Ranting and Raving

And productive too!

Saturday, I built a notebook I had lying around into a new web development/staging server.

The gory details:

IBM Thinkpad 380z, 233Mhz, 64M Ram, 4G HDD.
Redhat 9.0 running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and various and sundry other goodies.
Since I want the processing power for the good stuff, it does not boot to X.

It is Waaay quicker than its predecessor, and getting it going was easier than I'd planned. The only snag I ran into was with the PHP parser. It's a later version than what had been on the RH 7.2 box, and had globals turned off by default, so it wasn't parsing my code. Turned globals on (which is also the way my ISP has their PHP Parser set up) and everything was hunky dory.

Sunday, I pencilled AND inked Tuesday's strip. So much nicer than the past two weeks when I ended up inking hastily Monday night. I was able to use the dip-pen rather than the fountain pen (though I lettered with the fountain pen). It was more relaxed and deliberate than inking with the fountain pen. Inking with a dip pen has some of the characteristics of meditation. And tonight was the first time I inked without music. It was very refreshing.

Got Tuesday's strip pencilled and inked. I'm happier with it than I've been with many. Tomorrow I will scan it. The first panel contains some stuff that I'm going to computer letter, because I don't think I can do a decent Courier by hand, and the dialogue is a written exchange between Grendel and his PC. In PHP.

Which reminds me. . . the PHP program that serves up the comic has a little glitch in the calendar control that causes the latest comic to be displayed when one of the Month links is clicked, unless there is a strip for the first day of the next month, or the last day of the previous one. A look at Cat-Tharsis' log database has revealed to me that this glitch has confused at least one visitor, so I need to fix that. It should be easily accomplished with a couple of trivial functions.

morgan1 and I went paddling yesterday. Two lakes and four portages. It was the first time this year that I was out in my solo boat, which is just sad. It beat the snot out of me, which is testimony to just out of tone I've become from lack of paddling. Oh well, it was an extraordinarily depressing year, but things have been starting to look up. It seems that to be willing to do a lot of the fun stuff, like paddling and camping, etc. I really need to feel that I have a stable base, and with the past year being the least stable since . . . well since the last time the President's name was a four letter word, I haven't really had the confidence that that confers.