This comic was uncannily true, but I finally decided enough was enough and got myself a new car - 2007 Toyota Corolla LE. Now I'll have more time to code stuff because I won't ever have to fix this car (ever... God says Japanese cars don't break).

It wasn't quite the 2-seater rear wheel drive convertible I was hoping to get, but at least its got a manual transmission. It's probably better I wait until I have a garage (and some rooms attached to it for sleeping and cooking and stuff) until I get a project car anyways - its hard to rebuild an engine and install a turbo kit in a driveway I'm actually really happy with it as a daily driver, and I think I'm going to take a while to enjoy NOT having to bother messing with cars.

Just to let everyone know, a few small bugs in the site got fixed last night - the most notable being the "Classic" comics' issue with only displaying the name and number of the last series, no matter which one was selected. While fixing that, I made a few enhancements to the php/sql scripts that retrieve the comic info, so you might notice a little bit quicker load times as well. The very next priority is getting some anti-spam filtering set up for the comments script

Please, post in the forum or email Matt if you find ANY more bugs in the site.

I just thought I'd say that aside from taking a break to eat food and watch Heroes (OMFG) I've been at work since about noon Monday. Its now 4:30am tuesday 

http://roux.vox.com/library/post/why-why-am-i-still-laughing-at-this.html

Hey everyone, I just wanted to give a little heads up as to what I'm up to and why there are some annoying issues with the site. I've been working about 70 hours a week lately, so I haven't had the time to play around with the enhancements we were planning on doing.

I want to apologize to everyone who has tried to register for the forums... I tried setting it to automatically accept users but something is "stuck" and it wants admin approval. There were a couple people in the queue and you're approved now. I'll try to keep on top of it better until we fix (read: beatdown) the forum.

If you want to check out what I've been working on in the meantime, visit http://www.blogbackuponline.com - we just started our public beta. Hopefully things will calm down at work and I'll be able to crank out some fixes for the site. We've been looking at some various options to get comic comments back on track, finish the forum theme, and then take things forward to maybe having some "premium" content for community members (free, of course, as a shameless bribe to register and participate  ).

If you notice something wrong with the site, please send me an email or post about it.

So I TRIED setting the user account stuff to automatically approve, but apparently it isn't.

yeah, I know I have things to fix

Posting this mainly because I am at work testing our compatibility with various blog engines and stumbled across it and want to remember it, but also because matt might find it interesting.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0122067/2006/05/15.html referring to http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=674042006

Good quote about science and religion co-existing:

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."

So we're getting ready for an open-to-the-public beta (we've had a couple private betas) and I am working way too much this week. 

What's everyone else up to?

I got a little package in the mail. Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro/80. They make me smile.

http://www.beyerdynamic.com/cms/Headphones.68.0.html?&L=1&tx_sbproductdatabase_pi1[showUid][showUID]=44&tx_sbproductdatabase_pi1[showUid][backPID]=68&cHash=ea6cb3ee29

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar99/articles/sessentials.htm

I finally got around to organizing my 2nd bedroom/home office a bit more... I want to get something like this to elevate the laptop screen to ergonomic levels, make another usb DAC (this time with switchable headphone and speaker outs), and get another bluetooth keyboard (the first is down with the HTPC), then I'll want to work from home more than go to the office  Hmm, I'll also need a headphone stand.

So, what would make YOU, the viewing audience, actually start participating in the forums? What enticing community features would you like to see added to the site?

And yes, we are planning on repairing the forum theme so it matches the site again.

ok, I started this on the lord forum, but my self-imposed exile makes me want to do it here, too.

I got this gem today: "Pre-War Intelligence Came from Magic 8-Ball"

FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec, is a compression technique for digital audio that provides a bit-perfect copy of a CD's WAV audio while decreasing the file size by half. Yes, not as small as MP3 (or AAC, or WMA) but those formats REMOVE data that it "thinks" is inaudible in order to get the file size down. That is referred to as a "lossy" codec.

This is why I will never purchase from iTunes (except the damn 4-song exclusive Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers release) until I can get lossless tracks. Apple and Microsoft DO have "Apple lossless" and "WMA Lossless" but again, tied to one platform. FLAC is open source and works on Mac, PC, Linux.

Why bother? I like sound quality.

So apparently everything that happened thanks to the hack has undone the measures we tried to put in place to foil the bots. Sorry. Its all coming back slowly.