Questionable Content

OK, maybe some folks my question stuff I've posted here, but the title really is also the title of a webcomic by Jeph Jacques from Northampton, Massachusetts. He started Questionable Content in 2003. It's a slice of life/romantic comic about a group of friends in that town. There are a few odd things, though, since it's set in a sort of alternate universe where there are little AnthroPC robots and some people are already living in orbit and they're not just astronauts.

The characters are all 20-somethings living in the alternate Northampton. Marten Reed is the main character. Early on he takes in Faye Whitaker, whom he had just met. She managed to burn down the apartment building she lived in thanks to a toaster mishap. She works at Coffee of Doom, a shop run by Dora Bianchi where much of the action is set. Marten has an AnthroPC named Pintsize who's always up to something nefarious and occasionally destructive. As the strip develops the cast grows larger. Some of the additional characters are decidedly odd and relationships among the characters can be rather complex .

I found out about QC a month or so ago from a mention in Danielle Corsetto's webcomic Girls With Slingshots. After reading for a while I decided to go back to the first strip and read all the way through to the current one. That takes a while since Jacques has done 1,547 of them so far. It was definitely interesting. Jacques has been making a living from doing the comic along with a line of merchandise, mostly T shirts. He was so successful at marketing T shirts and stuff (at one time he posted a note about going off to buy $1200 in postage for sending out shirts) that earlier this year he joined a group of other webcomic artists who market their merch through a company called TopatoCo.

TopatoCo also markets things for Wondermark by David Malki (he was at Wordstock at the Portland Convention Center several weeks ago) and Christopher Baldwin, who did Bruno, the first webcomic I got interested in. They've got 34 artists overall.

I Only Missed One Day

I'd hoped to post something here every day as part of National Blog Posting Month, aka NaBloPoMo, but I missed a day in the middle. It was kind of silly to miss because I was posting "Sundancer's Fairy Tale" and all I had to do was a little copy, paste and make a few words italic. Oh well, I did post the other 29 days, and I did better than October when I missed three days.

Sometimes, especially after I finished the story, I found myself stuck for something that intrigued me enough to blog about it, especially these past few days (except for Saturday, when The Thistle & Shamrock was such a good show).

I'd thought using StumbleUpon would make it very easy to come up with something each day, but a lot of what I see tends to get repetitive. Lots of photo collections, humor that isn't always that funny or intelligent, just less than I thought I'd find, I suppose. Also, I haven't wanted to get into politics or religion.

I guess I'll come close with politics on this one, though. It's Sen. Al Franken doing a freehand drawing of the United States, and he does pretty good at it. He does it state by state and it all fits together quite nicely. I have always loved maps and could probably do a fair job of it myself, but I doubt it would look nearly as good as Al's.





Now that I've gotten through November, I'm still trying to decide whether I want to keep up with posting every day or just when something truly interesting comes along.

A Little Extra Cash Would Be Nice

I was chatting with a friend earlier when he asked me about being an Amazon Associate. At first I thought maybe he was thinking of becoming one, but really he wanted to know how it worked, then said he was thinking of buying something somewhat pricey and if he gets it through Amazon he'll click on one of my links. I let him know that clicking on any of my Amazon links doesn't commit you to having to buy the item the link takes you to. Once you get there, anything you buy counts.

I've seen some pretty strange things show up that I've gotten commissions on both in my Associates page for stuff that are direct links from me, and also on some of my Squidoo pages where some of the items, all of them on some pages, er, lenses, and none on others are links that mean Squidoo gets half the commission and I get the other half. That actually works out better for me most months because I don't get all that much action on my links and half of Squidoo's commission is a little more than I'd make if I put in one of my own links with my Associate ID. The more items an Associate sells in a month, the better the commission, and Squidoo of course makes top commissions.

So, if you're thinking of getting anything from Amazon, I'd appreciate it if you used one of my links here in this blog. This link to Amazon.com will take you to their main page and you can take it from there.

You should know it doesn't cost you anything to get to Amazon through my links. You get the same deals, same prices, everything is the same as if you'd just gone there on your own. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep it in mind.

Thanks.

The Thistle & Shamrock

I just listened to this week's program of The Thistle & Shamrock, the NPR program hosted by Fiona Ritchie. While it was probably one of the least Celtic shows, it was one of the more memorable ones as Fiona traveled to the home of Pete Seeger, who spoke of his life and music. Fiona interspersed his reminiscences with songs he wrote and/or made famous sung by people such as Dick Gaughan, Nanci Griffith, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Bruce Springsteen and of course Pete himself.

There's three possibilities for listening. One would be to catch it as it airs on your local NPR station. Another is to check the ThistleRadio website to find it's list of streaming radio stations to find when you can listen online at a time convenient for you. The third is to check back to the website's main page and click on the Listen Again link.

Pete Seeger turned 90 last May. He's a living link to the history of American folk music from the 1940s on to the present day. I had a chance to see him live once when he appeared at a benefit for some workers in Gardner, Massachusetts in the 1980s.

If it's at all possible for you to catch this edition of The Thistle & Shamrock, I think you'll find it's an hour well spent.

A Town by any Other Name

...probably wouldn't be as interesting.

I've always been fascinated by places with odd names. This site tells about 21 of them. Of course, I know of quite a few more, and I was pleased to see at least one favorite: Lake Chargogagogmanchaugagogchaubunagungamog in Webster, MA.

I live not far from Boring, Oregon. One of these days I'll have to find out how it got its name.

My friend Dick Ford lives in Mize, Mississippi, which isn't all that far from Hot Coffee.

I've wondered if there's a trash disposal place in Pahrump, Nevada. It would be the Pahrump Dump.

Up in Washington along the Puget Sound there's Pull and Be Damned Road. I encountered the name during one of my phone jobs and later looked it up on Google Maps.

Linux: It's Not Windows

OK, that title seems to be stating the obvious, but a lot of people seem to expect Linux to be so much like Windows as to make no difference. But of course, Linux is quite different. For one thing, it's free open source software, so you don't have to pay for it. For another, it was not developed by a for-profit corporation that provides paid technical support.

Recently someone in the Go Firefox! forum on Delphi linked to Linux Is NOT Windows, written in 2006. Since then Linux has gotten easier to use for people who aren't all that geeky.

I'm a little bit geeky in that I did take a couple of courses at Boston University ten years ago for building computers and Windows NT. As part of that, I ended up learning quite a bit and did installations from DOS up through Windows XP. I can often figure out things, or at least find web sites that will explain stuff when I run into problems.

But there are limits to my geekiness, so when I decided to try Linux again I looked for something that would pretty much work right out of the box. Of course, there was no box, so I did have to know how to download an .iso file and burn it to a disk so it would boot, and I had to do that using Windows.

The article does a very good job of explaining the differences between Windows and Linux without getting overly technical. So many people have grown up with Windows that they may expect Linux to be very Windows-like without appreciating why is isn't and why the differences are good things. The article explains, again without getting overly technical, how Linux started and how and why it was developed and why the open source way of doing things is better once you accept certain things.

Realizing that open source software like Linux and the many applications that run on it are developed by volunteers who don't owe users anything is pretty important. If you have a problem, you can ask for help, but you have to realize people aren't being paid to help you, so it's best not to expect or demand instant gratification. I didn't have any problem with that in part because I'm used to the helpful information sharing I find on Delphi Forums and other places. Delphi's Go Firefox! forum is a place where people can ask for help with problems and people volunteer their knowledge to help solve them, but nobody's getting paid to do that.

I have to disagree with some points made in the last couple of paragraphs of Linux Is NOT Windows, and that probably has a lot to do with improvements in Linux over the past three years aimed at newer users. The author suggests if you want an operating system that does just about all of the heavly lifting for you, stick with Windows and make sure you've got a good firewall and good security software in place, or get a Mac and use OS X. Now three years later I'd be willing to bet that many people who might not have been good Linux candidates then would do very well with Linux Mint. At least, it was my choice. There are other versions out there that other people may find more to their liking, especially if they like playing around with geeky stuff more.

Linux Mint 7, aka Gloria, is the most up to date official release as I write this, and Mint 8, aka Helena, should be released very soon. I found that right off the CD Mint worked just fine for me. One thing I had to do was install a Dreamweaver substitute, Quanta Plus, so I could make some changes to my home page, a graphical web page of linked icons that resides on my computer, not on the web. I had to learn a few things to do that, but to me they didn't seem too terribly geeky. Anyone willing to search and follow instructions could do it.

I Was Ahead of the Bad Astronomy Blog

Yesterday's entry here was about a site that shows the Solar System to scale, with one pixel equaling a thousand kilometers. Today while checking my Bloglines feeds, I saw that Phil Plait, the astronomer who does the Bad Astronomy blog on Discover Magazine's website, featured it.

Of course, Plait has something I don't: thousands of readers every day. It's a pretty interesting blog if you have any interest in space and science in general. The site is called Bad Astronomy because Plait often takes to task people who misuse astronomy or just get it wrong. Needless to say, he thinks, correctly, that all the nonsense about Dec. 21, 2012 is a bunch of hooey.