I was inspired for this cartoon this morning. I was looking at my cellphone, it has an application called notes. I have never used the notes tab but noticed there were several notes already there. They were notes from my daughters. Several of the notes said things how each or them rocked or how great they were. Of course I’m sure the notes were written about themselves, as neither would put anything nice about their sister.

   The nice surprise was each had written notes to me about how awesome I was. I sure enjoy them thinking so highly of me, while it lasts. I know there will be a few years were they won’t think I’m exactly awesome. They are 8 and 12 so my awesome days are numbered.

    On a side note DWEX (Dallas WebComic Weekend) is this Saturday November 14th. I did an inventory of all the stuff I’d hoping to possibly sell. I have many t-shirts and several mouse-pads to sell. Mostly I’m just hoping to network and promote my site. It is sure nice having a working site again. I’ve been pleased with my visit count the last few days with no new posts so I’m hoping today’s cartoon will do as well.

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  I drew this cartoon very fast did but did not save as I went a long. You’d think I would learn my lesson by now. I had too much stuff open and my PC locked up. So, I had to draw it again. I drew it quicker this time but think it actually came out a bit better but I had to reply on copy and paste more than I wanted to.  I’m trying to not use copy and paste much while drawing but it makes life easier, especially when it is getting very late.

  The cartoon was based once again on the wit of my oldest daughter. That girl is just plain funny. I had a few ways I could go with the final panel and may still change it later. I debated about the last panel making mention of my wife’s clothes being good for dress like a nerd day or 70s day. Still thinking but the the toon will be up on schedule.

    I’m fully on the new host and I’m really liking the new speed and the excellent interfaces provided by the host provider. I’m so glad I but the bullet and left the old lousy host.

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   This cartoon should have published on Tuesday but my site has been down for a week. I have done the update as if it did post on Tuesday for symmetry sake. I did publish it on Tuesday at donetfeedthegeek.wordpress.com so it’s not cheating.

   For the record my old host hostdepartment.com is still having issues. Just like in the cartoon the live chat is off and while the ticket system can be reached, sometimes, the tickets are being ignored. To me what is the most frustrating part is that hostdepartment.com has no changed their status in days and the status that is there says “a few hours” until it’s fixed. This is the worst outage they ever had for my site. My sites have been down for a full week but were having many issues before that.

   I’ve moved over to simplehelix.com now. While they are more expensive it is clear you get what you pay for. If ever my site takes off it looks like these guys could handle the traffic. So far I’m impressed at how quickly they have responded to my first ticket for migration. It was 7 minutes! If I get a response in 48 hours that would be new for me. I’m sorry for HD but I will NEVER use them for anything. I will be moving the rest of my business off of them ASAP.

   Now I need to work on tomorrow’s toon. No idea what it’ll be but I know I’ll be able to post it now.

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   First of all I am not knocking Fall Festivals that so many churches have. The church I work at and the church I attend both have fall festivals every year. The fall festival has been very common over the last few years as an alternative to Halloween. The idea is to provide a safe environment for the kids to wear costumes, have fun in bounce houses, and get way to much candy. One of the issues some Christians have is the pagan roots of Halloween. What many seem to forget it is the dates for Easter and Christmas also have roots in pagan traditions. As usual some folks like to pick and choose truths. Personally I have no issue with Halloween and I think it is time to take it back as just a fun holiday. When I was a kid we had Halloween parties at church and we called it a Halloween party. If it was OK back then with those fine Christians, why would it be wrong now?

    I do think, as always, some people get carried away with the macabre side of things. Some of the people in my neighborhood actually have some things in their yard that can be really disturbing and scary to little kids. I think we need to guard against some things but really think those who avoid Halloween may be just a bit paranoid. If you don’t want to celebrate by letting your kids trick-or-treat, then more power to you, but my kids will be out Saturday. Like the toon says, “Daddy needs candy”.

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   Somehow my post I wrote last night went away. Idid critisize  my web host a bit. Hmmmm. Well anyway, this cartoon is mostly true. I spent Sunday watching football with my buddy Sam, and the Cowboys won, Yeah. I had to be careful that he did not notice my back was giving me problems. I had to wait to get up when left the room or was distracted, because getting up has been tough. If you are wondering why I would hide it, you are probably not a guy and have never had a friend like Sam. This summer I had cracked a few ribs after a fall. I made the mistake of letting Sam see me take some Advil. From that point on he kept poking me in the ribs. I have learned over the years to also take advantage of him when he is in pain. If he makes the mistake of telling me he has sore arms or shoulders I feel obligated to poke him in the sore spot and ask “does it hurt there?” Yes, we are friends and yes we abuse each other. More like brothers at time as bad as we treat each other.

    If this page loaded slow it’s because my host had a DOS attack form within there servers. They say they are still working on it. So far today I only had about an hour of outage, which is nearly a record for this months so far. I’d move to a new host if I had time to plan and implement a move.

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  Today’s title takes on double meaning. My webhost has had my sites down for a few days. Lucky for me the outage came on the day I was celebrating my 200th cartoon. My stats obviously suffered on a day I should have had great numbers. I had several real cartoonist sending notifications of my 2ooth toon to their readers. Then these readers were created by a dead page. They have the problems “fixed” they say, but there is still some serious delay in loading pages. I had this toon ready to publish last night but could not reach the admin page to do the actual post. I’d switch webhosts but the amount of planning and execution do move my site would require more time than I have right now.

    Back to the cartoon. Here at work we have many many computers and we all share a T1. If people do simple surfing or email the T1 is just fine for us. Where we run into trouble is from streaming of audio/video and other things. One of the biggest bandwidth hogs I’ve seen lately is when folks upload photos to Facebook, and they seem to do this a lot. It’s not like these people do these things to be selfish, they just are not aware of the impact they have on others. I have mentioned all of this in past email, but I get the feeling my emails go over like Charlie Brown’s teacher voice. I don’t really care where people go online, I let the filters keep the worst sites awya, but they just cannot affect everyone else. Someday in the future I hope we can add to our bandwidth and make it possible for people to do whatever they want. Until then I just ask my users to do their heavy usage early in the day, lunch time, or at the end of the day. I don’t think that is unreasonable. I don’t want to block Facebook because I think it is a great tool for the staff to keep up with each other’s lives. In a few weeks I’ll be addressing the staff in our monthly all-staff meeting on all of this, so wish me luck.

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   Two big events today in my life. One far more important than the other. First it is my daughter Emily’s 12th birthday. Second, and much less importantly, this is my 200th cartoon for dontfeedthegeek.com

   Emily and I wrote this cartoon together. It was based on some banter between she and I. I really should write more of our conversations down for future cartoons. In fact tonight I was teasing that I could beat up this rather large man that the family knows. She asked did I want to be Buried or cremated.

Happy birthday Emily!!!! I love you kid, you are just one of the most outstanding people I have ever know and look forward to a lifetime of you being a smart-Alec to me.

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  In fairness I thought I’d make myself a victim of today’s toon. This is toon 199 so Tuesday will be 200 and my oldest daughter’s birthday. She will be the star of that day’s cartoon and she and I came up with the idea together. We’ll see if it is funny or not. As usual though the idea is to amuse myself and if anyone laughs…. well you know the whole icing and the cake thing.

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  OK, I really wish I had more time to spend working on these toons and the talent I want. I have been watching real web cartoonist work on live streams and ugh! Watching someone with so much talent makes me realize how far behind the curve is. My only saving grace is that rarely does anyone look at the art much longer than it takes to read the balloon text.

  This is cartoon 198. So next Tuesday I’ll be at the 200 cartoon mark. I do like going back to the beginning and so how much improvement I’ve made. I hope in another 200 toons I can compare to this last batch and see a big improvement.

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    This is not a bash of Apple or it’s user, well maybe it is of the zealot users. Although I have a reputation as a Apple hater  that really is not true. As an IT buddy of mine said once “use the right tool for the right job”. For graphic design, hands down Apple is the right choice. For working in the enterprise, Microsoft is the right choice for now. Ironically Apple had the enterprise sewn up at one point but let it slip away.

   I do think Mac is a fine machine. My bottom line reason for not owning own myself is budget. Their markup is far too high. I can get so much more for my dollar with other choices. Now that Apple runs on basically the same hardware as Microsoft I’m surprised they can still justify the higher markup.

    If you think the cartoon was a stretch, well it is. However, go look around on sites talking about Windows 7 and peruse the comments. I almost guarantee you will see some of the most heated comments bashing Microsoft or praising Apple or both. I often discuss politics with people from the opposition and atheist about religion. Those people are far more civil (for the most part) than discussing computers with these Mac zealots. Not all Mac users are like that. Most I know go between the 2 OSes depending on their needs. If Apple would just lower it’s price point I’d probably have one. Sadly I could run Mac OS on a machine that I could build easily and afford-ably. However, according the the EULA of Apple that would be illegal.

UPDATE: In the spirit of full disclosure I have been trying to post this for 10 minutes but the screen I wrote the post on froze up. I was waiting for it to come back but it just wouldn’t. Thankfully I remembered that WordPress saves drafts while you are writing. The fault is not entirely Windows as much as I have tons of stuff running on this machine, some of which is high CPU wasting. Windows is not perfect especially Vista, which I’m currently running. The tests I’ve done with Windows 7 are very positive and looks great so far. Why is it Windows only gets every other OS right?

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