but iTunes seems to lock up or get really sluggish sometimes. I mean, it worked fairly well at ripping and organizing files internally and it did really well at ripping things, but it's annoying as can be when I'm actually trying to sign up for an iTunes Store account and it goes off into lah-lah land for five to ten minutes while I'm trying to enter a credit card number. (And why do I need to put a credit card on file when all I've done so far is download a free game demo? C'mon, Apple. I'd feel much safer if you asked me to enter it on each purchase, rather than trusting you to keep it on file. Yeah, it's more work for me, but I work in the computer industry and I know how sloppy computer security can be.)
  • The iTunes help file is pretty useless. On the few times I've had to look something up, it's taken forever for find it in the help file or I've never found it and had to figure it out myself. Other forms of help are only available online. I understand that iTunes works as a largely online application with the whole integrated store, but what if I'm just charging/syncing without a wireless connection and I run into trouble? How is the Apple website going to help me then?
  • Minor personal irk: iTunes by default organizes files by artist, then album, and there's no apparent way to change this. Yes, I found out too late that you can organize your files manually yourself, but I only found that setting after iTunes completely reshuffled my files every which way. While I'm sure artist-to-album makes sense for certain setups, it really trashes compilation albums. I ripped one Dr. Demento collection and ended up with dozens of artist folders, some with only a single song file in them. Now without iTunes it's impossible to find everything associated with that album again, which makes me wonder just how stable iTunes really is. The same thing happened with my Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, which put all the instrumental pieces under Danny Elfman but each song under the person singing the solos.

  Now that I've vented, I thought I'd share a little humorous bit I thought up. Shortly after I had toyed with the iPod a while, an imaginary conversation popped into my head about what the LifeDrive and iPod would say to each other on their first meeting:

  LifeDrive: So... you're the new guy, huh?

  iPod: Yep! Hi, I'm an iPod! And you are...?

  LD: A Palm LifeDrive.

  iP: A... what?

  LD: A LifeDrive. From Palm. You know, they make PDAs.

  iP: Oh... one of the "old guard." Gotcha.

  LD: "Old guard?" What's that supposed to mean?

  iP: Heh... ah, c'mon. A PDA? Who uses those anymore? I mean, with cell phones doing all that PIM stuff...

  LD: And playing MP3s...

  [Uncomfortable silence]

  LD: So… you play music. What else can you do?

  iP: Oh, I can do much more than that! I do podcasts as well. That is, after all, where podcasts got their name.

  LD: Jeff used me to listen to his music and podcasts all the time.

  iP: I can do video too!

  LD: Got about a hundred megs of baby videos right here on this SD card. And I saw the files he converted for you. They’re several megs bigger than the files he encoded for me.

  iP: I can also play games!

  LD: Been there, done that, bought the leather case with a belt clip. What else you got, kid?

  iP: Uh…

  LD: Got BlueTooth?

  iP: Not… built-in…

  LD: Wi-Fi?

  iP: N…no…

  LD: Voice recorder?

  iP: As an $80 add-on accessory…

  LD: Copious amounts of storage space?

  iP: HA! Got you there, old man! 30GB right here. How much do you have?

  LD: Er… built-in? Only 4GB.

  iP: AH HA!

  LD: But with SD expansion cards I have virtually limitless capacity!

  iP: And just how many cards do you have?

  LD: Well… um… if you add them all up…?

  iP: Yeeeessssss…?

  LD: Um… there’s the ones here in my case… add in these old ones in the briefcase… maybe count the ones with the old Tungsten C… so… approximately 3.84375 GB?

  iP: Approximately?

  LD: Well, some are less than a gig. And if you include the built-in hard drive, that brings me up to 7.84375 GB. But then, realistically, you have to subtract the drive space used for “memory” and that brings it down to…

  iP: Never mind. I’m sorry I asked.

  [More uncomfortable silence.]

  iP: Well… at least you’re not a Windows Mobile device.

  LD: Of course not. I’m from Palm. Although some might say my OS is becoming outdated, at least it’s not a watered down version of a piece of desktop bloatware. The only reason those guys have so much more memory and processing power is because they need it just to make the darn OS run. And I won’t even associate with those Treo 700w’s and 750′s. Traitors.

  iP: Amen to that.

  LD: Why do you say that? You got something against Microsoft?

  iP: Well, duh. I’m from Apple.

  LD: OH…. That… that says a lot right there.

  iP: Yup.

  [Still more uncomfortable silence.]

  iP: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  LD: Just keep your ear buds to yourself, kid, and you’ll get along here fine. Just wait ’til you meet Cell. He’s… special. If his antenna falls off, try not to notice.

  iP: Um… right.

  

• Personal, Webcomics

  Jesus Geek interview now up

  April 25th, 2007 (3 years, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  And here it is.

  It’s funny how after you do something like this and you listen to yourself hemming and hawing and stuttering, you realize just how many things you wanted to say that you completely forgot about at the time. Oh well. And of course Suddenlink would have a major outage today, meaning the blog would be down half the day, starting about when the interview went live. [Rolls eyes]

  Anyhoo, enjoy the podcast. There’s a lot of interesting discussion, especially around Year Seven’s Providence, Nick and Ki’s relationship vs. Fooker and Sharon’s, and this here little slice of the Intraweb. Discuss the podcast either on the podcast’s comments page, or use this thread on the GPF forum.

  

• Personal, Webcomics

  Jesus Geek interview

  April 23rd, 2007 (3 years, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  One of the impending things hinted at in today’s GPF News item is that I should be interviewed in this week’s Jesus Geek podcast. Jesus Geek is a weekly Christian/technology podcast “hosted by a geek, amateur astronomer and homeschooling dad.” When I received their interview request, I went back and listened to a number of episodes in their archives, and there’s a good chance I’ll become a regular subscriber. I’ll be putting up an official link in the next GPF News post as soon as the podcast goes live (as well as a permanent link down in the GPF Links Off-Site portion of the GPF Link-O-Rama), but I’ll give you guys a heads-up here.

  

• Personal

  Tell Pete Abrams I need a pair of emergency pants

  April 5th, 2007 (3 years, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  Greetings from Utah. I certainly hope your past few days have been better than mine, as I’ve had a rather crazy couple of days.

  As previously alluded to, I’m currently in Provo, Utah, on the campus of Brigham Young University for the ID+SCORM conference. (In fact, at least part of this post was typed in during one particularly boring session using a combination of my LifeDrive and an infrared keyboard.) I’m not sure how many of you would be interested in adaptive learning models and computer-based instructional design, so I won’t bore you with any of those details. But let’s just say my trip here was a bit more… interesting.

  I got up as normal on Wednesday morning, driving into Hinton with a couple traveling bags instead of my usual briefcase. My project manager and I hopped in her car and drove a couple hours to Roanoke, VA to catch our flight. Why Roanoke, when the airport in Charleston, WV would be probably closer? Because Travelocity said so, I suppose. We got to Roanoke without incident and in plenty of time to get through security and get to our gate. All the displays said our flight was on time, so we both settled in–she with her book and I with my Palm laden down with multimedia–for the wait until boarding.

  It wasn’t long before we started hearing rumors from other passengers that our flight was being delayed. Sure enough, we boarded perhaps an hour late. This wasn’t much of a concern for us, as we had a long enough layover in Atlanta, GA to comfortably get to our next gate. It was a bit of a jog (for those unfamiliar with the layout of the Atlanta Hartsfield, it’s not atypical to land at the end of one concourse and have to hoof it to the end of another), but we got there right when our next flight was supposed to be boarding.

  Emphasis on “supposed to be”.

  Our second flight was also delayed. Unfortunately, we had another connection in Chicago, IL to catch, and we didn’t have nearly as much wiggle room at that layover for delays. (This was the first time I’ve ever had two layovers; I’ve always avoided multiple layovers in the past, but I didn’t book this trip.) My manager talked to the attendant at the counter and managed to get us on a direct flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, Utah. (Ironically, the attendant in Roanoke offered to put us on that flight before we left VA, but we turned it down.) That hurdle avoided, we settled in to a long cross-country flight, feeling that most or our problems were over.

  This is the point where you say, “But they weren’t, were they?”

  And this is the part where I reply, “You betcha.”

  We landed in Salt Lake about two hours earlier than we originally planned. There was a third member of our party flying in from a different location on a different flight, so we had to stick around and wait for him. So we headed down to baggage claim to fetch our things, check in with the rental car place, and get those two tasks out of the way. We waited around the carousel for about an hour… and our luggage never came. We went ahead and checked out the rental car, then returned to the baggage desk to find out where our luggage went. The woman who helped me was much more informative than Cheryl’s attendant, who told her nothing. I managed to learn, however, that there must have been some confusion about our change in flights, and the bags neither made it on our new flight nor our original flight. She at least sounded sympathetic when she said, “Sir, we don’t know where you luggage is.”

  We grabbed some rudimentary dinner and waited for Lee’s flight to land. Unfortunately, things didn’t get any better. Undoubtedly our entire trip was cursed, as his luggage was also “delayed,” even though he was on a direct flight from Pittsburgh, PA to Salt Lake. By this point, it was already 9PM Mountain time, which to us still felt like 11PM Eastern time. With an hour’s drive still ahead of us, we threw up our hands and gave up. We arrived in Provo after 10PM with plans to get up early and make a trip to Wal-Mart to pick up an emergency change of clothing. (Thus the title of this post.)

  Fortunately, today was much better. While I may smell of “citrus aloe” and “orange ginger” instead of my usual more manly scents of Old Spice and Dial Antibacterial soap, I at least have a new polo shirt, pair of khakis, and several new pairs of dress socks. And during the afternoon break, Lee called the hotel and Cheryl’s and my luggage finally arrived and were waiting for us up in our rooms. (Lee’s bags, unfortunately, are still unaccounted for, although his were promised to arrive by 11AM.) Later in the evening, I hooked up with Howard Tayler, a local to these parts, and headed to his Thursday evening hangout, a local gaming store called the Dragon’s Keep. If I’m lucky, I might have a few interesting sketches or such to share once I get back home where I can access a scanner.

  

• Personal

  Business trip

  February 26th, 2007 (3 years, 5 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Comments Off

  For all the shows and cons I’ve been to, I’ve only been on an official business trip once. I went to a FOCUS conference way back in 1999 down at Disney World; I remember the date clearly, because it was my first birthday after our wedding, and I was in Florida while my wife was stuck back in North Carolina. I tagged along with my wife when she went to a conference last year (again in the Orlando area, and while she was four months pregnant), but I don’t count that since I spent most of my time there stuck in the hotel room working remotely over VPN (or at least trying to since the hotel’s Internet access was lousy).

  When I went to WDW for the FOCUS event, I actually announced it in the GPF News on the off chance some reader might have been going as well. Of course, back in ’99, GPF’s readership was much, much lower than it is today, so the odds that some Faultie was also a FOCUS developer who just happened to be going to the same conference were pretty low. Needless to say, I didn’t run into any adoring fans (or even abhorring ones), and being the social wallflower I tend to be, I spent a lot of my downtime in my hotel room or at one of the Disney parks.

  Well, it’s eight years later, and I’m finally going on another business trip. I’ll be going to Brigham Young University on April 5-6 to attend the ID+SCORM conference being held at their conference center. It’s still not 100% official, but my manager told me today that he specifically wants me to go. Of course, considering the highly specialized nature of SCORM and ADL, the likelihood that any of you out there are also in that field is still pretty slim, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. I haven’t decided if I’ll mention it on the News or not; it’s not exactly GPF-related, but those of you who read this blog regularly are a tiny fraction of those who read the comic.

  Then again, I’ll be in Howard Tayler’s backyard, so maybe I should look him up….

  

• Personal

  I’d say that’s one “cold turkey,” but he’s more related to a pheasant

  February 7th, 2007 (3 years, 5 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  

  I’m really beginning to miss those mild North Carolina winters. I’ve been told that we’re supposed to have a mild winter here, but so far I’ve seen more snow in the past few months I’ve been back in West Virginia than I saw in all nine years I was in NC. It’s been cold, the wind chill has been even colder, and the morning commute from Beckley to Hinton (about 37 miles (~60 km) or 45 minutes) has been treacherous, especially this morning. We had about five inches (12.7 cm) of snow last night and the roads were terrible. If it weren’t for the fact that I need to give a demo today, I would have requested to work from home.

  “That’s interesting, Jeff,” I hear you say, “but what does that have to do with the picture of a peacock?”

  I took this picture last night on our back porch. This guy is the neighborhood peacock, taking some shelter from the wind and snow. I think he likes that particular banister because it’s right over the drier vent, so hot air is almost constantly blowing up from there.

  “Neighborhood peacock?” you ask.

  Um, yeah, you heard me. It’s really an odd story. Nobody really owns him that I know of. He simply roams around, going wherever he wants, strutting his stuff around our little housing development. And in case you think it might be odd that a “wild” peacock is wandering around in suburban WV, then you’d be quite right.

  I’m not sure if there’s an official story, but the one I’ve heard through the grapevine is that there’s a peacock farm somewhere in our vicinity, and this guy’s an escapee. The farmer tracked him down and brought him back several times, but he’s pulled a Houdini each time. Eventually, the farmer gave up and the peacock took up permanent residence somewhere nearby. He undoubtedly considers our neighborhood part of his territory and patrols it regularly. None of the local dogs or other potential predators seem to bother him, perhaps because of his size (or maybe his disposition).

  I haven’t had much interaction with said peacock since we moved in. It seems that each time he’s been spotted, I’ve been somewhere where I couldn’t see him (like at work) or he’s been far enough away that all I’ve caught is a quick glimpse at a distance. Then during the last snow storm, I saw some interesting animal tracks that I couldn’t recognize along our back porch. I followed them, thinking they were going the opposite direction that I was, only to find him perched on the banister as you see him here. He sat there rather calmly, obviously not considering me a threat. When I took out the garbage last night, he was there again, so I took the opportunity to snap his picture.

  

• Personal

  Two mortgages are never fun…

  November 30th, 2006 (3 years, 8 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

  Sorry for the recent silence, folks. With work, Ben, and the Thanksgiving holiday, I haven’t had much time for blogging of late. There should be some interesting things coming up soon, so hopefully things will pick up here soon.

  The real thing I wanted to mention is that our house in North Carolina finally sold. The closing was today, and fortunately we were able to do our part remotely without having to take days off from work to be there in person. There were a number of last minute repairs that had to be done (which suspiciously were caught by the buyer’s home inspector where our own inspector found none of these issues a few months before), but those have been taken care of. We’ve officially severed all our ties down south, so we’re no longer Rednecks and have been firmly reinstated as Hillbillies again. (There’s a subtle but definite difference.) Considering that both mortgages combined ate up more than half of my pay in a given month, we’re definitely relieved.

  In celebration, here’s a peek at the final colored version of the Gamester picture I previously taunted you with. Enjoy!

  

  

• Personal

  Housing update

  July 13th, 2006 (4 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps

  While it’s technically still premature to say things are a done deal, we now have a new house in West Virginia. After a full month of searching mostly online and partially in person, including at least one failed bid, we’re now in the contract phase where all that’s left is the paperwork.

  We have a closing date of July 28th. The home inspector has already been through and given his approval of everything, the financial paperwork should be on its way back to our bank in North Carolina as of this writing, and the movers are scheduled to show up at the old house on the 31st, meaning we ought to have our stuff in WV by August 4th. (That said, I know of a couple friends who just moved from New York to Florida who spent a miserable 42 days (a coincidental number?) while their possessions were locked up in various warehouses and tractor trailers, completely out of their reach. I’m hoping for a bit more competence from our moving company.)

  So far, I like this little building. Compared to our cramped little starter home in NC, this will have a lot more room. It has two stories, the top comprising of the living room, kitchen, and three bedrooms, while the lower level is split about 40/60 between the two-car garage and a spacious den. We’ve already picked which bedroom will be the baby’s room and which will be the office. The living room and den will be quandaries, however, as we don’t really have enough stuff to fill both. It’s especially difficult deciding where we’re going to put the massive 57″ widescreen TV; getting up the hill or those stairs into the living would be a pain, and it would be shame lot to put it down in that huge ol’ den. Of course, being the geek that I am, I’ve already been trying to decide where to put the cable modem router to get the best possible wireless signal throughout the entire house. (I’ve also got a plan for running Ethernet into the office to the 16-port switch, but that can wait.)

  The house cost a bit more than we originally wanted to pay. However, in the same frame, I think we may have been aiming a little lower than we needed to in our pricing. Once the financing calculations were done, we found out that the mortgage payment won’t be significantly higher than what we’re already paying in NC. And since we’re notorious savers and have an obnoxiously sparkling clean credit history (we’re too goody-two-shoes for our own good), we’ll be able to comfortably pay the big ol’ 20% down payment directly without having to finance that as well. (I say “comfortably” in that we’ve got the liquid assets to do it, not that it won’t hurt. Of course, it will help that our estimated return from the sale of the NC house will almost completely reimburse the down payment on the WV, but that’s part of the “comfortable” part as well; we should be able to buy the new house first with the cash on hand, then worry about making up the return on the old house later.)

  So now that you’ve been updated on the house, I’ll throw in one meta-blog update as well: When the move finally occurs, the machine hosting this site and the GPF Store will be moving as well. Since I physically control this box, I’ll be breaking her down, packing her up, and setting her up in the new house myself. The good news is that I should be able to do this with a minimum of downtime, perhaps only a day or two, depending on how quickly we can get cable service set up. The bad news is that it could be longer if there are unforeseen delays, such as delays in getting the cable set up, the movers require enough of my attention that I can’t take time to set up the network, etc. So if you can’t reach the blog or the Store for a while around the end of this month and the beginning of this month, that’s why.

  Oh, and one other note: I was able to finally sit down and actually draw line art for comics this week. I’ve set up the art desk at my parents’ house temporarily, and was able to squeeze in a week’s worth (of the old schedule, one “Sunday” and six “dailies”) in a couple nights. I honestly can’t remember the last time I physically drew. I had drawn up a couple weeks’ worth of line art some time back, when I first started the new job, and I’ve been doing the digital half of those strips until I recently ran out. It was both refreshing and exhausting at the same time, like I was getting back to something I enjoy that I’ve missed, but that also takes a great deal of energy to accomplish. Either way, it felt good to be back in the GPF saddle.

  Oh, and maybe one more other note: There may be a baby update tomorrow. We’ll see.

  

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Jeffrey T. Darlington is the creator of the popular online comic strip General Protection Fault. He is also the creator of a number of other inconsequential things, but seeing as they are inconsequential, he didn't think you should be bothered by mentioning them. More...

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