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.

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.

This is a bit later than I originally intended to do this, but...

I've finally added a link graphic page to Sandsday. Now you can support Sandsday by adding a pretty picture to your site! The navigation is now significantly different, no longer using the main site's sidebar.

The leaderboard (728x90) and skyscraper (160x600) images are bigger than I know what to do with at the moment, so I don't recommend using them. Not that you would expect to use them for regular linking as opposed to ads in the first place.

(I have some idea of what I might do with the skyscraper down the line, but the leaderboard is a bit more vexing.)

Because if I had any readers, this would be much-clamored for by now. I know I've been wanting it.

The speed with which this happened both impresses and ... what's the word... humbles me. (I mean, I'm being listed on this site scarcely a week after Evil Inc.!)

Thanks to Komix!, you now have an RSS feed, of sorts, for Sandsday, which you can access here. It's a bit of a stopgap until I can figure out how to get a real RSS feed. (For one thing, if you use this RSS feed you have to put up with the Komix interface.)

The strip has an entire landing page at Komix, and you can utilize the Komix features with Sandsday if you feel the need to. (There's even a discussion board if you want it.)

As it's become obvious that Buzzcomix is likely NOT coming back, I'm clearing both links to it from the strip page (I don't need the Buzzcomix Reader link anymore anyway) and replacing it with a link to Komix. Tomorrow? Link graphics.

Quick thoughts on the Super Bowl

• If I were putting together NBC's opening sequence, I would have made a few more changes to the opening song. For example, instead of "waiting all day", how about "waiting all year"? And how can you pass up the fact that "forty-three" rhymes with "NBC" and so could have been inserted into the song with few other changes? You won't get anything like this until Super Bowl 70!
• I hate to disagree with Roger Goodell, but this game did not top last year's game. This game does have the advantage over Super Bowl XLII, and XXXVIII, that the first half was not boring as hell. But while this game did produce some landmark, all-time Super Bowl plays, those individual marks can't really compare with a great game - this game was just like any other Super Bowl from a pre-game angle standpoint, unlike XLII, and the Cinderella team didn't win, which hurts its standing - in fact I was rooting for Pittsburgh to pull out the win just because it would have been too bizarre otherwise. There are in fact some similarities with XXXVIII, another game people wondered about being the best Super Bowl ever. One of these days I need to go over the game film, or at least the NFL Films distillations, or even compact game stories, of every Super Bowl and rank the greatest ever. FSN's "The Sports List" did a ranking probably around the time of XL, maybe even before XXXVIII. Obviously, that list needs a serious update.
• Is it too early to start talking about Ben Roethlisberger's Hall of Fame credentials? Remember, in the lead-up to the Super Bowl people were talking about Kurt Warner's Hall of Fame credentials now that he had reached three Super Bowls with two different teams. Now Roethlisberger has been to one fewer Super Bowl and won two, becoming just the tenth QB in NFL history to do so, and not completely throwing up in the second. Not to mention his leadership in the regular season. If there's a knock against him it's that he's leading a team composed of a bunch of parts that might win Super Bowls without him, but then again that was the knock against Tom Brady for a while as well. If he so far as makes one more Super Bowl, is he a shoo-in for the Hall? And is it possible that his final drive in this game, which had Steve Young positively salivating on ESPN's NFL Primetime, is the one that puts him in the Hall?
• Speaking of ESPN, and lists, about your "Top 10" Super Bowl plays: Your own analysts, who clamored for Manning-to-Tyree to beat out Roethlisberger-to-Holmes for #1, are correct. What you should have done was rank the Harrison INT return significantly further back, in the middle or even near the back, since it was one of those sideshow gimmicky plays that come out of the blue every once in a while in the Super Bowl. By ranking it #3, you forced the Holmes play to #1 to avoid consecutive plays from the same game. Probably the main reason you rated the Holmes play #1 was because it actually scored the game-winning TD, but it arguably makes Manning-to-Tyree greater that it attained such greatness without actually scoring. (Incidentially, initially I rendered "Holmes" as "Burress". What does that tell you?)
• Am I the only one who noticed that the clock briefly stopped at two minutes left in the game when Roethlisberger barely got a play off, then started again as the clock operator realized there was a play going on, and the discrepancy was never corrected? How might that have influenced Arizona's final drive? The game-ending fumble would have only occured with two seconds or so left on the clock! You think Arizona would be working a bit quicker? And am I the only one who thinks that on the play to the 5 on Pittsburgh's final drive, the main reason the Steelers called a timeout was that the receiver (I think it was Holmes) was a little lazy getting back to the line of scrimmage, as though he didn't quite realize the situation? The Steelers might have needed that timeout to set up a field goal with a few seconds left on the clock if the Cardinals had been able to get a stop. I think there was one other "Am I the only one who noticed that" in there, but damned if I can remember it now.

I have plenty to say about the ads in a later post, where I hope to hand out awards for the ads, and some comments on NBC's modified banner for the game, which is also an opportunity to talk about ESPN's new tennis banner it broke out at the Aussie Open. There were a LOT of great ads in the second half of this game. Lineal titles updated for the offseason.

More football than you'd ever expect two days before the Super Bowl

This post is now hosted only on the new site.

Da Blog for the rest of this week

So after I proclaimed how much less stressed dropping the webcomic post for this week was going to make me, I'm realizing I'm as stressed as ever if not more.

Barring a calamity, Thursday should see the long-awaited posting of the final college football rankings and lineal titles. Friday should see the posting of another sports-related post, one which I actually consider is more vital to get out of the way this month. But it's unlikely I get it out first, so I'm slating it for Friday, though you may see it before then.

The post time on this post is on Tuesday PT, just before midnight. I say that counts. Even if it actually goes up at 2 AM.

So I don't have the results of the Golden Bowl, or the final college football rankings, and the NFL Lineal Title hasn't been updated, neither has the college title really, and the webcomic post is going to be delayed until at LEAST tomorrow (Wednesday), and I should come clean and figure out the reason all these things, plus myriad schoolwork and my job hunting, are late.

I've long figured, in my own mind, that checking all my myriad RSS feeds shouldn't take too long. I mention my RSS reader from time to time on my webcomic posts, and I am of the position that having an RSS feed will greatly accelerate the day I review your comic. I may well be reviewing Sluggy Freelance this week if it had an RSS feed; instead it could take a month or more.

Well, webcomics aren't the only thing on my RSS feed - I have eight or nine feeds on sports alone and those are just the ones still updating. (One of them has an odd little problem; it seems IE7 can detect the items on there, but isn't detecting new items, not even slotting them in the old items' slots.) I have plenty of other feeds as well, covering more topics than you can shake a stick at, and many of them are blogs. Ideally not only would most of them be short, I could read at least some of them at home, and not waste time I could be spending doing stuff that actually requires an Internet connection.

Commonly, however, they often link to longer articles. Or I could get stuck reading a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, or doing a lot of scrolling through the feed. And on both the posts and the longer articles, I'm often moved to comment, or at least look at the comments, and that can involve as much effort as writing a blog post.

One thing I like about Irregular Webcomic! that's almost as novel - maybe more, for its impact outside webcomics - as its structure is its RSS feeds. Yes, I said feeds, plural. One feed contains just a link to the comic, with a list of themes it's in. Another feed contains the comic itself, and a third feed contains the comic and its complete annotation. I don't have much use of the lesser feeds for a webcomic, but imagine if Blogger allowed readers all these options.

Blogger allows you two choices of feed, "short" (first paragraph or 255 characters, though I suspect strictly the latter, with no paragraph breaks or images) and "full" (entire posts). The choice of feed is a philosophical choice: you could be on the side of making sure people trigger your hit counters and see your ads, or you could make it more convenient for them to read your blog as long as you're giving them a feed. But believe it or not, some people may prefer a short feed, if they have less interest in the topic and don't want to commit too much time to reading a bunch of crap they're not terribly interested in, and scrolling past all of it.

If I had to quibble with any feed's decision on how much info to put in their feed, it would probably be Sports Media Watch's short feeds. I always click on anything SMW puts up, even if it's something I read already in a place like Awful Announcing and I don't need to know anything more. But I can imagine how the topic might be just a little too geeky for other people and they don't want to dwell on it too much. If something doesn't interest them in the title and first sentence, skip it. (And Paulsen has pretty short posts. AA would benefit from a short feed, for that matter, even though I wouldn't use it.) Conversely, there are some things I'd rather see in short-feed form that publish as long feeds, yet I can see how people would be interested enough in the topic to want a long feed.

So anyway, that's been my chief distraction: too many feeds to check. I haven't been able to follow webcomics without feeds, and I haven't bothered to fix feeds that aren't working, and I dread it when I add a new feed, which I do sparingly. And it all monopolizes time from other stuff. Even the semi-frivolous business of Da Blog has fallen by the wayside to the almost completely frivolous business of checking stuff.

I may re-prioritize some of my feeds and re-organize my folders to clear out some of the cruft and most frustrating stuff, and I'm going to try to focus more on more important stuff... but I've told myself that before. The problem is that checking feeds is relatively low-intensity, so it marks good rest time, but I just need to reduce the time it takes somehow.

So. If you want to stick it to Microsoft with the exception of your operating system, click here for the Random Internet Discovery, which I may have more to say about later. And I guarantee at least two posts on Wednesday. Of course, that's contingent on me getting enough sleep now...

(And I have a serious beef with Buzzcomix. It's one thing to have your site suspended twice in a little over two weeks, but to not even have a channel to let people know what's going on, especially when the old site had a forum...)

Because I just wasted my free time on my first day back at school...

...this is the only post you get from me today.

Because of all my college football stuff, I've sort of been growing distant from the NFL Lineal Title (the Colts' long reign hasn't helped). During the before-the-bowls interregnum, I've been neglecting to update it at all. That changes now. However, the college lineal titles aren't updated until after the National Championship.

We wish you a merry blog-day...

On this day two years ago, I made the very first post in the history of Da Blog. I remember it clearly. The post was written inside a bus stop shelter in cold conditions, and I shivered as I typed those first words about myself. I had a few ideas of where I was going to take Da Blog, but few of them were very clear in my head. Some jerk, probably coveting my laptop, kept needling me while I tried to work. I told myself that one day, I would be writing posts in nigh-luxourious conditions and would look back on that first, bus-stop-penned post, with laughter and chuckles.

I'm writing this post... well, the main reasons I'm not writing this in a bus stop shelter again are 1) the Storm of the Century hitting Seattle making it even worse than last time and downright treacherous for a laptop, 2) I'm writing this Sunday night after burning up my laptop battery on my last Flex Scheduling Watch of the year, and 3) as I've mentioned a few times, the public wi-fi I used two years ago has almost been abandoned.

But hey, no one's making me fearful for my safety, so that's progress!

Now, at the time, the main reason for the weird conditions was that I was on winter break. I was still living in the university dorms at the time during the regular class year. So the instant that I moved back to campus I was already writing in a hundred times more luxourious conditions than I was before (and on my desktop). But that February, I was basically kicked out of the dorms and sent home. Since then I have used various means to improvise to get any internet connection at all. I've stolen two different connections from neighbors. I made mad dashes of half a block to squeeze out a little bit of Internet time and back. I went to the library for a while. I've even taken advantage of an offer from my dad to use the Internet at the place where he works.

Since this summer, I've made at least a token effort to get a real job, and even gotten some initial interviews. But nothing has panned out, and because I haven't been able to get a real job I haven't been able to move elsewhere or get an Internet connection I don't need to steal. So it's been Improvization City for the better part of two years. No doubt the tanking economy (we wish you a merry recession-day!) has played a part in my lack of a job - certainly it would seem fatal when combined with my general lack of experience.

But there's also the fact that I've been treating Da Blog as more of a job... even though I still don't have the readers to justify it. Or any revenue streams besides advertising - but that's one more revenue stream than I had a year ago.

The past year has been one of finding my voice on Da Blog. Over the course of this year, I launched Sandsday, the Random Internet Discovery, started doing regular webcomic reviews, started forming my opinions on the state of politics today, started doing college football schedules and added pages on the web site for the college football rankings, and so, so much more. I think it's been at least June since I've failed to post on a weekday. Given that volume of postings, you may think it way overdue if you've noticed that the Blog Archive on the sidebar has switched to breaking down posts by week. It's easy to forget that a year ago, I was making twelve to twenty posts in an entire month. This is the 374th post I've posted in 2008, and already the 28th this month. I posted 155 times prior to 2008, which means I've well over doubled the output of my first year in my second.

(I was remiss in not marking my 500th post, in part because all my counts I get from Blogger include posts I've abandoned. Post #500, oddly, was this one announcing a move to CAPTCHA for all comments.)

With the move to a more regular posting schedule, and the addition of more quality content, people have started to notice. A year ago, I got excited at 25 visits in a single day. These days... well, there's still quite a few times when I get fewer than 25, but generally, especially on weekdays, at least 25 is the norm, and less than ten is a disappointment. From March through November, readership on Da Blog has increased every single month. This month is already over 1.5 times last December, and while it only has 682 visits so far through around 6 PM PT Sunday, it can still easily top last month's mark of 923 visits. The 1,000 frontier remains within reach. And last December, I was excited to get around 300 hits in a month, a mark I haven't fallen below since May. And some surprisingly heavy hitters have showed up. Okay, so when you're talking about webcomic names like David Morgan-Mar and Robert A. Howard commenting on (and linking to) Da Blog posts, you're talking maybe T-list "celebrities", but I'm a Z-lister at best, so anyone with their own site and any kind of following taking notice is going to leave me awestruck.

(My post with my predictions of SportsCenter's "Top 10 Games" proved to be surprisingly popular on searches, so look for me to potentially repeat it next year and in future years.)

Even with football season over, I've got still more plans for Da Blog, and for the web site. I'm going to be running a "mail call" feature to mark the first anniversary of Sandsday in about a month's time (I hope), so if you have any questions about the strip, leave a comment on this post, the open thread, or mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. Howard rightly pointed out that my webcomic posts have fallen into a rut of Ctrl+Alt+Del, Order of the Stick, and Irregular Webcomic! over and over again, and in something I had been planning on already, I'm going to aim to change that starting tomorrow. I still hope to complete at least my Democratic platform examination before the inauguration. As I vowed last year, I still plan to focus on my studies, but I'll only be taking two classes - although I still hope to add a job on top of that. And I still have a boatload of new projects I hope to have coming down the pike in the new year.

What of my advertising revenue, as much of a trickle as it may still be? I started adding advertising in August and I already have four dollars. Woo-hoo! But what do I do with it? As much as it sounds frivolous, given all my other problems, I'm going to start thinking of registering "morganwick.com" as a place to stow my various projects (including, potentially, Da Blog). And before my latest term with Freehostia runs out in August, I need to start thinking about potentially getting a new hosting provider to go along with the new domain. If I can afford it, I need to look for a hosting provider that provides the most bang for the buck, especially where PHP support and MySQL support is concerned. Ideally, I need more MySQL databases for the College Football Rankings and some new webcomic ideas I have percolating in my head. I also need to think about upgrading my SiteMeter account, pending what happens when they launch the new service for real - I need to start looking back more than just 100 visitors to see where they're coming from.

Year Two of Da Blog was a momentous one, for itself and for me. Let's see if Year Three takes us on just as exhilirating a ride - and if I end it posting in slightly better conditions than now.

College Football Schedule: Week 15

The much-delayed college football rankings are up. I've also corrected an error and listed the correct start time of the SEC Title Game. All times Eastern.

Top 25 Games
#1 *Florida	v.	#7 *Alabama	4 PM	CBS
#2 *Oklahoma	@	#13 Missouri	8 PM	ABC
#4 USC	@	UCLA	4:30	ABC
#9 Ball State	v.	Buffalo	8 PM FR	ESPN2
East Carolina	@	#23 Tulsa	Noon	ESPN2
#24 Boston College	v.	Virginia Tech	1 PM	ABC
This Week's Other HD Games
Louisville	@	Rutgers	7:30 TH	ESPN
Navy	v.	Army	Noon	CBS
Pittsburgh	@	Connecticut	Noon	ESPN
Washington	@	California	3 PM	FSN
Arizona State	@	Arizona	8 PM	ESPN
South Florida	@	West Virginia	8 PM	ESPN2
Cincinnati	@	Hawaii	8:30PT	ESPN2
Sun Belt
Middle Tenn. St.	@	Louisiana-Lafayette	7 PM WE	ESPN+
Arkansas State	@	Troy	7 PM	ESPN+
Western Kentucky	@	Florida International	7 PM

On April 4, 1748, the French were embarking in the last major offensive in the War of the Austrian Succession, and someone wanted to run a human through the then-new field of taxidermy.

(From mezzacotta. Click for full-sized complex games. IE users will need to get something to allow them to see SVG files.)

On October 10, 2008, the long-running, once-delayed-but-twice-changed, countdown running at mezzacotta.net finally reached its conclusion, unveiling the latest project from the circle of friends known as the Comic Irregulars (named for Irregular Webcomic! and best known for Darths and Droids).

The centerpiece of the site was a webcomic. One requiring SVG support in order to be able to see it. One with archives going back before the site's launch... indeed before the advent of the Internet... indeed extending into the BC era... indeed before the estimated age of the entire universe. Obviously such a comic would need to be automatically generated in order to have archives dating back that far, and indeed most of the characters and lines seem to fit a cookie-cutter pattern, from identified sources ranging from the Dungeons and Dragons manual to Irregular Webcomic! In fact, there are certain patterns with certain "characters" that has led to the creation of a cast page.

(The only thing missing? Lines from other webcomics not affiliated with David Morgan-Mar. I know he's done at least three xkcd pseudo-parody strips, I'd like to see the characters spout some lines from that - that'd be really surreal. Dinosaur Comics would add an... interesting vibe to say the least, and might fit best of any other webcomic. Order of the Stick would make the whole thing even more surreal yet paradoxically give the D&D manual quoter someone to talk to. Really crappy idea, but it kinda fits, for reasons I get into below.)

But how? The strip "for" the most famous date of this millenium (and a few others) call it a "randomly generated comic", which would seem to suggest each strip in the "archive" is only generated when someone visits that date. Since each date generates the same strip each time, that would in turn seem to suggest the mechanism in place then saves that comic to that date for any future visitors. 24 hours after the site's launch, David Morgan-Mar (the group's apparent leader and proprietor of IWC) seemed to back up that theory by proclaiming mezzacotta the new comic with the most strips (supplanting Sluggy Freelance) on the basis of how many strips had been viewed in the archive, a statistic that would be most relevant under such a model.

But why use a two-part mechanism for that purpose? Why set yourself up for future potential space strain down the road by even having the endless archive in the first place? How do we know this "evidence" isn't a misdirection, and the comics are actually generated based on some formula from the date, one complex enough it might seem random? With the evidence seemingly this obvious, why are Morgan-Mar and the other Comic Irregulars still putting on a show about being tight-lipped about all the workings?

With the method of comic generation, the vast majority of the comics are bound to be incomprehensible crap, but that comes with the territory; a comic rating system allows more comprehensible and even funny comics to rise to the top and get viewed more. But mezzacotta the webcomic - which derives its name from some form of the Italian for "half-baked" (good luck reverse-engineering that result from an automatic translator though) - is just one example of a, well, half-baked idea to come out of mezzacotta the site. As Morgan-Mar described it on the first day:

I lamented that the problem with our furious generation of ideas and our attempts to implement them was that we kept needing to register new domains for sites that might turn out good, but are in fact more likely to turn out truly half-baked and never do much. What we needed was a single site which could be a central repository of half-baked ideas that we sort of half-implement, to see if they’re any good.

mezzacotta is that site. [...]

So, the initial idea was half-baked. The countdown timer was half-baked. ... The webcomic is half-baked. Everything about this site is half-baked. That’s what mezzacotta is.

Welcome to our central repository for half-baked web implementations of half-baked ideas. Most of the stuff on this site won’t be great. But by just throwing it all out there and daring to be stupid, you’ll get to discover the rare gems that we might generate and not immediately recognise ourselves.

Coming up with ideas is easy - anyone can do that. Actually doing something about them is the hard part. Anyone who’s done it knows how much sweat you have to put in to get an idea beyond the “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?” stage. This is our place for doing the hard work. It’s a spur to drive us to do something with some of those crazy half-baked ideas we get. And hopefully we’ll entertain a few of you, rather than just ourselves.

It's impossible to say anything about the above without in some way rephrasing it. Beyond being a single... experiment, for lack of a better word, mezzacotta is a place for throwing ideas on the wall and seeing what sticks, some of which amounts to little more than that, some of which results in some actual implementations. That includes even a couple other webcomics.

Lightning Made of Owls, inspired by a completely random phrase posted on the mezzacotta blog, is essentially a redo of a pre-mezzacotta concept, Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, both of which are attempts at collaboratively-written-and-drawn comics. Because ∞ on 30Cr a Day has an ongoing story, it's gotten bogged down in administrative tasks and competition for the "best" strips. LMoO was conceived from the start as a gag-a-day comic with six characters that are very rough sketches, with comics to be sent in completed, not as scripts for artists to work on. Needless to say, the result is somewhat... disjointed, and there's very little to unite the various appearances of the characters into coherent, well, characters.

More interesting - and potentially making its way into my RSS reader - is Square Root of Minus Garfield, inspired by Garfield Minus Garfield and other mashups of the Garfield comics. Let me say upfront that I don't really get the hatred many have for Garfield. I find it entertaining enough, and in fact it's one of only four newspaper comics I have really taken an interest in getting the book collections for and following in any way. In recent years (by which I mean the most recent years to be released in the book collections) it's felt like it's been running out of ideas, and the seeming disappearance of such characters as Arlene, Pooky, and to a lesser extent Nermal seems ill-timed and exascerbating to the ongoing decline, but the early years, through the mid-to-late 90s at least, were funny enough comics to hold me captivated. (But then, I read Ctrl+Alt+Del.) I hear (again, I only keep up with the book collections) that in recent years Jim Davis has resorted to advancing the Jon-Liz relationship beyond the unrequited and hopeless puppy love it had been for, what, two decades? That just smacks of desperation to me.

Secondly, as popular as G-G has become (to the extent of actually inspiring an officially sanctioned book), I actually find the mashups that remove Garfield's dialogue, not Garfield himself, to be more appealing. G-G essentially says, "Wouldn't it be cool if we took these Garfield strips and get rid of the title character? See how crazy Jon looks!" Only stripping the dialogue, on the other hand, has a more appealing hook as - assuming Garfield isn't actually speaking despite the thought balloon and isn't communicating through telepathy - it depicts how things actually happen from the perspective of the human characters. It really drives home the idea that Jon is crazy when it actually reflects something actually happening in-universe.

(Incidentially, take a look at the strip to the right, from page 3 of the original T&BB thread. It attracted such comments as "I can't even imagine it with Garfield saying something" and even "This is one of those weird ones, where you know Jon isn't actually supposed to hear Garfield, but clearly this is in response to something Garfield said. Huh." Certainly that's a common enough feature that it's sometimes confusing whether or not Jon is or isn't supposed to "hear" Garfield's thoughts. Replying to the latter comment, one poster psychoanalyzed the resulting mashup:

I like it because it's as though Jon takes a moment to consider what he said, mentally kick himself and then project that hatred onto his cat. It's a neat little psychological study that I quite like. I'm not entirely sure that Jim Davis didn't plan this all along and that we're merely forging the next step of his global empire.

The kicker? The original comic - posted at left because the Garfield web site doesn't seem to have a way to permalink to old comics, which is kind of ironic and stupid when you think about it because it forces people like me to "pirate" the strip, and forces √-G to link to the individual comic images, neither of which allows Garfield to benefit from its web advertising - doesn't actually have Garfield saying anything in the second panel. In fact, all he says in the strip is "I didn't say anything". Jon's remark actually was in response to nothing in particular, and much of his neuroses in the "modified" strip actually were intended, rather obviously, by Davis all along - or don't exist even in the "modified" strip. Does this say more about Garfield (and if so, is it positive or negative), or about the people who like to bash it?)

Anyway, √-G is essentially a different mashup of a different comic each time it comes out. Some of them so far are really little more than changing the dialogue or the pictures in a slightly surreal way, and one really only shines a light on an old series of strips with two identical panels. But it's somewhat fascinating nonetheless for anyone who's been interested in Garfield mashups. And... I don't know why I wasted time with other Garfield related stuff.

But I do have to sympathize with the Comic Irregulars' plight. I too have way too many ideas than I would ever be able to work on. The web site is, in many ways, my own version of mezzacotta, a repository for all my many and varied ideas, be they the 100 Greatest Movies Project (still on indefinite hold), my street sign gallery, Sandsday, the football lineal titles, or my college football rankings. And then there are the projects I host right here on Da Blog. There are some ideas that, for some reason or another, I just can't implement, at least alone. Here's a brief start on getting started on a list of ideas I may not be able to implement myself, but that I'd like to see fruition in some way, shape, or form:

• Election results based on my projection formulae. Would require a source of results and a group of people willing and able to call races based not on their own biases, not on unreliable exit polls, not on past performance, but on nothing but the results themselves.
• Truth Court: Sorting out fact from fiction in politics based on hard evidence, and always open to new evidence or a new interpretation of old evidence. Like Mythbusters or Snopes, but more focused on questions like "Do people cause global warming?" and "Was the 2000/2004 election stolen?" and "Do gun control laws help or hurt violent crime?" and "Was 9/11 an inside job?" and "Does supply-side economics really work?" and "Who's really to blame for economic and/or foreign turmoil, the current president or the preceding one?" and...
• Similarly, a (bi/nonpartisan) web site dedicated to "keeping the media in check - and the blogs that watch them".
• The 100 Greatest Movies Project, currently on hold indefinitely on my end unless and until my old USB drive's stuff comes back. Even if I have to shut it down, I'd like to see someone else take it over and do it justice; even if it does come back, I know for a fact I need a third person to do write-ups (I have two at the moment, including me). More here.

That's just the ones for which I've solicited comment at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com (except the third). I have a bunch more ideas bouncing around in my head, some of which I just haven't mentioned, some of which I'd still like to try to do myself, some of which I don't feel I can reveal yet. I'm a veritable font of ideas in a wide variety of topics. I can only hope that I can bring as many as I can out into the open for you to peruse... and that they don't turn out half baked.

I need to remind myself that I *CAN* save long TV Tropes pages for reading at home.

Welp, I have once again had a disappointingly unproductive day.

But I have updated the lineal titles on the website. You may not have paid much attention to the Iron Bowl or the Florida-Florida State game, but it had two lineal title implications: first, the SEC Title Game will unify the 2004 Auburn-Utah and 2008 BCS titles (finally, the two SEC titles actually get unified!), and second, there will be no need for a 2009 BCS title because the unified Auburn-Utah title will be at stake in the National Title Game.

More stating the obvious: if Oklahoma wins the Big 12 Title Game and goes on to play for the national title, it'll merge Auburn-Utah with Princeton-Yale, and we'll be left with all of two lineal titles. Which is nowhere near as fun, especially when one is the safely-ignorable 2007 Boise State title (unless Utah loses their bowl). Our last hope may be for Boise and Ball States to continue undefeated...

Hey, I wasn't going to make the strip slip to the morning again.

I may be spending the night at a relative's, but nonetheless I'm still posting the new college football rankings (long-overdue, as always) and updating the lineal titles!

Now if only I could take care of that nagging college football schedule...

Details about changes to my college football playoff should be coming by the time next week's rankings come out, including a major change I'm considering compared to last year.

The new college football rankings, more than a few days late

...and hindered by my hibernation problem rearing its ugly head again, wiping out what I had written for the first 14 spots or so. But it's up now on the web site, and IF I decide to put up the schedule it won't be until tomorrow.

Update: The lineal titles are updated now as well.

Quick notes

I guarantee the rankings and college football schedule will be up later tonight! Probably around the time of the new strip. In the meantime, the lineal titles are updated to tide you over.

A new way to look at election results!

I know this is kind of short notice - I've been sidetracked by my ongoing platform examinations - but I'm wondering if anyone wants to help me track the results on election night? Ideally I would have some sort of PHP and MySQL system set up for inputting and tracking results, but because of Freehostia's restrictions that would mean letting people into my Sandsday MySQL account, so I may have to rig something up on Wikipedia. I had trouble keeping up with the results on Super Tuesday, which was actually about on the order of the number of presidential races on election day proper. Trying to keep up with that, plus Senate and House races, would take me forever. I'm thinking 25 races per person would be more than a workable number; that would mean two people to do the presidential races, one to do the Senate, and 17 people to do the House, for 20 total and I would be one of them. I don't think I have 20 visitors a day, let alone that many willing to volunteer, so I may have to double up some of the work on some people. Comment on this post or e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you're willing to refresh pages all night.

If I can't get anyone, I'll just put all my Presidential race work on Da Blog, mostly just my projected electoral vote counts (and if I get only one or two volunteers I may just give them an Excel file and have them post work on their own blogs). The sources of semi-raw vote data with all candidates I relied on in primary season might not be available anyway, which probably means the dreaded patchwork of sources.

The reason I'm planning on doing this is to provide a demonstration of my projection system. There's more explanation here, but the idea is to take race projection at least partly out of the hands of potentially biased analysts and making it less reliant on possibly flawed exit polls. It's based on one thing and one thing only: the results themselves.

Rather than one level of projection, which favors an early rush as networks fall over themselves to project and then boredom most of the rest of the way, this creates three, two of which are based on objective mathematical formulas:

Projection: Only invoked when the race appears to be a sure thing but the mathematical formulas haven't confirmed it yet. This occurs only at my discretion, and is based on the results themselves, not invoked the instant the polls close (unless the candidate is unopposed).
Autoprojection: Invoked when %1 > %2 + (1-P), where %1 is the vote percentage of the first place candidate, %2 is the vote percentage of the second place candidate, and P is the percentage of precincts reporting. 1 represents 100%.
Confirmation: Invoked when P * %1 > P * %2 + (1-P), using the same values as above.

If I feel like it, I may have more tomorrow, but I'm already late in trying to get home and see the Obama infomercial when it airs on the West Coast!

College Football Schedule: Week 10

You know the drill about the updated rankings and the lineal titles. Matt Sarz seems to have done a relatively sloppy job this week - one game has its game time disagreeing with CBS Sports.com, another has a disagreement on which team is the home team and which is on the road, and three games don't have "PPV" eliminated. See the SEC section below for one such game whose TV details I did NOT get from Mr. Sarz. All times Eastern.

Top 25 Games
#1 *Texas	@	#6 Texas Tech	8 PM	ABC
#2 *Florida	v.	#11 Georgia	3:30	CBS
Washington	@	#4 USC	6:30	FSN
#23 Nebraska	@	#5 Oklahoma	8 PM	ESPN
#7 Tulsa	@	Arkansas	2 PM	Gameplan
Arkansas State	@	#8 *Alabama	3 PM	Gameplan
#9 Missouri	@	Baylor	3 PM
Iowa State	@	#10 Oklahoma State	3:30	ABC
#12 Boise State	@	New Mexico State	7 PM	CSD.TV
#14 TCU	@	UNLV	8 PM	CBS CS
#17 *Utah	@	New Mexico	9:30	mtn.
#18 Iowa	@	Illinois	3:30	ABC/ESPN
Northwestern	@	#19 Minnesota	Noon	ESPN2
West Virginia	@	#20 Connecticut	Noon	BEN (ESPN+)
#25 Florida State	@	#21 Georgia Tech	3:30	ABC/ESPN
#22 BYU	@	Colorado State	6 PM	mtn.
Watchlist and Other Positive B Point Teams
South Florida	@	Cincinnati	7:30 TH	ESPN
Wisconsin	@	Michigan State	Noon	ESPN
Miami (FL)	@	Virginia	Noon	Raycom
Fresno State	@	Louisiana Tech	2:30
Arizona State	@	Oregon State	7 PT	FSN
Oregon	@	California	3:30	ABC
Houston	@	Marshall	8 PM TU	ESPN2
This Week's Other HD Games
Buffalo	@	Ohio	7 PM TU	ESPNU
Air Force	@	Army	Noon	ESPNU
Central Michigan	@	Indiana	Noon	BTN
Michigan	@	Purdue	Noon	BTN
Kansas State	@	Kansas	12:30	FSN
Auburn	@	Mississippi	12:30	R'com/Y'hoo
Pittsburgh	@	Notre Dame	2:30	NBC
Temple	@	Navy	3:30	CBS CS
Clemson	@	Boston College	3:30	ESPNU
Tennessee	@	South Carolina	7 PM	ESPN2
Louisville	@	Syracuse	7 PM	ESPNU
East Carolina	@	Central Florida	8 PM SU	ESPN
SEC
Kentucky	@	Mississippi State	2:30	Gameplan
Big 12
Colorado	@	Texas A&M	2 PM
ACC
Duke	@	Wake Forest	3:30	ESPN360
MAC
Eastern Michigan	@	Western Michigan	2 PM	CSD.TV
Kent State	@	Bowling Green	2 PM	CSD.TV
Mountain West
San Diego State	@	Wyoming	2 PM	mtn.
Conference USA
UAB	@	Southern Miss	8 PM	CSS
Rice	@	UTEP	9 PM	CBSCS XXL
Pac-10
Washington State	@	Stanford	5 PM
WAC
Hawaii	@	Utah State	3 PM	ESPN+
San Jose State	@	Idaho	5 PM	CSD.TV
Sun Belt
North Texas	@	Western Kentucky	4:30	ESPN+
Florida International	@	Louisiana-Lafayette	5 PM	CSD.TV
Troy	@	Louisiana-Monroe	7 PM	CSD.TV
Bowl Subdivision
Tulane	@	LSU	8 PM	Gameplan

Our long national nightmare is over! I think!

Sandsday should be pretty much back to normal now, so I'm removing the "Sandsday on Da Blog" notice. Freehostia is displaying a notice about their busted MySQL database server, but Sandsday wasn't showing an error when I checked and seemed to be pretty much back to normal, so I'm guessing I escaped it, or it's fixed and they haven't changed their notice. And there's still a little bug in their file manager as well.

(I think I'm considering ditching Freehostia again, but only if my ad revenue is sufficient for me to move to a paid host. And I'm thinking getting my own domain would be a higher priority for ad revenue than a paid host.)