greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Of Telephones And Traffic

    So, to catch up a bit…

    After a bit of public-transit unpleasantness my daughter dealt with the previous weekend on her way to visit, I decided to see about getting a second line on my mobile phone plan so she’d have a way to call if she needs to change course along the way, or get a ride, or what-have-you. (Her brother, apparently, has a phone of his own now.) So. We went to the Verizon store at Lloyd Center on Saturday. At first it looked like I was going to have to walk away from the deal, but the saleslady found a way to make the plan palatable: dropping the “PDA” level of service. Since I almost never used the PDA features of my Windows Mobile device… no great loss. Now we both have LG Voyager phones (thanks to a buy-one-get-one offer), and I’m rather surprised by how much I like it. (One downside? The “shift” keys, yes there are two, are in weird places. Oh well.)

    In other news, Quacked Panes is off to a decent start. I’m still three comics ahead in the pipeline, and thanks to getting pimped by Cleolinda Jones over the weekend, I saw some significant traffic for a couple of days. Since I also picked up a tripod (finally!) on Saturday, this evening marked my first webcomic shoot that didn’t require a half-dozen attempts per frame to get a non-blurry image.

    Unfortunately I managed to slice a small cut in my foot while I was setting up (something sharp tracked in by my shoes, I figure) so that delayed things just a bit. Ow.

    Other than that, I’m just kind of hanging in there, hoping nothing else in life goes horribly pear-shaped in the near future. Life is… mostly good, actually.

  • I May Have Overdone Relaxing In May

    I felt good about all that I accomplished in April, so I told myself not to worry so much about May. All I needed to do this month was get my stress levels under control and finish prepping for the webcomic launch.

    Well, I’ve accomplished one of those things! I’m remarkably stress-free right now!

    I haven’t completely slacked off on the other thing, either. Unfortunately it’s all background work up to this point, though with this coming Wednesday through Friday off from work, the words “principal” and “photography” are front-and-center on the To-Do list. The plan is to launch within the first week of June with at least three weeks’ worth of material (figuring on a two-comics-per-week schedule).

    Some of the background material may wind up on my wiki at some point. I’m weighing the benefit of having it on the web where I can get at it from anywhere versus the detriment of publicly giving away all of the secrets.

    Then again, it’s a webcomic about rubber ducks. I mean, seriously. How can there be spoilers, right? Let’s keep some perspective about this!

    On a related note: Another thing I’m trying not to stress about? How quickly I’m going to run out of jokes…

  • Quacked Panes

    Well, I’ve made the site presentable enough to let people know where it is, so…

    Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce Quacked Panes, future home of a webcomic centered on rubber ducks. It combines my desire to dabble in photography, my desire to dabble in website hosting, my desire to make people laugh at bad jokes, and my small (but ever-expanding) collection of ducks. It’s a dilettante’s dream project, I tell you.

    I know. There’s nothing there yet. I’ll post a more extravagant notice when the thing actually launches. So, why post anything now? Easy: I seem to work better when there’s an expectant audience. (Which is preferable to an expectorant audience, naturally.) Now that you know it’s there, and I know you know, I have that much more incentive to get this thing off the ground.

    Basically, yes, I’m using psychology on myself.

  • Unexpected Downtime

    I apologize for the several hours during which the greyduck.net webserver and its entertaining contents were unavailable. It looks like Cacti went haywire… something I thought I’d cured for good the last time I ran into the problem, but I was clearly mistaken. So much for pretty monitoring graphs. Cacti is nuked. Again.

    One thing did give me an extra moment of panic after Infinity Internet bounced the server: Apparently, during initial setup of this server, I never got around to configuring MySQL for automatic startup at boot time. Hey, the machine has only been rebooted three times since I was handed the keys; this is the first reboot in almost exactly a year.

    Now I’m going to attempt relaxation after a bit more than three solid hours of being a raving stressmonkey…

  • Testing The New Lighting Gear

    Following Dad’s suggestion, I picked up a couple of “sunlight” bulbs for scene lighting from Freddy’s. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a pair of flexible desk lamps to put ’em in, and here are the results:

    Lighting Test: Li
    Lighting Test: Li
    Lighting Test: Li, Rusty, Score
    Lighting Test: Rusty, LI, Score

    The colored towels are there for testing purposes. As you can see, these ducks look pretty good now. My next trick will be to come up with a “set” of some kind. Mind you, I don’t plan to restrict things to just the one location, and in fact with sunnier weather on tap this weekend I’m considering getting some usable shots out-of-doors if at all possible.

    Another, albeit less critical, task that I’d like to accomplish involves some softening of the lighting. Both Dad and Uncle Pete have given some good suggestions on that, it’s just a matter of acquiring materials and performing more tests. (Oh, shucky darn, I’ll have to take more pictures. Boo hoo.)

    Progress, it is being made. Once the physical requirements are met, though, I’ll have the really tough work: Cranking out enough scripts to get a few weeks’ worth of material into the queue… and there’s the whole “gotta do something about the website design” thing, too. Ack. What have I gotten myself into?

  • Dialog Bubble Test Image

    I tried to tweet about this, but for some reason folks were getting a 404 error… even though the image link was 100% correct. So. I don’t know whether WordPress or Apache is at fault. I don’t have the luxury of time to spend tracking it down, either, especially when a simpler solution can present itself: I can blog about it! Duh!

    So. Here you go (click the image to embiggen):

    Meet Poe. He’s a pretentious little twit duck. Figures he’s named after Edgar Allen, but everyone else knows that his name’s just short for poe-zur…

    (Also, I won’t be using the Dragonbones font in the actual project. I just liked how it looked during testing so I kept it in the “final” image.)

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