Waffle

Here's a first: Today, for the first time, I've rejected an ad on ROCR.net and banned the Project Wonderful member posting it. The advertiser was a tacky Italian lottery site that's probably illegal in my country and for all I know is completely fraudulent. Nuh-uh. No way am I accepting those ads (he said, reminding himself to keep an eye on the google ads that this post throws up).

Generally speaking, as an advertiser, I find it very annoying when a PW site insists on approving every ad by hand. It leads to delays and uncertainty, which degrades the value of the entire service as far as I'm concerned. Because of this, I've set all ad boxes that I host to "automatically accept everything". So far, it's been highly unlikely that anyone hosting ads will be confronted with inappropriate ads. If more gambling-oriented sites of the kind that have been traditionally advertised through spam join the system, that may have to change... but the interface for blocking ads and banning advertisers is actually pretty easy and convenient to use. So I'll leave things as they are and will continue to advise other PW members hosting ads to set their ad blocks to automatically accept everything.

• White House in Orbit: Orbital Germans has started. I'm running an ad campaign for it, and I've put up a provisional home page for the series for people to bookmark and link to. Of course, the series also runs on the ROCR.net home page.
• The "Oh-my-god-why-are-the-scans-suddenly-tiny-and-ugly" point in the Guðrún storyline has been pushed to the comic for November 8, 2000 the comic for November 27, 2000. I'll add some more remastered comics today. It's going reasonably fast now. infinity. The work is done, folks!
• All this work on Guðrún is making me itch to put it into print. Not that I expect there to be many buyers; after all, only a handful of people have signed up for the Headsmen collection - not nearly enough to lift it out of its current vaporware status. But perhaps Guðrún would be more popular? One never knows.

The current guest comics sequence will be followed up, over the Christmas period, by more archival material. I'll be running the first White House in Orbit serial "Orbital Germans" on the website, in a remastered version based on new, cleaned-up scans.

I'm not nearly far enough along with Feral to resume posting that story. I've got seven pages drawn, but not lettered or coloured. Based on my experience posting the first batch, I would run out of pages in no time even if I had those seven ready to go. So something else will have to run in its place.

As you may know, I've got a love/hate relationship with regular update schedules. As a reader, I like them; as a website publisher, I find it satisfying to have them. But as an artist, I no longer want to be a slave to them. Unless I wring a living wage out of my webcomics somehow, I'm going to produce them at my leisure.

That leaves me with the need to post something else on the website, to keep... and of course, when I announced the interruption of Feral's regular publication, I said something about sidecomics. At least I have been working on that a little bit. But the problem with sidecomics is that they tend to disappear in the vast archives. Some of the batch I posted a year ago have been very succesful, especially the one-pager Chain Mail Bikini which I'd been sitting on for years, convinced, based on the reaction of one person I told the script to, that it wasn't any good at all. But while they do reach their audience eventually, they don't benefit from the exposure that comics posted on the front page get. So from now on, I intend to give every comic I add to the site, whether it's a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic or not, its day in the sun.

I've long been meaning to consolidate White House in Orbit into my main website again. My first effort was with a site hosted on Keenprime several years ago, which never got off the ground. Most of White House in Orbit was made in periods when I was also working hard on other comics. Especially back in 2001, I was maintaining a regular schedule with Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan while also drawing the first season of Floor, and WHIO never got as much time and attention expended on it as it needed. I remember spending a lot of my time working on it being stressed out and frustrated at unstable software. I want to avoid a repetition of that, so don't expect me to run two webcomics simultaneously any time soon. Instead, I will make a serious effort to give WHIO a decent-sized audience, using tools I didn't have at my disposal back in 2001, such as Project Wonderful.

By the way, doing things this way (producing at leisure, running one comic at the time, giving each installment of every comic I post its day in the sun), I should be able to update the site 7 days a week, possibly for as long as a year. So that will be my aim for 2007: 365 updates. Many, perhaps most, of these won't be ROCR updates though, and it may turn out to be necessary to re-brand the site, to start presenting it as reinderdijkhuis.com rather than rocr.net. Not that rocr.net URLs will stop working, but there may well be a change in emphasis. We'll see.

Embarrassingly, there's still some uncertainty as to when the WHIO reruns will start. The most likely date is Sunday, December 17, when the guest comics run out. But there's still a slight chance of one guest comic arriving on Saturday, and if it does, I'll reschedule the WHIO comics and post that on Sunday. If the guest comic doesn't arrive on Saturday, I'll post it on New Year's Eve instead. The flexibility of WillowCMS allows me to do that and still keep the archives coherent in the long run.

Speaking of which, Mithandir has been busy working on new features, which will be rolled out on the ROCR site in the next week or so.

Got something to say about my plans for next year? Comment in the forum!

Last Saturday, a few hours after posting this, I made a deal with my supplier in which the issue of the memory sticks was resolved, and I got my PC back with a new motherboard and hard drive. I partitioned and formatted the new drive, installed SuSE linux 10.0 on it and started copying my administration and working files to the new drive, from the old 40 Gig drive which was still installed. I also moved my music collection to a data partition on the new drive and started downloading some old Doctor Who seasons just because I had that much space to fill for the first time in years.
Because of the download, I left the PC on overnight for a few nights. When I got out of bed on Tuesday morning, the PC was unresponsive. I rebooted it and was greeted with a large number of file system errors. Because I needed to plan my travel for a workshop in Emmen, I panicked a bit, but eventually I managed to boot the PC from a Kubuntu LiveCD and after a few attempts managed to mount the partitions on the new drive, causing the reiserfs journal entries to get replayed so the drive could be shut down properly. Yes, this is going to be that kind of post. Long and technical.
I ran fsck a few times with different options as well, but I do think it was mainly mounting the disks that caused the problem to go away for the time being. I shut the PC down, rebooted it after my workshops and it worked normally. So I resumed the download and continued to leave the PC on overnight. One might argue that that was irresponsible, but hey, I knew how to solve the problem if it reoccurred, right? And if it did, I might be able to investigate it in my own time, without running in panic mode, and solve it properly.
Well, that didn't turn out that way. I got the same problem again on Thursday, so I rebooted into Kubuntu LiveCD, did what I did last time, and rebooted my normal system again. Only now I got a new set of hard-drive-related I/O errors during SuSE bootup, and when I rebooted again, I got hard drive errors during the BIOS bootup stage. Eep.
Booting into Kubuntu LiveCD again for another look at my disks turned out to be harder than it had been before. The Hard Drive error occurred before the system decides to boot from the CD... luckily, it doesn't occur every time, and upon repeated tries I got the LiveCD to boot. Unfortunately, LiveCD technology isn't all that reliable, and this one had about five different places in the bootup process where it could and would get stuck, including at the end, when it sometimes displays a 1280*1024 pixel desktop on a screen set to 640*380. Now, there are plenty of linux geeks around who can fly blindly and fix problems like that without being able to see what's on their screen. I'm not one of them. If I can't see nearly all the contents of the screen, I can't fix the screen configuration, so in those situations, all that's left for me to do is reboot and try again.
When I did get Kubuntu to run properly, I found I could no longer see the new drive in the Disk/File system configuration screen, so I figured that at the very least, the file system was a goner, and possibly the hardware as well. So I fetched my portable hard drive from the studio, so I could back up the data that was still on the old hard drive. That way, if the new drive was broken, I'd be able to do a fresh OS install on the old drive. But while I was copying over my working files, the old hard drive also began to fail, and it didn't last long enough to copy over my Opera config files (which contain my email and my password). Upon a remount, the system returned similar I/O errors to the ones I remember seeing on Thursday morning. It's very likely now that that drive is also dead. It's like my computer is rotting!
I've called the shop about the problem. They invited me to bring my PC back to them, but mentioned that they were still drowning in repair work. I've mentioned their workload before - it's a big part of what caused the three-week wait before I got the machine back the first time. It may also have been the cause of some less than stirling workmanship; the intermittent nature of the Hard Drive Errors may be a sign that it's actually functional but not connected properly.
So I've decided to take some cooling-off time in which I weigh my options. I could take it back to the shop; I could take it to another shop; I could get a more hardware-savvy friend to look at it. If I get really desperate, I could open it myself and see if someone didn't connect the yellow wire right.
Or I could give this machine up as a bad job, reevaluate my computing needs and start with a fresh system. If the hard drives are broken and the data on them lost, I have no real reason to keep tinkering with this system; I might as well get something new that's more adequate to my needs right now.
When I bought my current system, I had a need to edit high-res comics in mind, and got a decent processor as well as as much memory as I could fit in. As it turned out, I've only ever used that power a handful of times since. All my productive work is done in the studio - on the desktop PC if possible, on the iBook if necessary. The home machine is used for getting online and playing media, and doesn't do the latter all that well.
And while I'm at it consider that:
1) I consider not having to spend time rummaging in the innards of a computer a good indicator of my quality of life;
2) I find tinkering with Operating Systems and getting software to run somewhat interesting, but it's not something I should spend great amounts of time on, which linux tends to make me do too often;
3) I don't trust Windows - I think XP is ancient and unsafe, and don't think Vista was developed with my interests in mind;
4) I don't have a lot of space in my apartment;
5) Me and my iBook, we get along very well...
...what's to stop me from just plonking a Mac Mini in the space where the PC is now, and join the army of computer dimwit graphical artists for a while? Well, apart from the price of the damned things. But maybe if I work a bit harder while there's no PC at home to distract me, I might earn the money soon enough.
Oh, and there's the issue of getting Macs online through @home.nl. But then I'm a bit fed up with them anyway.

I may be slow to respond to mail or comments in the next week or so, because I have no working internet connection at home.

Last Monday, my home PC refused to boot up. I now know that the problem is with the motherboard, which, as it turned out is in a kind of customer-service limbo: it's no longer being made but still under warranty. The store says they can still get it but it'd take a while. They also offered an inexpensive replacement mo-bo of a slightly different type that would fit the chip, but I expect that I would end up having to spend an afternoon reinstalling linux (after first backing up my financial data, correspondence and ROCR website archive just in case I wipe my file system again) just to get a few tiny details right, so right now I'd prefer waiting for the warranty replacement.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to get the iBook online. Looks like getting online at @home.nl is to join the surprisingly long list of things I just can't figure out how to do with a Mac, even after two tech support calls. It's the first one that's actually important, and failure to get it done will affect either my future use of Apple computers, @home.nl's internet service, or both.
While not being able to get online from home has its advantages, it's bad on the whole because I couldn't get to my business email, some of which I had to act on that very morning, and I couldn't check on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site at update time. I will have to urge all my contacts to direct their correspondence to reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com, but I can't make them. I still get non-spam email at samizdat@bart.nl, which hasn't been my public addess in ages, and I still hear from people that they've tried to contact me through reinder@despammed.com, which hasn't worked in over a year.
As for the updates, I guess I'll have to double-check them before they go live, and the loss of my home connection has also served to remind me that I need to buffer as far ahead as I can. So yesterday I spent several hours setting up my future updates through to the end of the guest comics reruns. I now know reruns will continue until December 12 so if you want to contribute a guest comic, that will be your new deadline. I do plan to keep the number of new guest comics low, simply because they'll come at the end of six weeks of guest comics - but at the same time, I want there to be some new ones to finish off those six weeks.
It's pretty inconvenient for this to happen during my busiest month in years. I'll muddle through, I guess. Let's at least hope that by tonight I'll have the iBook online.

I'm in the process of becoming the main tenant of the studio I've been working in for the past five years, taking over from studio-mate Edmond. On Monday, we both went to the corp that owns the building, Edmond signed a document canceling his contract, and I signed the new one. That bit was easy.
What's not so easy is paying the deposit. Back then, Edmond just gave the corp's representative the deposit in cash and got a receipt. Since then, there have been some changes in how these things are done. The corp came with the seemingly reasonable request that instead of paying the deposit directly and polluting their books with money that isn't theirs, I give them a bank guarantee for the amount. So today, after asking about how this worked at the Postbank's desk, I went to ING bank (the same company as the Postbank, but their serious banking branch) to ask about it. I got a very nice welcome - I was asked to wait for one of their staff, who then lead me into a meeting room, gave me coffee, held an introductory talk and then eased into the business part, getting my info and explaining the arcane workings of bank guarantees to me. Including the cost.
If the song and dance weren't indication enough to me that this wasn't the sort of transaction normally handled at the front desk, the cost was. Bank guarantees come with a 60 Euro administrative fee and a quarterly provision of 1% - perfectly reasonable if you're renting an € 10,000/month office space, but not for a one-off deposit of € 287, which is what our tiny studio's rent is.
The bank guy actually told me he'd never been asked for a bank guarantee for such a low amount. I'm feeling all special now.

I'll be asking the company that recently set up in the room next to us how they worked that out. But I expect I'll be simply sending the deposit to the corp's bank account, or maybe drop sixty bales of potatoes on their doorstep. I don't know. If you want something kept off the books, potatoes are the way to go, I guess.

[Rahball]
I have designed a soft toy of the famous O RLY owl.

I'm now collecting pre-orders via the website linked above. When I get 500, I'll be getting them mass produced. Go on! You know you want one!

I will be refining this design soon, to make it even more like the photograph. And once the O RLY owl's out there, stay tuned for his friends, the YA RLY and NO WAI!! owls...

As you may have noticed, I've been switching tooncasts around on the ROCR front page. For the time being, I'll switch manually between Alcydia and Guðrún, probably until I get fed up. I'm still dubious about whether people actually see the tooncasts in the spot they're in, but they do push those comics up the Webcomicsnation charts, which should get them noticed elsewhere.

I've reorganised the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives a bit. There's now a crossover section which includes Keenquest/Even In Arcadia and Incognito, the latter in larger scans than during its run on The Bare-Pit. I still need to add some annotiations to Incognito but will do so ASAP.

I've got until tonight to send a list of invites to the presentation of the "Groningen bij Nacht" book and Ricky van Duuren's collection of comics at Vera on September 8. Anyone want an invite? I know I've got a few readers living in the Netherlands... Email me at reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com.

An English version of my contribution to "Groningen bij Nacht" is currently being serialised on ROCR.net.

I have one more bonus piece for the Keenquest/Even in Arcadia storyline. It's another comic originally made for the The Pantheon website. After that, I will run "Roadworks Goblins", a short story I made for an anthology book that's about to come out in September. It's not a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story — it's more related to the Little Cottage in the Woods stories I made with Geir a few years ago.

After that, I hope to fill a few days with a short ROCR story while also buffering for the next proper ROCR storyline, "Feral". The art for the first few pages is very labour-intensive, so I need a little more time to create a nice buffer, even with the schedule moving back to Monday/Wednesday/Friday.
"But wait," I hear you ask, "Didn't you say you weren't going to do the regular schedule thing anymore once you got back to doing new material?" I think I did, but I've changed my mind. Let me tell you what happened last week.

I was trying to write the next Gang of Four page for Hello You! magazine. I spent two days practically dozing in front of my iBook, then at 3 PM on Thursday, my editor asked me when she could expect the script, so she could send it to the language corrector before she went on holiday. So I took a deep breath, made tea, sat down on the studio balcony with my sketchbook, and wrote it in ten minutes.

I need deadlines. Without them, I go slack and become easily distracted. For a while, I was burned out on producing to a deadline, and it was a relief to just publish old material for a year and a half. But now it's time to jump back in the grind.
"Feral" will be produced on a deadline, but it will have to be a realistic, reachable one. To make this possible, I'm delaying the story's start a little, but I am also joining the second edition of the Lazy Grind, a competition among webcartoonists to see who can update on a thrice-weekly schedule the longest without missing an update. That starts on September 11, leaving me with four days' worth of updates on the old schedule to fill between the end of "Roadworks Goblins" and the start of "Feral". The comic will update on those days.

That's the state of things for now. Do take care to read my guest storyline at The Bare-Pit, Geir and Daniel's Alcydia and Abúi's misadventures in the world of Chasing the Sunset.