Waffle

This is sort of a cross between a memo to self and a public announcement of my priorities for the next few months. If all you're interested in is the schedule of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic, scroll to the bottom.

Like I mentioned the other day, I'm getting married in May. Since my fiancée and I currently live on different continents, that means one of us is going to have to pack up and leave, and that's going to be me. Aggie has the public-facing job, the house and land that she owns and the two teenagers; I've got no dependents, no mortgage and a job that I can do over the internet.
The planned emigration is a much bigger change than the marriage itself, and a much scarier one for me. There's a number of ways I need to get my house in order before May 29. These are some of them.

The emigration itself. We have talked about it between us in the past year and at some point I was downloading and saving documents from the US INS to study the matter. But it's been a maze of documents to read, I lost track, then the hard drive the docs were on went kablooie. All that I took away from it is that it's a very long process, that as a spouse or prospective spouse I should have it relatively easy but will still have to fill in a bunch of applications and probably have to prove that I actually know this woman and have spent time with her, and that it's a good thing that Aggie's income is well over the poverty line. I will need to start making phone calls and writing to the embassy for more information and incorporate those things into my schedule, soon. In the next few weeks.

Work: I have already experimented with working long-distance from Tennessee at my current job and have the go-ahead from my boss to go back and do it again. There are still some teething problems to sort out and some unanswered questions about the value of it all to the company; all we know is that it doesn't hurt my job performance. I consider this issue 80% covered, but just in case, the next issue will be:

Money: Over the past year, I have slowly built an emergency fund in high-interest savings account. That will have to be turned into a Flexibility fund that should be enough to keep me going for a year in case I do somehow lose my job and am not yet able to look for a new one in the US (or in case I lose my job, am eligible to look for one in the US, but can't find one. It's Middle Tennessee; the demand for white-collar work isn't high there). By my estimate I will need € 20,000 in savings and have no idea how to get there from here (I have € 5000 as my Simplified Net Worth, i.e. whatever is in that account - anything in my other bank accounts may be needed to cover taxes and stuff like that).

Stuff: In the next few weeks, I will start selling or giving away a large part of my books, CDs, DVDs, etcetera. I will also start looking for a transport company that will ship whatever I won't get rid of to th US without costing an arm and a leg. But I'm aiming to keep that part to a minimum: the Stokke chairs, the A3 scanner, my unsold original art and some irreplaceble books should cover it.

Driving: Amazingly, it's a year ago that I started my driving lessons. I had to drop out of them due to being too tired after work to learn anything or indeed be safe. In Tennessee, an adult has to be able to drive, so I'm going to have to go back to driving class and hope I don't run into the same problem again.

Health/exercise: I put on weight while staying in Tennessee. That by itself isn't so bad; it's not like I am being immobilized by carrying a ton of flesh around. But I do feel flabby and spent much of this weekend and the previous one not having much energy at all (see "Driving" above for an example of how that hurts me). Time to pick up running again. Running every other day should reverse the weight gain and help me fit in my pants again so I won't have to buy new ones, and it should help me feel better and get my energy and drive back.

Comics: To be honest, my biggest problem relating to my own comics is that I'm not as motivated as I used to be. If I really wanted to, I could keep the comic going on a weekly schedule between now and May 29 or the day the storyline is over, whichever is earliest. But I'm kind of burned out for now.
Having said that, I have no idea what effects the work related to moving out will have on the comic. I do know that I will want to take it easy over the next few months and not bust myself out to make deadline. It's entirely possible that I might find a way to squeeze some extra money for my goals out of the comic, in which case the readers benefit from my plans. Or I might take a long break so I have time to read emigration documentation. It's all up in the air right now.

It's another episode of "Interesting stuff I'm reading":

Answers in Genesis refuses God's command and Ken Ham should repent (from Answers in Leviticus

Les Paul Youtube Friday an old Crooked Timber post rounding up music by Les Paul, pioneer of the electric guitar and multitracking, who died this week aged 94. One they missed, at Lawyer's, Guns and Money.

Also at Crooked Timber, a rather wrongheaded attempt at understanding the basis of Megan McArdle's position on healthcare reform (wrongheaded because engaging McArdle's opinions or indeed taking them seriously at all is a waste of time and only encourages her to post more) nevertheless leads to some good discussion on European health care systems.

But since people do take McArdle seriously for some reason, here's The Hunting of the Snark countering the argument that changing the health care system in the US will stifle innovation.

Also on health care, Cell phone service and healthcare at Angry Bear was good for a chuckle.

Daniel Davies, again at Crooked Timber, examines the claim that humanitarian intervention in Rwanda would have stopped the genocide and concludes that it wouldn't, because it didn't.

Finally, does anyone know if anything that looks likethis creature is common in Austria? Many years ago while vacationing there, I was spooked by a large twitchy insect thing with false eyes, and seeing this picture brought it all back. The critter in the picture is a click beetle and was shot in the United States

Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly gets a question in his e-mail and passes it on to his readers:

So why are far-right activists so apoplectic? Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that will help them and their families? President Obama supports an approach to health care reform that emphasizes competition and choice, doesn't increase the deficit, and wouldn't raise middle class taxes ... and conservatives are comparing the plan to the Nazi Holocaust?

Because every last one of them has a mental age of fourteen.

This has been another edition of "Simple answers to simple questions"*). If you want a longer, more nuanced answer, go to Benen's post linked above, but honestly, this one fits the facts as well as anything he says.

*) which is a formula that I've been told can be credited to Atrios. I dunno. Everyone and their dog is using it.

Allright, this post is the big announcement I've been promising to make since I came back from the US on Monday. It took a bit longer because I came home with a cold on top of my jetlag, AND I had to get straight back to work the next day. It's taken me this long to get on top of things.

I'll keep it brief: Aggie and I are getting married! I've been sitting on that announcement for a long time; I asked Aggie back in March. Back then, though, we didn't have a date set yet. We do now, so the big news is that Aggie and I are getting married in a historic location in middle Tennessee on May 29, 2010.

Back in March, just the act of asking her was a big phase shift in our relationship and my feelings about committing myself. Things just fell into place emotionally. But it didn't have any immediate practical influence. That's going to change, because the marriage means I'm going to move to the United States, and that's a pretty big, scary, complicated move to make.

But that's something to write about another day. Today, I'm just happy to let everyone know what's going on in our lives and that we're planning to be together for a long, long time.

Just one year after "Recovery", Loudon Wainwright III has another album in the pipeline, and it's another project-oriented record, based on the life and career of old-time North Carolina banjo picker Charlie Poole. It's called High Wide & Handsome and there's some video documenting the project and highlighting the songs on the project's website. As you can see, he's brought the whole family in - while I don't like everything that all of them have done, there's no denying that his ex-wife and offspring are a fantastic talent pool.

This is one record I'm gonna snap up unheard when it comes out. Loudon has been on a very strong streak in the past four or five years, and from what I hear in the video's, this record, too, should be a goody.

Out of the Kitchen, onto the Couch. Michael Pollan reminisces about Julia Child and discusses the contradictions inherent in the Food Network.
In Defense of Food Network. Tristero disagrees with Michael Pollan.
The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. 1972 article by Murray Rothbard describing exactly in what ways Objectivism functioned as a cult and demanded blind loyalty to its leader and her doctrine, all in the name of reason. Useful to know about now that Ayn Rand's work is back in the limelight again.
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush. James A Haught at the Council for Secular Humanism writes that former French President Jacques Chirac alleges that former US President George W. Bush invited him in 2003 to help invade Iraq to "thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse". Seriously. If true, it's pretty much a miracle that the world survived eight years with Bush's hand on the red button.

Mac Boot Key combos
Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive.

If you ever need to do a salvage operation after you've left your Time Machine disk on another continent for a month or two, these two articles will come in very handy. I think I've got everything now, so it's time to wipe and reinstall my normal configuration.

Afternoon update: Salvage and restore now completed - whatever I didn't rescue from that drive is now gone. Conclusions:
1. Late 2008 MacBook hardware is unreliable, rickety and prone to overheating.
2. However, there seems to be no permanent damage to the drive. I could restore to the hard drive I already had.
3. Time Machine is useful but is not the saviour of back-up and restore as I previously thought. I had a hard time importing from it and eventually gave up and imported from my external emergency disk (which was itself imported from Time Machine; funny that) instead.

Now I can at least scan my next update. That means I'd better go finish drawing it.

Wow, it's been a whole month already since I did the stats thing. Last month's statistics. July's results are as follows:

ROCR.net: 82343 pageviews, 8184 month-on-month unique visitors. down from 98002/8434.
ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16810 pageviews, uniques unknown, up from 9951.
QOTWQ/ROCR@Moderntales jointly: 5427 pageviews (estimated), monthly uniques unknown, down from 9341.

Apart from the Drunk Duck numbers, these stats are pretty dismal. As I'm not interested right now in increasing my advertising budget, there isn't much that I can do about it other than try to increase the update frequency, which is unlikely to be succesful. I have other priorities at this time, it's as simple as that.
One exception: I can start adding more comics to the COTWQ mirror again. I had quietly started mirroring the Corby Tribe storyline, currently being rerun on Drunk Duck in remastered form, there, but had stopped due to time constrained. I do want as many people as possible to see the new version of the storyline, so this week I'll start catching up. But even that is simply republishing and re-mirroring old material. The flow of new material will not speed up for now. Sorry.

I'm back in the Netherlands after 2 1/2 months in Tennessee. I've got some announcements to make and a backlog of other things I want to write about on the blog, but they'll have to wait as I'm exhausted, jetlagged and sick with a cold.

I did get a few things done since arriving here. I've renewed the domain registration for five years so I won't have to think about it again until 2014. And I've started recovering data from my Macbook, which broke down spectacularly while I was in Tennessee. Let's just say that I'm unimpressed with the hardware quality on Apple's newer laptops.