jeffaBlog

Finally got to spend some time working on jeffaBlogger.

Finished alpha version of the app-which-must-not-be-named. My wife will be testing that one until I get the ole jeffaBlogger up to snuff so she can use it for her site. Once we get there I’ll provide info and links from here.

A large chunk of time was spent getting my head back to the state it was in when I switched from jeffaBlogger to that project a couple of weeks back.

I think I’m back up to speed now and ready to plow forward.

My goals for the next few weeks are:

1. Basic blog functionality (for multiple blogs)
2. Basic interaction with Live Writer
3. Basic image gallery functionality (for comics)
4. Profile maintenance for members (hey, let’s all be social)

That should be a good chunk of work.

It is difficult to wait for jeffaBlogger to be ready. The urge is to deploy soon, but once you deploy something you solidify it to some extent. Have to force myself to hang tight a few more weeks before going live with the sites I’m planning…

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is from several years ago. I have not recently been to the ER…

Someone I follow on Twitter lopped off part of a finger and was tweeting about it. I thought she might enjoy this…

I learned several valuable lessons one weekend:

1) Sometimes it's best to lose a point in a game you are playing rather than following the Nike admonition to "Just Do It"

2) Your ankle is only supposed to bend in certain directions

3) Your ankle has a limit to how FAR it should bend in any given direction

4) Don't go to the emergency room on a Sunday unless there is a better than 50% chance you are going to die

5) If you do go, for God's sake take a book or something (it might take a while for you to die)

6) Some cell phones cannot withstand a 2.5 foot drop from a wheelchair to a tile floor

7) Take ear-plugs if the sounds of people screaming bothers you

8) Don't sit next to someone who seems to have appendicitis. They puke a lot. A LOT.

9) Don't let pets in the kitchen when you are cooking. You might cut a significant portion of your finger off if Fluffy decides to jump on you (at least that one made be feel better about my ankle)

10) In the emergency room it is sometimes necessary for the workers to say unusual things like, "is the rest of your finger in this bag?"

11) Just because you can't wear a shoe on your injured foot, doesn't mean you shouldn't wear a shoe on the other foot. You might have to go to the bathroom...

12) X-Ray tables are good places to freeze meat

13) People involved in shootings say colorful things

14) Do NOT flip the little blue switch

15) Be glad the doctors don't feel the need to race you in...

16) Not everything they do hurts, just most things

17) FastTrack means they will probably see you today

18) Badminton isn't for the weak (ankled)

19) Even when your ankle makes a sickening ripping sound, you have between 30 and 60 seconds before the real pain hits. Enjoy those moments.

Here’s my idea of the most awesome possible outcome of Disney buying Marvel:

This is my homage to both companies. They of course own all their copyrights, trademarks, etc. If they want to use my idea for a line of comic books, they can sign me up as the first subscriber.

I did this completely with a brush instead of my usual pen/nib. I need a smaller brush so it meant REALLY having to be steady to do the fine strokes. The shading on the shield was especially difficult with the brush.

Most people who care about this issue seem to be upset that Disney is buying Marvel. I really loved the Disney comics when I was growing up. They tended to have far deeper stories than the cartoons.

I had a lot of fun doing this one. When I heard Disney was buying Marvel I immediately began thinking of which Disney character would be good in which Marvel role. Donald is obvious since his anger management issues rival the Hulk's any way.

Mickey as Captain America seemed obvious as well. That cast them as the Avengers right there, so the next two who had to be there were Thor and Iron Man. Goofy's taller than the rest of the characters and I thought with the appropriately "goofy" equipment he'd work out.

Ten points to anyone who knows who is under that Iron Man armor! Should be obvious to anyone who read the Disney comics, pretty obscure to everyone else. He did appear in the Duck Tales show I hear (but that was after I had stopped watching cartoons because I was too old, but before I was old enough to have kids and start watching them again!).

Guess what? I ticked off Facebook by posting links to this drawing on the various Disney related groups, and they blocked me! I guess they figured anyone who posts links must be selling something. If anyone came here under the assumption I would be selling something, then I'll try to dig up something around the house to sell. I have a bunch of really old broken computers! Um, how about a 10 MB hardrive for one of the original crop of Macintoshes? Pretty rocks?

The New York Times has an article about the prospect of sending people to Mars less expensively by NOT BRINGING THEM BACK.

Now THAT is outside the beltway thinking!

Who knew our space program was being hobbled all these years by an antiquated insistence that people who are shot into space should expect to be brought back. Alive even!

The article suggests that many people, especially scientists, would be perfectly willing to sign up for a one way ticket to the red planet where they could live out the remainder of their lives doing SCIENCE! Think of the exciting research they would probably produce! Oxygen producing machines, water producing machines, cosmic ray block (SPF 40 X 10²³)…

Cosmic rays, it turns out, are less likely to give you superpowers than cancer. I KNOW! I was shocked by that thought too. Turns out that even if we DO try to bring the astronauts back to earth, they will STILL DIE sooner than if they hadn’t gone to Mars.

That brings us to part two of the plan: send old folks. Well, it stands to reason that if you are going to shorten someone’s life, you should make it be by the smallest PERCENTAGE possible. If you shave three years off the life of someone who is 100, then you have only knocked off 3%. If you do that to someone who is 50 then it balloons to 6%. If you sent a one year old it would be a staggering 300% of his life so far! Outrageous!

Sen. Al Franken (D – MN) proposed in one of his books that sending senior citizens into space would help solve the Social Security crisis. No, really he did. Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (Of course it was one of his humor books and very funny, I might add.)

I can see the advertisement now:

Yes, Mars is the land of Milk of Magnesia and Honey flavored cough drops. Send Granny to a better place. ALL her health care needs will be provided FREE OF COST on Mars. You will be GUARANTEED BY THE GOVERNMENT a regular EMAIL UPDATE from Granny, since radio signals from Mars tend to be garbled. Don’t you worry about Granny! She’s made of hardy, pioneer stock!

The last bit of the article I found interesting was the account of polling scientists about whether or not they would sign up for such a trip.

One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand.

I imagine that later that day he told them how much science could be conducted by someone who jumped into a volcano and they all made a mad dash like so many apocryphal lemmings leaping gleefully to their molten doom.

Ask NOT what your country can do for you, just get your butt on the rocket Professor Granny!

I’ve been so busy working on the software side of things for the past several weeks (and months) that I haven’t had a chance to do much drawing or comics.

I have a couple of one-off ideas I’d like to do as well as getting back to work on Funzietown.com and another strip I’ve been playing around with.

If I can finish up jeffaBlogger (and the super mysterious secret project I mentioned in my last post) to a point that I can host the various sites, I hope I can take a breather on that front and do some comics. Plus some writing.

For now I’m sitting here watching ETL processes chug along. The fun part with that is if you have a bug, it can take 15 or 20 minutes of processing (or more) just to get to the point in the process where it breaks. Makes for tedious debug cycle. Make time for super-short, micro-blogging however…