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Personal
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GPF, Personal, Webcomics
Maybe it was Persephone’s third cousin twice removed…
June 26th, 2006 (5 years, 7 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
I had an interesting little surprise a week or so ago. I had recently come back to North Carolina after a week on the new job and was spending a lot of my “free” time cleaning and repairing things in an effort to make the house more presentable and sellable. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of yard work, something I’m not known for being very good at. I’m fine when it comes to mowing the lawn (not that I’m an expert at it, nor that I necessarily enjoy it, but at least I’m competent), but just about anything else involving chlorophyll is foreign to me. However, I’ve recently successfully planted flowers, spread mulch, and cleared over a foot of clearance between our overgrown bushes and the front of the house. All in all, not bad for a gardening newbie.
One day, I stepped outside for a reason that now escapes me. As I was walking past the front planter along the walk to the front door, something bright yellow caught my eye. I looked down to find the interesting blob you see above. While I had a sneaking suspicion of what it was, I knew I couldn’t be certain. I rushed back inside, grabbed the camera, and snapped a few photos to take back to my biology teacher mother when I returned to West Virginia. Sure enough, she confirmed exactly what I suspected: it was an honest-to-gosh slime mold.
When one of your main characters is a slime mold, you tend to get a lot of slime mold related mail. I’ve had fans send me tons of unsolicited photos, hyperlinks, and amusing mold-related anecdotes over the years. Needless to say, when the news hit SlashDot back in February of a robot controlled by a slime mold, I was inundated. But I’ll have to admit that my actual personal slime mold experience is relatively small. Other than the above snapshot and a chance meeting on a hike during a recent vacation, my path has rarely crossed with any slimes of note.
Sadly, this chance meeting would not be repeated. By the following morning, the little mold had been baked thoroughly by the scorching NC summer sun and formed a crusty, hardened shell. When the shell broke, a fine black mist of spores rose into the air, carried away by the breeze. As far as I know, the mold never showed any signs of sapience, but I conveniently neglected to tell my Fred plush doll the news of the encounter, just in case it would have broken his heart… er, nucleus.
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Personal
Homeward Bound
May 25th, 2006 (5 years, 8 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 5 Core DumpsWell, it’s official. As I reported in my last post, there was a good chance I was going to get a job back in my old home state of West Virginia and that I would be moving there from my current residence in North Carolina. That “90%” has now become 100%, and that’s made me one ridiculously busy bee. The reason you haven’t seen any posts here or in the GPF News is because I’ve been swamped with things going on behind the scenes, getting ready to pull up roots from one place and plant them somewhere else. So forgive the scattered randomness of this post; I’m dog tired and half awake, and I know my not firing on all cylinders this morning.
In addition to filling out a bunch of paper work for the new job, we’re doing everything we can to make our current house as sellable as possible. For the last couple of weekends, I’ve been pressure washing then water sealing our deck and privacy fence. It’s a long, tough job that we’ve done once before, shortly after we moved in. Every muscle in my body is aching right now… it’s a good thing I finished my weekly comics quota early this week. Sometime soon we’ll need to empty out the office and paint in there, as that’s the only room we haven’t painted since we moved in. There’s lots of yard work to do, and while that’s usually my wife’s domain, she’s not really in a condition to be doing much of that. (Right now, paying someone to do it looks really attractive….)
We’re currently looking for somewhere to stay in WV. Our first choice is somewhere to rent, where we can probably get in more quickly and have the freedom of moving easier if I don’t get extended in this new job. Unfortunately, rental prices in the Beckley-Hinton area are outrageous, so we’ve expanded our search to homes to buy. I certainly hope we’ll be at least mostly unpacked by the time the baby arrives….
On a completely unrelated note, today just happens to be my birthday. Yay, me. I won’t say what number it is, but it’s a nice, round, geeky power of two that just happens to coincide with the number of megabytes of RAM the first PC I personally bought had. No big plans for today… just putting in a full day’s work (my next to last on my current job) and going out to eat one last time before we move at our favorite Japanese hibachi steakhouse.
I just realized… ever since we moved down here, I’ve had to drive all the way from Burlington to Greensboro (a good half-hour’s drive) just to get to Best Buy. Then the finally put a Best Buy in Burlington, just five minutes from here, and now we’re moving where the nearest BB will probably be a hundred miles away. Dang it….
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Personal
He speaks! He isn’t dead! Yet!
April 22nd, 2006 (5 years, 9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 5 Core DumpsI apologize for the crushing silence lately. As I will be mentioning in Monday’s GPF News update (note: the link won’t work until then), things have been really hectic around here, and it’s been more personal stuff than it’s been GPF-related. So while the News item will be somewhat sparse, I’ll try to summarize here what’s been keeping me so gosh darn busy.
As some of you may know, ever since I was laid off from IBM back in December of 2002, I’ve essentially been bouncing from contract job to contract job, usually for a few months a time, little islands of employment between stretches of unemployment. Oddly enough, these short jobs have usually earned enough cash to keep us around the same income level as before the layoff. Also oddly enough, three of the four contracts were back with IBM, working for the same customer I was with before the layoff. However, my current contract is coming to another close. I’ve been on borrowed time for a while now; my original contract was just for three months, but I’ve already been kept on for a year. The time of extensions is over, though, and I’m pretty much guaranteed to be out the door by the end of April.
The good news, however, is that I already have another job prospect waiting in the wings. It’s not a done deal, but it’s supposed to be “90%” there. Essentially, the employer wants me, but since this is a government contract, they have to wait for the government to sign the check to have the funding to bring me on. They’re hoping to bring me on in the beginning of May (convenient with the current job ending this month), but I’m still assuming that 90% is still less than 100% and that no further assumptions should be made.
The bad news is (and yes, this will sound like one of those “good news, bad news” jokes for a while) the job is in West Virginia, my old home state. This means we will most likely have to move from our current location in North Carolina. Lots of headaches, frustrations, and heavy lifting. Even though it’s been years now, I still remember the headaches of moving from WV to NC, and I’ve accumulated a lot more stuff since then.
The good news is that West Virginia is where all our family is, which is especially good with the baby on the way. With both sets of grandparents, one sister, and a number of uncles, aunts, and cousins readily accessible, we’ll have a lot more help when the baby finally arrives. At the least, that many built-in babysitters will be handy.
The bad news is that this is yet again another contract job, just six months.
The good news is, it’s also right-to-hire, meaning the customer has the option of bringing me on full time once the contract is up if they want to keep me.
The bad news is, right-to-hire means they can also decide not to keep me. I’ve been on right-to-hire before; I’m not still employed at those places.
The good news is that my wife’s job is already remote, so it doesn’t matter where she works from. WV is just as good as NC for her, so long as she has Internet access and a second phone line.
The bad news is, we’ll also have to start over with a new set of doctors, hospitals, OB/GYNs, etc. We’ve already set up a rapport with the doctors here, and it’s not going to be fun picking up a new set of docs in the middle of a pregnancy.
As you might guess, I can keep on going like this for some time. In many ways, it’s a positive move to return to WV, but there a lot of advantages to remaining here in NC. The big advantage of NC over WV is my job future: it’s a simple yet unfortunate fact that high tech jobs are a lot easier to find in NC than they are in WV. That is, after all, why I moved to NC in the first place. If this contract ends and I don’t get brought on permanently, it could be fatal blow to my IT career to move there. And while GPF is probably more profitable now than ever, after seven and a half years it still hasn’t reached a level where it could sustain us as a full time job.
Anyhoo, the long story short: This job situation has taken up a good bit of my time lately. While I’ve been able to keep up with the strip itself, I’ve unfortunately let a lot of extra things slide (like the News, extra PREMIUM content, etc.). While this potential job change and move could potentially impact the strip, I’m hoping that it won’t. That’s one reason for the buffer and all the fore-planning I’ve done over the years.
For those of you who consider yourself to be religious, I would appreciate your prayers. While I’m already trusting that God will put me where He wants me, I want His Will to be done, where ever it may lead. If that means my family should move to WV, then so be it. NC has just enough little hills to keep me from getting too homesick, but I do miss those mountains….
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Miscellaneous, Personal
Silence isn’t always golden
January 27th, 2006 (6 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Comments OffSorry for the lack of updates, guys. I’ve completely recovered from hard drive crash and Apollo is back up and running. In fact, I managed to recover so much of my data that the final outcome essentially boils down to about a week’s downtime, me being a couple hundred bucks poorer, and Apollo getting a 20GB hard drive upgrade. If you want the gory details, feel free to check out the hard drive crash thread on the forum, which pretty much has a blow-by-blow account. (The previous blog post was actually originally posted there and copied here with minor editing, so don’t worry if something sounds familiar.)
I keep hinting in the GPF News at bigger news floating around, and I do plan to eventually announce it to the Web at large… but not today. Instead, I’m going to file that away for later. Instead, I’ll turn my attention to a new link over there in the Site Links area: Raw Sewage. This is a new, private section of the site intended for personal friends and family and not for the general public. As such, you’ll probably be confronted with a username and password prompt if you try to click that link. As stated in the updated NCD FAQ, regular GPF readers, fellow online cartoonists, and ordinary random Internet denizens are generally not invited, so please don’t bother asking for a password. You won’t get one, and you won’t get a response. No offense intended, of course; it’s just private conversations should remain that way. The public blog isn’t going away; I’m just adding a private section for private information. If you’re a buddy or relative and I haven’t sent you login information yet, shoot me an e-mail an I’ll rectify that oversight.
Not much else to add for now. I’ve been extremely busy, but I’ll try and throw up some more relevant posts as soon as I can.
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Personal
Okay, so it isn’t official…
I haven’t bothered to sign up, because I know I’m not going to finish in time. But, dang blast that Chris Wright, he finally got to me. After my little tantrum about NaNoWriMo, he’s been needling me in my comments and IM to at least give it a try. So I’m doing it. Unofficially. It’s unofficial because I know I don’t have time to work on it, but I’m doing it anyway because this has been the first chance I’ve had to actually write something other than GPF for a long time. And I really need to get this particular project out of my head and into a more tangible format anyway before senility sets in and it’s lost forever.
I’ve put my word count over in the blurb under the calendar so I can be thoroughly embarrassed in front of the entire Internet when I don’t break 10k (out of a winning number of 50k words) by the deadline. Of course, since I’m not officially participating, I have nothing to be embarrassed about. I can also continue to write after November 30th guilt free. Unofficialness is my friend.
I told Wright he could officially gloat, which he officially did over ICQ. And I officially don’t care.
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Personal
Man, I wish I weren’t so blasted busy…
October 27th, 2005 (6 years, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 3 Core DumpsAs the (dis)honorable Mr. Wright over at eviscerati.org mentioned, National Novel Writing Month is only a few days away. It figures. I could really use “NaNoWriMo” to get a kick-start on a few projects but… in November? C’mon….
What possessed these people to pick November, of all months, for this? Not only is that the month of Thanksgiving (at least here in the States), which means I’ll be traveling a lot to visit family, but it’s the month leading into December, so that means Christmas shopping, things going on at the church, end of year things at work, etc. I suppose the only month that could possibility be worse than November would be December (which is probably why it wasn’t chosen). And this particular November is not a good one for me. Not only am I starting Year Eight of GPF (which is the next big year-long mega-arc), but my buffer has seriously been trashed by cons, vacations, and illness, so I’m working double-time to rebuild myself back up to eight weeks ahead from an all-time low of three weeks. That’s not to mention job hunting, as I’m fairly certain I won’t be on my current contract come the beginning of the year.
I could really use NaNoWriMo. Oh, how I could use it. While I’ve got a good ten or twelve other comic projects I’d love to launch, I have even more ideas that could work as novels, movies, or television series. I’ve got one that I’ve been brewing for a good eight or nine years now that I conceived back in college. While I’ve got a good four or five books worth of plot and characterization multitasking in and out of my brain’s CPU, I have virtually nothing down on paper or hard disk about it. I have to take time to put this down, and NaNoWriMo is the perfect excuse. It’s just that I’ve got twenty more excuses vying for my attention right now, and none of those are willing to give up their precious time.
Yes, I’d like to have some cheese with my whine now. A fine, aged Romano should do. It’s sharp, strong, and stinky, just like me. Well… maybe I’m stretching on the sharp and strong part.
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Personal, Technology
Space Happy
September 27th, 2005 (6 years, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
Man, I am such a geek.
My wife and I are in Florida this week on vacation, right? We decided to go to that certain huge mega resort that acts like a huge black hole, sucking in dollars. You know, the “happiest place on earth.” And you know what I’ve enjoyed the most so far? Besides spending some quality time with my sweetie, of course. Here’s a hint: It didn’t have anything to do with mouse ears.
We went to the Kennedy Space Center today. I didn’t care too much for the tour company that took us there and back, but I definitely enjoyed myself there. I acted more like a giddy little school kid around the space shuttle mock-ups and the real Saturn V rocket than I have been all week at that “other place.” I filled one 64MB card on the digital camera and started another. (That’s 88 pictures, if you’re wondering.) I even got to meet astronaut Col. John Blaha, the second astronaut I’ve ever met (the first being Capt. Jon McBride). Slipped him a GPF business card, too. (My secret ambition is to get so many Faulties in the JPL that Fred or Nick or some other GPF character might stowaway into space, hidden somewhere on a space probe someplace.)
I am such a geek.
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Personal
Macel Darlington, 1914-2005
![[Macel Darlington]](/myimages/granny_macel.jpg "My Grandmother")
My grandmother passed away yesterday after a long and steady decline in health, culminating in congestive heart and kidney failure. She was 91.
Granny Macel–usually, since she was the grandparent my sister and I saw most frequently, we simply called her “Granny”–was the last of my grandparents to leave this earth. I never got a chance to meet my father’s father, as he passed away before I was born. My mother’s parents both died when I was young, and while my memories of them are fond and warm, they are also somewhat faded now by time. Granny Macel, however, was always there for us, since she lived in the same town just a short drive or long walk away. She has always been there, from my birth, through college, and beyond.
She was practically a second mother to us, helping watch the two of us while Mom and Dad had to work during the day. During our youngest years, she was almost always at our house, keeping track of two squabbling brats as best as a person her age could. Even as she got older and her memory and hearing began to fade, she was always feisty, always ready to speak her mind and let you know what she thought was right and wrong.
She led a full, rich life, and it seems there’s always something new to learn about her. She was born in a dirt-floor shack in the hills of West Virginia, and lived through some of the greatest events of the last century. She remembered the great flu epidemic of 1917, the Great Depression, World War II, man’s first steps into space…. She played women’s basketball and ran her own school to teach weaving. She loved anything having to do with Elvis, and had the largest collection of National Geographic magazines I’ve ever seen. Her house was always filled with a museum’s worth of knickknacks and antiques, as well as a virtual flock of parakeets and canaries.
Unfortunately, time ravaged her frail body. She had three hip replacement surgeries, lost at least one toe, and her hearing steadily faded until not even her hearing aids were very effective. Toward the end of her life, she was largely bedridden, although her doctors tried to help her move around with physical therapy. As she neared the end, her memory would come and go and she would occasionally confuse me for my dad. But I could always see the love in her eyes, and I knew without fail that she loved me (whether I was her son or grandson).
I know it may confuse some of you out there, but I actually take comfort in her death. Yes, she will be greatly missed, and I have to hold back tears when I think of how I will not see her smile upon this earth again. However, I know first of all that her pain and discomfort have ended, and she now has a peace she could never have had in her final state. But secondly and most importantly, I firmly believe she was a Christian, and that she entrusted her soul and eternal future into God’s hands. II Corinthians 5:8 tells us that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and I am convinced she is now waiting there with her husband, the grandfather I’ve never met, waiting to greet me when I finally join them.
I love you, Granny Macel. May you find the rest and peace in Heaven that you could never have on earth. Keep some of those nice fresh tomatoes form your new garden handy; I’ll be there in 50-60 years or so, unless God has other plans.
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Personal, Webcomics
Daddy’s little helpers
Not much going on here at the moment. I haven’t had a chance to work on my comics all week due to Dragon*Con and our project at work (which has me putting in a full day’s work this Saturday, bleh). At this rate, I’m afraid I may lose another week from my buffer. However, that’s what the buffer’s there for, and I’m sure I’ll get those strips made up eventually. (Listening to Jennie Breeden repeatedly cry out “Five weeks?!?” in exasperation during the webcomics panel this past weekend was fun.
Anyhoo, I thought I’d share this with you (if nothing else, as a test of the Upload File feature):
Yep, that’s Randi the Wonder Kitty. (That’s also my pasty white knee she’s napping on.) I guess this picture’s a little over a year old, and I’ve been using it as my desktop background on Apollo for a while now. Randi’s my little fuzzy buddy, and she’s been exceptionally affectionate since we got back from Atlanta. In fact, while typing most of the above text, she was camped out in my lap, purring up a storm. (Of course, by the time I got to the end of this paragraph, she was bored and hopped up to head to the food bowl. At least she knows her priorities.)
For equal opportunity’s sake, here’s one of Kiki the Boo Wonder, which currently serves as my background on Demeter (the Linux box this server’s housed on):
We miss our girls when we’re away, and they miss us. We originally got Kiki to keep Randi company while we were gone. They’ve been together now for a good four or five years, and keeping the peace is sometimes a chore. Who needs children when you can have cats?
Nothing of substance in this post. Just cute cat pictures. (That’s what a blog’s for, isn’t it?)
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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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