Previous News08.15.2011 - Terrence Marks:Happy Monday.
What have we been up to? Last week I took some time out for fun and went to see DEVO with my friends. The guys put on a good show. Decent mix of old and new material. I hear it's hard on a band when most of the crowd's there to hear your hit single. It must be harder when most of the people are there to hear the hit single from thirty years ago. But they still rock. I prefer guitar-based DEVO to keyboard-based DEVO; Are We Not Men is my favorite album of theirs. I enjoyed the concert, but I was delighted when they switched instruments halfway through.
As I mentioned last Sunday, we had some car issues and some Internet issues. Planned on going to work a bit early, maybe get some overtime. I turn the key. The engine chugs once or twice, then just clicks.
According to the Internet, it's either a battery issue, a starter issue, or an alternator issue. Now, I'll mention that last year, my car went through four starters in three months. This one has been working pretty well, but I really don't want to start that process over again.
So I open the hood and start cleaning the battery contacts. It's not the most likely fix, but it's one of the few useful things I can do with the tools available to me. Turns out the battery/alternator/starter wasn't the only thing to go. The hydraulic thing that holds the hood up when you open it doesn't work either. So I have to keep pushing it open every minute or so. I get the corrosion off the contacts just in time for me to leave for work, and nothing. The car still just clicks.
None of the local places rent cars on Sundays. I work until midnight, a long way away so there's nobody I can ask for a ride. I could try to find a mechanic that's open and get it towed there, but my car has over 200,000 miles on it - there's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay to keep the car going, and that limit is slowly getting lower and lower.
Fortunately, my father-in-law is a mechanic. He has a multimeter. It turns out that it's a battery problem, which is the cheapest and easiest of the alternatives. He also remembers that the battery is under warranty. I was able to get this fixed for under $30. And a day of work. But it's fixed.
That night, we also had out wireless router stop working three times in an hour, which is why comics were late. That story is less interesting. (It's not the first time it happened, so we went and bought a new router. The end.) It wasn't a good day to be an electrical device that we owned, though.
Favorite ND character (round 2)
Twix Snickers Cerise Mamma Dorpe Murphy Dorpe
Really? No love for Murphy Dorpe? Just one vote? I'd think the moustache alone would be good for, like, ten. Snickers won this one handily, with Twix and Cerise rounding out the Dorpe-Namir family poll.
08.10.2011 - Terrence Marks:We're going three days a week for Namir Deiter and You Say it First this month. That's all the comics I think we can reliably deliver to you. We've got a lot of little things going on, and I don't want to tell you we can go five days a week, then end up falling behind and scrambling to stay on top of things. I'd rather be able to give you comics on consistently and time, because you deserve that.08.04.2011 - Terrence Marks:First of all, comics are going to run late this week. Isabel has family obligations that require us to shift our schedule forward by about six hours. We apologize for not having comics done before this, but it's not something we can skip on or risk sleeping through.Secondly, you'll notice that several of the You Say it First arcs have had a Recommended Reading tag. There hasn't been one on the recent storylines because there's an awful lot of it. The stories are meant to stand on their own. I hope they do, but it's a moderately complex situation and I think that if you understand more, you'll enjoy it more. If you want to catch up on the backstory:
A lot of what we're seeing here goes back to The Troublesome Troubles of Ms. Taylor.
Kimberly's Grandfather and the history of Lemon Technology were mentioned in The New Guy, The Letter, and What Happened?.
Patrick and Sofia's relationship was a primary focus of The Dance. and The Roommate, and a large plot point in Lateral Transfer.
Patrick's interactions with Brisbane, Kimberly, (and Richard and Sinclair) are many, but the more notable and recent ones include Employee of the Year, Lateral Transfer, and Port Problems.
If you're just getting in, this chain of events (and all the ones in the Troubled Times stories) were set in motion by The Troublesome Troubles of Patrick Windsor.
I'm not sure that's everything, but I believe it's a good start.08.02.2011 - Terrence Marks:Favorite ND Character (Division 1)
Tipper Charles Gabby Joan
Votes so far: 453
We saw Charles and Gabby in a dead heat, with Joan not far behind. Tipper wins with not only a majority but a plurality. I'm not surprised. I almost feel bad about putting people up against Tipper. Almost.07.27.2011 - Terrence Marks:A few days ago, there was a Namir Deiter comic about how it takes a couple days to get a password reset in Final Battle Adventure On-Line.
I said, "It's a modern game, Isabel. There's no reason to have people there just to reset passwords. Is there anybody out there who doesn't have an automatic password reset system these days?"
Then Isabel asked me if NamirDeiter.net had an automatic password reset system.
At that point, I got real quiet and tried to pretend I was too busy playing video games to hear her.
It didn't work, and NamirDeiter.net now has an automated password reset system. If you're a subscriber, please make sure we have your current email address on file, since the passwords get emailed to you.07.25.2011 - Terrence Marks:As you can see, the comics are bigger. 70% larger, in fact. We've been doing comics at 650 pixels wide since 1999. Back then, that was pretty big for a comic. You didn't want to get much bigger. All our readers were on dial-up, and they'd get impatient if the page took more than a minute to load.650 pixels wide was a pretty good size. Then one day we looked around and you know which comics were larger than that? All of them. Nobody has to resize and downsample images like they used to. Most of you have transitioned off of dial-up. My current phone loads websites faster than my computer did back then.
Also, the sites got redesigned a bit. Hopefully this will make navigation a bit cleaner and less crowded around the comic. You Say it First got a new logo. The donation bar got a makeover and looks a bit sharper. It looks especially good when it's filled, but I may be biased.
We've still got a bit of work to do, like resizing the donation rewards box, creating ads for Namir Deiter (which is why You Say it First is currently advertising You Say it First), and putting the new logo on all of the pages. NamirDeiter.net has evaded the previous upgrades, and is in need of more attention. But I could keep puttering about with the site design for months, getting all the little details just so or I could put it up and fix the little things over the next week.
I'm sorry about the lack of poll last week. I meant to get this switched over last Monday and ask if you thought the comics were too big, too small, or just right. Turns out that the changeover was more work than I expected, which means that it happened on Thursday, too late for a poll, and that I'm not going to readjust the comics' size unless something catastrophic happens. No point asking if you want it bigger; I'd just be looking for you to validate a decision I've already made.
We've got all of You Say it First resized, and Namir Deiter going back through May 2004. I've done an automated check to make sure all the comics are there. That's not quite the same as looking at them to make sure they're all good, but it's a decent first-order approximation. They're probably all intact and correct, but if you see any problems, please tag them "resize" so we can get to them.
In the meantime, enjoy the hugeness.07.19.2011 - Terrence Marks:Do you regularly read webcomics on a PDA, phone or other mobile device?I had been considered building mobile sites for our comics. It's the way of the future, according to people who get paid to tell us what the way of the future might be. Personally, I've used my phone to read comics a couple of times but didn't really see the appeal. Of course, I spend most of my day either in front of a computer or too busy to read comics.
Yes, including this one. Yes - if they have mobile-optimized sites. Yes - if they have an app. No - I'm not interested in reading comics on a mobile device No - I'm theoretically interested but haven't got around to it. No - I don't have a mobile device. Thing is, the point of the site isn't to show me the comics. I know what they look like before we upload them. My goal is to make the viewing experience as convenient as possible for you, the reader. Right now, under 3% of our traffic comes from mobile devices, if I'm doing the math right. There were two possibilities: either only 3% of our readers wanted to read our comics that way, or more people wanted to but the site needed to be made more mobile-friendly to accomodate them.
I'm going to guess that it was the first one. It looks like the technology isn't mature enough right now for mobile devices to be a viable alternate platform. I'm sure that will change as time goes by, but for now, that's where we are.