The most important day in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe since the launch of Da Blog, and a day never to be matched in importance again.

The day has arrived that I knew would come ever since I launched the web site.

I have moved the web site from morganwick.freehostia.com to morganwick.com.

Morganwick.com will be the new home for all aspects of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, from the seemingly-stalled comic strip Sandsday to the 100 Greatest Movies Project to the street sign gallery to my sports projects. That includes Da Blog. Effective immediately, all blog posts will be hosted at morganwick.com, and the Blogspot account will stop updating. (Some dummy posts may start appearing next year.) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to point to morganwick.com.

I've made my frustration with Blogger and Freehostia clear over the past several months. Blogger was clunky and prone to problems. Freehostia had a clunky file manager in IE, a frustrating FTP, and only one MySQL database on the free plan. Both of them, however, should be commended for getting me a head start in building the content that will now make the move to Morganwick.com. In fact, the problems with Freehostia have been sufficiently mitigated that I might be tempted to continue housing the new web site on Freehostia, especially since my ads pay for my domain but not my hosting.

However, that's only possible in the short term, and it's not really possible. I'm only allowed one MySQL database on Freehostia and it pretty much has to be used by my blogging platform; while the blogging platform is robust enough to handle a lot, I kinda need to at least have the freedom to create a second database for certain purposes. And as long as I'm moving to my own domain and moving up to paying for the hosting, I should get the best domain, hosting, and blogging services there are out there, and get the most bang for the buck for them.

For me, and for those particular fields, that means moving to Namecheap, Hostmonster, and Wordpress.

For most people, GoDaddy is the only domain registrar they've ever heard of. I decided very early on in the process of finding a domain registrar that I would not use GoDaddy. By all accounts, they're all T&A (literally), no substance (or customer service), and possibly the worst domain registrar on the Internet, used only by amateurs who watch TV to find an Internet domain registrar and don't really know what they're doing. Namecheap was one of the most commonly cited and praised names that came up in a search for good domain registrars. I found Hostmonster the same way I found Freehostia - by looking at sites that would compare hosting services side-by-side for me based on other people's reviews. Hostmonster came out on top on multiple such comparison sites despite some tight competition, especially since Wordpress didn't include a link to Hostmonster that I could use to support Wordpress, but did contain a link to Hostmonster's sister service Bluehost.

That might be the last time I mention either service. You don't need to know who I paid for the domain or who's hosting the site. It's my very own domain now. I mention them in case I ever have problems with either service, or in case I ever move from either and have to shut down the site while the move processes. If there's a quibble with Hostmonster, it's that they've been known to shut down sites without warning for violations of Terms of Service, which basically comes down to backing up the site and not getting the domain and hosting from the same place lest you become unable to leave.

Chances are if you've ever heard of any of the three services, you've heard of Wordpress. Even in the unlikely scenario you haven't heard of it, you've seen it. Adherents to Movable Type would proclaim its superiority, but by many accounts Wordpress is the best blogging platform on the Internet, and certainly the best free one. It's fitting that there are three major blogging platforms and they all appeal to different people. Blogger is the quickest, dirtiest way to start a blog if you don't want to pay any money and don't know anything about the Internet, especially if you want to start building something big. (Both Wordpress and Movable Type have hosting services using their infrastructure but Wordpress' functionality is extremely limited - ads aren't even allowed. Typepad is a pay service, which makes me wonder why anyone who could afford it wouldn't just start their own Movable Type site.)

Wordpress is the best service if you have your own hosting and don't want to pay, and Movable Type is best if you believe "you get what you pay for" and can afford to pay the price to get better than a volunteer effort - though depending on your philosophy on the Internet and your exact needs, Wordpress may still be best. (No less than the government of Great Britain uses Wordpress to host its site.) It may be ideal to take the path I took - build an audience on Blogger and take it to a self-hosted Wordpress site when it gets big enough.

Honestly, not only did I grow frustrated with Blogger over the years, I've started to distrust it a little; use of Blogger has started to throw up a red flag of amateurism for me, especially the use of variants of the default Minima template, which is used by some of my favorite blogs. The effect is mitigated with the use of templates that at least look original, and when people have their own domain it reminds me less that it's a Blogspot blog, but there's still that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I can't shake while reading something like Awful Announcing: why aren't they at least using Wordpress?

I saw why Wordpress is so beloved shortly after starting experimenting with it. It was loaded with so many features that I could use. It wasn't so clunky as to eat the code I tried to feed into it (see: my first attempt at Da Countdown). Some of the problems surrounding draft posts, such as the matter of finding them if I stopped working on them and wanted to come back to them later (something that led me to start scheduling unfinished posts), as well as some of the patches Blogger tried to put on, such as the inaccurate post time for all unscheduled posts that led Blogger to tweak the posting settings, as well as some of the quirks of scheduled posts, aren't an issue with Wordpress, which has a "last saved draft" field allowing you to schedule a post without making it leave draft mode. And Wordpress' "pages" allows me to create my own, custom, "about me" page.

More important to you, Wordpress doesn't make it complicated to post a comment - you won't be tempted to post as "Anonymous" anymore when you wouldn't normally do so. Just fill out your name, e-mail, and if you have a web site a link to it, and you're all set. And because of the Akismet spam protection system you don't have to fill out a CAPTCHA anymore either, which is really more trouble than it's worth since it only protects against automated, not human, spam, and automated systems can easily crack it. (If your comment doesn't show up, don't panic; wait 24 hours to see if it shows up. After that, contact me with a copy of your comment; there is some anecdotal evidence of Akismet eating comments without the capability of accessing them, but if so it's so rare that on the thread I looked at, WordPress couldn't even reproduce it.) Tomorrow I'll launch the new MorganWick.com forums to complement the site and the comments, which I'll have more detail on then.

And perhaps most of all, Wordpress has a robust system of "categories", including the ability to make subcategories. Wordpress also has "tags" and my initial instinct was to make all of my labels tags, since that was what they seemed to resemble, and only make those labels that bore the most resemblance to subsites into categories, so I was a bit frustrated when Wordpress wanted to convert them all to categories by default without giving me a choice. But after reading up on the distinction between the two (it seeems tags are mostly a search engine helper) I decided that the way I use labels, it made the most sense to convert all labels into categories.

Because of my various interests, I always intended to create various subsites once I moved to morganwick.com to house my various projects in various fields. Because of that, because of the presence of subcategories, because of the decision to make Da Blog the front page of morganwick.com, and because of the intricities of the move itself, I have made several changes to the category structure, with virtually all categories affected:

• All categories are now properly capitalized.
• The "100 Greatest Movies Project" label is now a subcategory of "movies".
• "About Me" remains as-is but may, in the future, be split into multiple categories.
• "Advertising" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". As I've said before, most important information about ads will now come via Twitter.
• "Astronomy" is now a subcategory of "Science".
• "Blog News" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". The exact role of both "Blog News" and "Web Site News" given the merger of the two, the further splitting of the blog into subsites, and the role of Twitter, is undetermined at this point.
• Because not all formatting was preserved when importing all the old posts from Da Blog, and because comments will not be associated with any other comments you make going forward, the "Classic Da Blog" category will be extended to include all posts before last week, and will no longer be just a quick way to get Technorati to update correctly. (By the way, 5vjhdtuzmg.)
• "College Football Lineal Title", "College Football Schedule", and "College Football Rankings" are all now subcategories of "College Football".
• The just-launched new category "Constitution" is now a subcategory of "Politics", as are both the Democratic and Republican Platform Reviews.
• "Election 2008" is also now a subcategory of "Politics", and "Election 2008 Live Blog" is in turn a subcategory of "Election 2008".
• "Education Policy", "Foreign Affairs", and "Health Care", all categories used solely in the platform reviews, are now subcategories of "Politics".
• "General TV Business" is now just "TV Business". See below.
• "Human Nature" is now a subcategory of "Philosophy", two categories neither of which with very many posts.
• There is a new "Random Internet Discovery" subcategory of "Internet Adventures".
• "IRL" and "NASCAR" are now subcategories of "Auto racing".
• "Microsoft" is now a subcategory of "Computer geekery", two categories that may never be used again.
• "MLS" is now a subcategory of "Soccer".
• "News You Can Use" is now a subcategory of "My Comments on the News"; both its posts were members of that category already.
• "NFL Lineal Title" is now a subcategory of "NFL". "NFL Superpower Rankings" has been deleted, and all the posts it contained moved to "Superpower Rankings" which has been made a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Non-UFC MMA" has been renamed "MMA" and "UFC" has been made a subcategory of it.
• "Fantasy Football" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Simulated CFB Playoff" is now "Golden Bowl Simulated CFB Playoff" and a subcategory of "College Football".
• "SNF Flex Scheduling Watch" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Sports in general" is now simply "Sports" and all sports categories have been made subcategories of it, as have "Sports TV Business", "Sports TV Graphics" and "Sports Watcher". "NFL" and "College football" are now subcategories of a new "Football" category, and "NBA", "College basketball" and "WNBA" are now subcategories of a new "Basketball" category. All my sports posts are available at sports.morganwick.com, as are the old Morgan Wick Sports features.
• "TV Upfronts" is now a subcategory of "TV Business".
• "Webcomic news" is now "Sandsday", a subcategory of itself, and a subcategory of "Web site news". (To clarify: "Web site news" now contains a subcategory "Webcomic news", which contains a subcategory "Sandsday", which contains all the old "Webcomic news" posts.)
• "Webcomics" is now hosted at webcomics.morganwick.com and is loaded with new features, including an index to reviews, tags for each webcomic mentioned in a post, new categories for full-fledged reviews and reviews of webcomics blogs, a new "Webcomics' Identity Crisis" category for both the series itself and the ongoing blog thereof, and an index to said series, with potentially more features to come.

In addition, all web site features have new addresses, and may not be immediately accessible:

• morganwick.freehostia.com/greatestmovies (the Greatest Movies Project) is now at greatestmovies.morganwick.com.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/sports (Morgan Wick Sports) is now at sports.morganwick.com. It may be a while before this section of the site returns to full functionality, and when it does everything will be at a new URL. Watch the Twitter feed to find out when everything is restored, and where to find it.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/streetsigns (the Street Sign Gallery) is now at www.morganwick.com/streetsigns.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic (Sandsday) is now at sandsday.morganwick.com. I'm still trying to translate the PHP from PHP 4 to PHP 5, so it won't be linked to there until then.

For the time being, the Premier ad is being shut down, as it doesn't translate easily to the new site. morganwick.blogspot.com and morganwick.freehostia.com will remain up, but not maintained; in a year my Freehostia account will lapse and that site will no longer work.

It's a new day on MorganWick.com. Let's go boldly forward into the future.

Truly, the end of an era. Hopefully, not of the earth.

If I'm going to give my critical thinking skills a workout, I need to give my critical thinking skills a workout. And since I hope to do a lot of thinking over the course of my life, this should be an important and positive excersize for me. So you know what? I don't care anymore that no one's pitching in at the Global Warming Open Thread, or e-mailing me with their arguments. It's going to be a bit more work for me, but it's work I probably should do. ... It'll be a more fulfilling experience for me, building skills I'll need to do more of these series in the future, perhaps even skills that will prove useful for snagging a real job or at least doing well in college. ... If there's a downside, I might not have as much information as I'd like if it doesn't pop up right away in Google, and I want as complete a picture as possible for this heady issue. But I think it's worth the risk from a personal growth point of view, and I hope you're all along for the ride.
-Me, in April

Do me a favor: Next time I say something like this, give me a good smack upside the head.

Seriously, I actually thought this would be a "personal growth" experience instead of my own personal hell?

I've been in a bit of a schedule crunch for the past few months, with a lot of stuff on my plate and some of my school studies starting to suffer a bit. The worst part, and the part that I think has been dragging me slowly insane, has been the global warming series. You may have gleaned some evidence of this from the increasing lateness of the strip (seriously, I posted the strip at 7 PM PT yesterday?) and from some of my Twitter posts, but I haven't been in the mood to do research for the series as much as I've needed since entering the second phase. Research for the series started out as not too bad if time-consuming and sometimes shied away from, but it has since become an obligation I really haven't wanted to do, a job I tack on as an afterthought after doing everything else, especially since starting my recent summer class. I told myself, as was hinted in a recent strip, I had to maintain a daily schedule to finish the series as fast as possible, but for most of the second phase I've rarely worked more than one strip in advance.

What's more, the sheer weight of the research required has started to wear on my brain. You've seen me start to give a more pro-global-warming bias than I ever intended to give, failing to properly explore arguments, and breaking them off prematurely - or over-relying on waiting strips that move the argument precisely zilch, often essentially repeating prior arguments. This series hasn't "given my critical thinking skills a workout", it's worn them down to nothing.

All that might be excusable if I had touched off the open debate I hoped to start, or attracted the people I hoped to attract to Sandsday to explore the debate for themselves as I present it. But not only has none of that happened, readership has actually gone down compared to the preceding video game strips. Previously the strip, according to Project Wonderful stats, averaged about five page views a day; right now I'm lucky to get two. The Sandsday ad box has actually been delisted, something that never happened before - suspended for no one loading the box, but not out-and-out delisted for poor performance.

So all that leads to the development at least hinted at in today's strip: I am suspending - not aborting - the global warming series for about three weeks, maybe four. During that time we'll go back to the sort of strips that characterized Sandsday before the series began, that is to say, video game strips. Afterwards, the series will start up again. However, once the series starts up again I will not hold myself to a daily schedule, but will instead do research when I feel like it and release strips accordingly. There may be long swathes without any strips at all, or periods where a lot of strips are released, one a day for weeks. I will allow the series to play out more organically and naturally from here on out until it reaches a conclusion. Once the series reaches an end I will end Sandsday right then and there with my final verdict. I've considered ending the strip before - at one point I was considering ending it at #500 - but the inability of the global warming series to increase readership and its increasing job-like nature have convinced me that I probably will never get the readership I'd hoped for and probably will never find the strip as enjoyable as I would need to to continue with it.

Sandsday will not be the last comic I do, not even the last webcomic; I have at least two other ideas I'd like to bring down the pipeline, although they almost certainly won't be ready before the site relaunch. I still stand by the basic gimmick of the strip even if I was not able to utilize its potential in the way I had hoped for, and I feel like I've tarnished the gimmick in some way by working on it myself instead of leaving it for other, more talented writers to pick up. I would like Sandsday to go down as an experiment that I used to help build my writing abilities by getting in over 500 reps over a period of nearly (if not over) two years. I've gotten some appreciative comments about the strip; I have also gotten some comments that have told me to, essentially, get some art lessons and abandon this hopeless carcass. Through it all, I maintained a streak of consecutive days with a strip that will run to over 550 by the time I start dropping strips. I don't take the decision to end the strip lightly, but I trust that with the time I'm freeing up by ending the strip, there will be more and better stuff to come into the Morgan Wick Online Universe that will make up for the loss.

Hilarity in cereal tie-ins.

So today I finish off a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats and I happen to notice the giveaway on the back of the box.

As a tie-in for the Star Trek movie, it allows you to send in for a "Starfleet T-shirt" so you can look like you're on the Starship Enterprise. The shirts are available in blue or red.

"For just nine tokens, or one token plus $9.99, you can own the original red shirt! Wait, where are you going? How come we're selling out in blue but haven't sold a single one in red?"

My mornings have become 100% unproductive even when I'm up for them. I need a starvation diet at some point.

I was all set for an incredibly productive weekend. I was going to make boatloads of headway on my backlog in my communication class. I was going to work all weekend on banging out three different papers.

The amount of headway I actually made? One-third of a reading.

(On the flip side, I will agree with my comm teacher on this: Distracted by Maggie Jackson is interesting enough that I'd like to have the whole book to read for my book on the Internet.)

And while feed-and-Twitter checking can take a couple of hours, it shouldn't dominate the whole day! (Blame the need for naps for some of the rest.)

My plan for tomorrow: Feed/Twitter check, lunch, retake an exam for another class, get a new bus pass, and HEAD HOME. I need to at least partially make up for lost time.

Tweet, tweet! Tweet, tweet, tweet!

The stated purpose of Twitter is to exchange answers to the question, "What are you doing?" with friends and family. There are a few obvious problems with the concept. In some sense, it's really just a service to send a text message to a bunch of people at once, as though you couldn't do that anyway if you have a half-decent phone. Then there's the obvious question whether you, or your friends or family, would want your friends and family to know about every single thing you're doing. There's a limit to how much following you can do at once, especially if you're getting text messages for every single tweet (meaning you're constantly interrupted by each incoming text) and racking up your text message bill. There are all sorts of horror stories of people begging their friends, "don't tweet me every couple of minutes!" and "I don't want to know what you had for dinner last night!"

In fact, if Twitter was as simple as I just described, it probably would not be on its way to becoming The Next Big Thing(tm). Instead the makers of Twitter made several decisions that, in retrospect, represent them lucking out on something they could cash in on if they just found the right business model:

• Tweets are public. Anyone can read them, even people who haven't signed up for Twitter (contrast, say, Facebook). This is why Twitter is called a "microblogging" platform instead of, say, a "mass text message" platform.
• Followers control whether they want to follow you, not the other way around. It would be at the very least impractical for Ashton Kutcher to send messages to a million-plus screaming fans all at once. Big celebrities and news organizations like CNN could set up a "text this word to this number and get alerts right to your phone!" service, and probably do (for one thing, they could charge their own fees for it). But Twitter allows them to save the expense of having such a system AND open them up to anyone who desires to read them, in the spirit of the Internet itself. In fact, followship is not even a reciprocal relationship as with most social networking services, so it doesn't have the "commitment" of "friendship", and you don't have to follow someone you're not interested in just because they want to follow you. (I suspect some celebrities and corporate tweeters don't get this and blindly follow everyone that follows them.)
• It's possible to run Twitter without using text messages, or even going to the site that often. Twitter has opened things up for anyone to "build a better Twitter". I'm not really sure what the point is - either Twitter's admitting their site sucks or it works just fine and there's no need to use something else - but I do know I would like a Twitter platform that won't go on the fritz if it's disconnected from the Internet (i.e., it'll pick right back up when you re-connect to the Internet). And that won't prevent me from hibernating but there's only one way to find out if that's the case.
• I think Twitter itself anticipated that their service would not just be used to answer the question "What are you doing?" even though almost everything about their site works under that assumption. How else to explain the existence of "@replies" or "retweets" (admittedly the latter is unofficial) or other such things? Twitter clearly sees itself as a social networking platform of some kind.

At the same time, Twitter's relative independence from social networking platforms like MySpace and Facebook work to its benefit as well, including the non-reciprocity of followship, which actually creates more of an incentive for people to follow you when it means strictly "receiving their tweets". If Twitter were just another social networking platform it probably would never have been able to run down the giants. By focusing all its attention on a sole feature - quick, bang-bang updates sent out to as many people as want to hear them - and downplaying the social networking aspect of its existence, Twitter has established for itself a separate identity. You don't go to Twitter to meet new people or whatever else you do on MySpace, nor should you, and you don't go to Facebook to write a bunch of little blurbs every half hour.

Okay, so why tweet instead of blog? Isn't tweeting just an extremely limited form of blogging? There's the social networking aspects, but Blogger's decided to ape those with its "follower" feature; there's the ability to receive text messages instead of always going to a computer, but surely someone could have come up with a service that did that without outfitting it with all the bells and whistles of Twitter, right? There's the ability to send text messages to tweet, but surely an outfit like Blogger could institute that capability too, right? So why is it that blogs - Blogger blogs even, like Fang's Bites - not only have Twitter accounts on top of their blogs, but use them almost entirely to post links to their blog posts? I have to imagine it's to allow text message notification to people for whom RSS feeds aren't immediate enough, or blog promotion. (I personally actually prefer to read Fang's Bites off the RSS feed than in its "original" form.)

Perhaps more interesting is those people who put some things in their Tweeters and other things on their blogs. Why not just put the stuff you're tweeting on your blogs and stop antagonizing readers by either polluting their text messages or Twitter roll or withholding content from them? When I made Da Blog's tagline "The ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick", the intended joke was that of course it was the only blog written by me, because why would I create another one when I had this one? Why would anyone start a second blog - especially one that limited how much you could write so severely - when they already had one?

Twitter really hit mainstream consciousness with the Ashton Kutcher-CNN "race to a million" and Oprah deciding to get a Twitter account - but the mere fact that Kutcher and CNN could race to a million showed that Twitter had attained some sort of mainstream acceptance even before that. People have been pushing Twitter as the "next big thing" since at least 2007 (it only launched in 2006). Celebrities and ordinary Joes alike have flocked to Twitter in droves over the past year or so, convinced they have to get on board with this next big thing, and there is some evidence they eventually get confused or frustrated and quit.

Forget, for a second, whether or not the dropoff rate is the result of people using "better Twitters", as opposed to using the website, as some have suggested. Newbies are less likely to know they exist, so there's probably some genuine dropoff. I've listed above some of the confusing aspects of Twitter, areas where the uninitiated might wonder, what the hell is the point? I think some of the people wondering about Twitter should make sure they've looked at the tweeters of people who have already taken to it like a glove so they can really get a feel for the technology and what the community is like.

Twitter isn't just narcissistic; it can be a more two-way form of communication than almost anything else on the Internet, including ordinary blogs with their comments and even discussion forums, as you can have public conversations with anyone you're following and/or who's following you, from anywhere in the world - or even have a true "chat" room where just about anyone can come in and out. In this way it can be a way to elicit comments or contributions or other such things, invoking the "wisdom of crowds". The immediacy of Twitter helps greatly with this as well; you don't necessarily have to wait for a follower to go to the computer and actually look to check. You can use Twitter for personal purposes as well, such as to-do lists or notes, or to manage projects, or to cover events "as they happen" (impractical with a blog), or things you'd never expect to do with such a simple concept. There are a lot of rather unique Twitter accounts with some unique applications of the concept, more than I could possibly list here.

I said in Da Blog's introductory post that I would never have a MySpace or Facebook account. I saw them as things that were overly popular that I was therefore, in some way, "too cool" for. I had no use for them, and if I were to hop on their bandwagon I would effectively be going along with the crowd and doing what everyone else was doing. But Twitter intrigues me. In an odd way, I actually have some personal interest in Twitter's stated goal, of letting people know "what are you doing?" Since I was very young, I imagined any number of imaginary TV channels that in some way involved me and any number of... I won't call them imaginary friends, per se, but imaginary people. Through various corporate acquisitions and permutations (I have very well-developed fantasies - I read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid), I've managed to maintain these fantasies in some form all the way to the present day. Through all these permutations, I almost always managed to have one channel that followed me around all day long in whatever I did, except maybe when I was eating. I've always had some interest in the rituals of my own life and how exactly I spent my day every day, what I was doing at each moment. Twitter and I were practically made for each other!

So I've been thinking about hopping on board the Twitter bandwagon for a little while - I've only had sufficient exposure to it to really think about it this year, but still. This is actually a little sooner than I had intended to do so, as I had intended to hop on board around the same time as certain other developments (that haven't happened yet) came along, but I received an assignment from my communications class to (among other things) keep a log of my media usage for a four-day period. That aligns with one of the things I was intending to tweet about, and I just loved the irony of maintaining such a log on Twitter. From now until Monday, relevant entries in said log will be marked with the "#MediaLog" keyword.

So say hello to the real-life Morgan Wick Channel, also known as www.twitter.com/morganwick, your one-stop shop for all things Morgan Wick. Here you'll find:

• Everything (or almost everything) I'm doing. Am I on the bus? In class? Checking feeds? Working on the latest blog post? Doing actual work? Watching TV? You'll know.
• If I'm moved to leave a comment on something somewhere on the Internet, I'll usually elect to write a mirroring Twitter post, depending on how much I've talked about the topic on Da Blog and some other factors. (Sports or webcomics? Yes. Global warming? No.)
• Anything happening in the Morgan Wick Online Universe (which I intend to tighten soon). Every time I make a post on Da Blog, it will appear on the Twitter feed with a link. This includes "web site news" items, so you'll get tweets every time I update the web site. I'll also tweet every time a new Sandsday goes up, which should be a more reliable and punctual option than the Komix feed, as well as alert you when I need to post the new comic on Da Blog. If I have other projects that for whatever reason I don't post about on Da Blog every time a new one goes up, I'll tweet those as well. This is another reason for me to go to Twitter: anyone who likes me for anything else will be exposed to any of my other projects!
• Other comments as I'm moved to leave them, including my more ranty moments, which will be phased off Da Blog.

I think there are enough problems with Twitter as constituted now that I'm not sure how full-bore I can go into it. Right now I'm (or rather, my mom is) charged for every text I send or receive, meaning I need to avoid texting any tweets if at all possible, and I either can't go around following everyone under the sun or I need to turn off text reception of tweets. There are plenty of other reasons for the latter; simply put, as presently constituted there is a practical limit to how many people you can follow without getting overwhelmed by tweets, many of which you're probably not the least bit interested in.

I'm laying down a few ground rules for my use of Twitter that will also affect what I post to Da Blog:

• Any post that could be a tweet will be posted as a tweet. If I'm ever tempted to post something shorter than 140 characters it will be posted on Twitter and not Da Blog.
• If I am ever tempted to write something that would span two or more Twitter posts it will be posted as a blog post instead. This could potentially actually counteract the loss of short posts to Twitter; I'll go along and happen upon something I want to make into a tweet, but it comes out too long. Off to Da Blog with it, even if I would not have made it a blog post otherwise!
• Some Da Blog posts may have titles written with Twitter syntax. For example, I could write a post directed to the "example" Twitter account, and so I would have a post with a title beginning "@example". If you decide to rely on Twitter to find out when new blog posts are up you'll want to make sure you're seeing all my @replies. (UPDATE: Okay, never mind. See comments.) Also, from now on if I have to put up Sandsday on Da Blog the post title will start "Sandsday #XXX" to mirror the Twitter format, as opposed to now when it's just a random thought on the action.
• No retweets. I find merely copy-pasting someone else's tweet to be essentially pointless. Instead I'll just make it a reply to the tweet. (There's a chance I'll retweet in the title of a blog post once or twice.)

Links to my Twitter feed will be located in three places: on the right sidebar of Da Blog, on the front page and 404 page of the web site on the sidebar, and on Sandsday, both in the sidebar and below the comic. Da Blog's sidebar, in particular, will contain "Da Tweeter", which will display my tweets in real time.

Okay, now, I spent long enough writing this introductory post that I'm going to have lunch and immediately start working on a paper for my communication class. What will I do next? You'll have to read my tweeter to find out.

I'm probably leaving enough clues for you to figure out what this is.

I have a number of things on my plate. I have some posts I've been sitting on because I've had more urgent things to work on in the time when I'm not completely distracted trying to catch up on feeds. I'm trying to make a big finish to make sure I pass one of my classes, for one thing.

I also have a decent-sized series I was planning to start tomorrow that would have served to maintain a consistency of posts into the fall, and combined with other projects, the RID, and webcomic reviews, maintained my 5-post-a-week pace well into next year. But because of procrastination on my part, I entered this past week with quite a bit of work to do to get that project ready. It was already somewhat doubtful I'd be able to get all the requisite research done in a week and might have needed to go to backup plans.

So naturally I get zero of that research done, or much of anything else, personal project or no, during the past week, and now I have a mountain of makeup work to get done, and I've been spending the past weekend catching up on seven hours' worth of TV shows as a result of missing two before last week. TV Tropes has ruined my life again! (Or in this case, introduced me to the Nostalgia Critic. It takes a lot of doing to get me to actually laugh out loud, and this passes with flying colors.)

So I feel I have no choice but to delay this project for a year until 2010.

I'm not particularly pleased with this decision. It passes up a once-in-six-to-eleven-years opportunity to start the series on a Monday, and by doing it next year I'm starting it on a Tuesday, which is... awkward. I could have the second part still be on Wednesday, or delay it two years to 2011 and start it on a Wednesday, but the latter might be too long for me and the nation and the world, and it would be most useful if I could get it out before the 2010 midterms, so the short notice a postponement entails is dicey enough.

But I feel it's probably for the best. I don't want a repeat of the mess that was the October of Politics, where the work I get done is of significantly less quality than what I had in mind and derails my life. Perhaps by waiting a year, I'll have a larger audience and the series would make a larger impact. Also, I originally envisioned the global warming series being mostly over at this point, and it's barely getting started, so the two mega-projects would be running concurrently for most of the time, complete with the research needed for each. There's some research I still need to do and fast to move on to the next part of the global warming series, and two posts I was hoping to get done over the weekend that I'm unlikely to get either done today, even with this postponement. Basically, I have way too much on my plate already for the next week without this little distraction.

With luck I can focus on the problems I have now, and hold off on this problem for another twelve months.

This week in Questionable Corporate Decisions:

Recently I wrote a paper for my communication class on the local Tully's, which I frequent for its Wi-Fi, as a social space. One thing I remarked on was the weird blend of easy listening and lite rock playing on the sound system.

It appears they've switched to 90s hits.

Now I find it significantly more distracting. Not what I would call the smartest decision in the world.

I desperately need a real job, so naturally I've put in zero effort towards that for months.

I'm pissed at myself, I'm pissed at the library, and I'm pissed at timing.

I wouldn't ordinarily hate the University District Street Fair. I've strolled through it myself on occasion, taken in sights, seen and tasted interesting things.

But when the vast majority of the decent Wi-Fi spaces near my house are right near the fair, I don't particularly want a big booming concert when I'm trying to do something, and I certainly don't want the library to make it hard for me to work under those circumstances.

(It didn't help that I lost my keys right before I left the house.)

So I'm really pissed that all this conspired toaln dfjhkrqvkaflhalsbwvnfhushwimowbtjwo ybiofvhqepg35nogv2g3qv[ delay posting the strip until not that long before 5.

Tomorrow's strip will be no earlier than noon PT.

Something's wrong with the Seattle Times' ads and it makes the website REALLY slow.

To the extent it inhibits my browsing experience on other pages in a way it shouldn't.

Or maybe that's just IE7.

Also, I am thisclose to getting myself a Tweeter.

I posted a strip I never should have, so I have two strips redundant with it.

(From Sandsday. Click for full-sized going around in circles.)

EDIT: I forgot to remove this post when I actually DID post the strip before leaving earlier today. I'm spending the weekend in the Portland area for a wedding. I may have street signs NEXT weekend. But not as many as I would have otherwise hoped, at least from this trip.

So much for that plan.

Someone tripped over my power cord and snapped it and now I need to wait for a new power cord to show up, so until Wednesday or so expect posting to be very light as I try to save as much battery power as I can.

Now that that's over with...

I'm not trying the trick I used last night to post the strip again. Actually I think I got Yet Another reason I need to leave Freehostia. For a while now, for whatever reason, I think they think I have a virus or something because a lot of the images I've submitted - images that were created on my desktop and only ever were on my USB drive and laptop en route to their servers - have had their permissions changed so that no one can "execute" them (not the same as "read"). Execute images. It might be something having to do with FTP, I don't know, but using the trick I tried last night I first had the FTP connection crap out on me (either I hope IE8 fixed how Windows handles uploading to FTP or Freehostia needs to fix their FTP system) then I saw that the strip had been uploaded after all but it was no good, so I uploaded it to the file manager and it seemed to work okay but I find out today that the strip image was completely missing so I had to upload it AGAIN around 7 PM. As far as I'm concerned the strip was up so I'm plowing forward.

So after the past weekend's expletive-laden rant let's get into details. My ideal Plan A is to work on the web site and Da Blog and everything from home, but that hasn't been an option, for whatever reason, for nearly if not over a year. As I've mentioned in previous posts I go to my Dad's workplace and mooch off an Internet connection that's not even the workplace's. The place itself is supposed to have a connection but that hasn't worked since virtually the instant it was instituted. So earlier this month the place I normally mooch off of decided to secure their connection, but they're fine with me mooching off them, which would be great if my laptop could get past the "detecting network type" stage without spitting out a "network doesn't seem to exist" error despite the fact it's staying on the list of networks the whole time. So now BOTH my Plan B and C, accessed from the same location, aren't working, and while both are nominally working on the problem it's at a glacial pace (and I don't think it's a good idea to only have one guy who knows the security code who's not always working there if you intend for actual patrons to use the connection) and to varying extents I get a vibe from them that it's my problem, forcing me to use my battery for Plans D and E, which for whatever reason tend to be pretty slow, perhaps slower than normal, at least for Plan D.

On the plus side, those annoying downstairs neighbors are finally gone, so if you move in directly downstairs from me and set up an unsecured Internet connection I can use fairly reliably I'll give you a gazillion dollars. (Gazillion dollars to be paid in varying amounts at varying intervals over whatever period of time the payer deems adequate including never.) Or at the very least you can chip in your IT expertise at Dad's workplace or the place next door and get at least one Internet connection working enough to be useful.

Not for kids. Or anyone.

Fucking neighborhood with its fucking college students and poor people and fucking Freehostia with its fucking file manager and fucking Blogger for eating my first attempt at the last fucking post and fucking me for not backing it up when I know how much Blogger fucking sucks and fucking Blogger and Internet Explorer for not backing it up instead of assuming everyone is fucking online every last fucking bit of the time because it's not as if there aren't people still on dialup or even not even on the Internet is there? and fucking laptop for sucking so fucking much and fucking laptop battery for sucking so fucking much fucking first-choice connection for being so fucking slow and fucking me for screwing up my fucking sleep schedule and fucking me for putting too much work on myself and fucking owner of the place where fucking Dad fucking works to not fucking be there to work on the fucking connection and fucking people to prevent Dad from getting the needed info for the other fucking connection and fucking place providing said other fucking connection and fucking me and/or Mom for losing the fucking info in the first place and fucking me for getting into the fucking situation to need either of those in the fucking first place and fucking society for its fucking intolerance of people like me because it fucking suppresses anger rather than fucking understands it.

Fuck the whole wide world and every last fucking person in it. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say that the world and the people in it would be so much better if it weren't for all the fucking people. I've been driven so insane by all my fucking overwork I can't even leave the house even after being cooped up in it doing nothing all day cause all the fucking people drive me fucking insane.

And fuck it, now that I've fucking let all this out I'm probably going to not believe a fucking word of it and I'm probably going to go back to nicely going along with the fucking crowd and believing the same fucking things as every-fucking-one else and meanwhile everyone's going to look at this as more than the fucking theraputic excersize it is and think I'm some kind of fucking monster that's going to become a fucking serial killer some day and it's probably going to fucking cost me any shot at a fucking real job and some people might say I shouldn't fucking post it in the fucking first place but I'm fucking doing it anyway because the world needs to fucking know this mindset and what fucking drives me to it and that they need to fucking steer clear of me and it's probably more common than they fucking realize and people like me are probably fucking driven to this fucking mindset all the time and I hate fucking needing to add this fucking disclaimer to every one of these fucking posts.

And fucking "K" key.

Idle, tweet-worthy thought.

A notice to Seattle's Metro transit system:

If you're going to have a rule saying "Wear headphones", it should come with an implicit corollary: "Don't play your music so loud it's like you're NOT wearing headphones."

Of course, such rules are only as good as the drivers' willingness to enforce them and the extent the passengers care about them...

One of these days I'm going to stop putting these "If you meet me in real life" posts on Da Blog. Most of them, anyway.

If I have to hear someone playing music on their headphones loud enough for me to hear it anyway it drives me right up the wall.

I also go crazy at having to see people's involuntary foot vibrations even though I do it.

I don't think this sort of thing used to drive me quite this insane. Then again, I seem to be noticing it happening more often recently. I think I need to spend a week this summer where I don't leave the house at all except to post the strip.

My revised mission statement on the global warming series

I think I've had an epiphany.

I have a confession to make. My intent with the global warming series was that I would attract partisans on both sides to argue their points on Da Blog, using my sources and the strip as a jumping-off point. My hope was to depict an argument so complete and convincing even hardcore partisans would be forced to rethink their positions if they disagreed with the final result (or even if they agreed). As such, I didn't want to leave any information on the table, and partisans wouldn't allow any argument to go unchallenged, lest it help serve to convince me that they were wrong, and thus allow the strip to convince others. So whenever I posted a round of the argument, people disagreeing with it would post a rebuttal, which would then get incorporated into the strip. That strip would provoke rebuttals, and the process would continue ad infinitum. To save time and blunt the impact of the argument in the strip, people might even respond directly to the original posts and vice versa, creating a full-on debate that would be mirrored in the strip.

I would need those partisans in order to have that debate, though, so last weekend I picked a fight at Newsbusters and posted a thread at Democratic Underground hoping to bait and guilt-trip them into coming here and at least starting the debate. Then I sat back and watched...

...as absolutely no one from either side showed up.

Yes, it was always far-fetched in retrospect because the strip wasn't likely to convince much of anyone with its lack of readership, not to mention the inherent silliness of a freakin' comic strip being so world-changing. In fact part of the plan was to build that readership that would be convinced by bringing in the people that would help make it convincing. I never said it was a flawless plan. Still, I grumbled as I set out to try to use Google and my existing sources to fill out the arguments, perhaps a little bit relieved at not getting chewed out by the partisans for a month or two but otherwise disappointed I couldn't get them to do my research for me.

Another problem was that although I tried as hard as I could to create a balance between skeptical sources and environmentalist sources, between partisans on the left and right, I wouldn't be able to be a neutral judge on the matter, because I myself was coming from a liberal background. In fact I portrayed my project to the people at Newsbusters as them debating me, neglecting to mention my trip to DU. But in truth, part of the reason I started the series in the first place was that I found skeptical arguments compelling and felt I could potentially be convinced. In fact I often find myself emphasizing with whatever side's information I'm reading at the time. I thought this fact would help convince skeptics I really was interested in their position and my neutrality could be trusted.

After my attempt at bringing people to Da Blog to debate was a bust, I still maintained e-mail contact with one right-wing partisan, the maintainer of that last, lengthy skeptical source, arguing more about the merits of debating here and via e-mail than about the actual matters at hand. I insisted the point I made in the previous paragraph, and Thursday I got this unexpected response:

"If the side you take is based on whoever you read last then I am sorry, that is pathetic and you are absolutely hopeless at analyzing information. In this case I will not be able to convince you of anything."

My mind raged with responses. Most people are probably like that (that, or it's based on whoever they read first)! If the balance of arguments ultimately tips one way or the other, sure I can eventually be convinced! My plan was to collect all the information over the course of the series, then reread the whole thing, churn through the arguments in my head, and decide on a position! It's not that I don't have critical thinking skills, I just need to give them a workout, and this series is part of that!

So why don't I?

In the end, I decided, he's right. I shouldn't just take whatever I'm told as given, I should work through the evidence myself. I shouldn't need the partisans to tell me what to think. If I'm going to give my critical thinking skills a workout, I need to give my critical thinking skills a workout. And since I hope to do a lot of thinking over the course of my life, this should be an important and positive excersize for me.

So you know what? I don't care anymore that no one's pitching in at the Global Warming Open Thread, or e-mailing me with their arguments. It's going to be a bit more work for me, but it's work I probably should do. I'll still look through and take into account the comments on the Open Thread, but I won't be as upset if there aren't any, I'm not going to be specifically looking for them, I'll work through the research myself to the extent that Google and my existing sources allow me to, and I'm no longer checking my e-mail on a daily basis, but at the rate I normally do. It'll be a more fulfilling experience for me, building skills I'll need to do more of these series in the future, perhaps even skills that will prove useful for snagging a real job or at least doing well in college.

If there's a downside, I might not have as much information as I'd like if it doesn't pop up right away in Google, and I want as complete a picture as possible for this heady issue. But I think it's worth the risk from a personal growth point of view, and I hope you're all along for the ride.

Short enough to be a tweet. Or not.

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Odd, very odd.

Want to know why today's strip is so late?

I was preparing for various extraneous things related to the strip (including the basis for what I hope will be a long-term traffic influx) a little after 1 when I dozed off.

When I woke up, it was almost 4.

And that was only the beginning of the madness.

I don't know if it's the universe telling me not to launch into this project I'm about to launch into or not... either way, expect the strip to be posted at 9 or 10 AM PT the rest of the week.

Not a good day.

I was all set to have a mostly April Fool's-free day. I would be spending most of my time preparing for the next epic Sandsday series. I wouldn't get tripped up by anything today, that's for damn sure.

Well, I've been dodging April Fool's jokes left and right on the Internet, while getting bogged down in writer's block and distractions for the series and fighting off a headache. (Right now I have two strips written and they're probably going to get the hatchet treatment.) And I have an assignment I need to get done for tomorrow... and last night I got around to coming up for an idea for the OOTS post that doesn't rely on following the current strips but which is going to take quite a bit of doing... and I still need to look for a job... and I'm already getting a head start on falling behind on the textbook...

Maybe I can make some incremental progress on the series while waiting to see the new OOTS strip...

God must be playing an April Fool's joke.

Is it just me, or is complaining about snow in spring becoming an annual Da Blog tradition?

I'd make a global warming comment, except I just got out of a class where the teacher told an anecdote about it snowing on Tax Day (well, today's Tax Day) in his youth.