I use Staedtler Mars pigment liners for inking Schlock Mercenary, and they come in six sizes: 005,01,02,03,05, and 07. Most of my foreground characters are inked with the 03, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling with that pen. The nib is damaged, and I’ve been nursing it along in an effort to save some money.

Today I got fed up, and grabbed a new 03 from the box. Two panels’ worth of work later, I pick up my 03 to ink a foreground character, and realize that the nib is broken. Not only that, it’s broken EXACTLY like the 03 I replaced it with. Grrrr…

I looked down and figured I’d use the 02 instead, and there was another 03 in front of me. The new one.

Duh.

When you’re going to throw away a marker because it doesn’t work right, you have to throw it ALL THE WAY AWAY, Howard. That’s why there’s a trash can in your office.

–Howard

So the iTunes store has a Pepsi “redeem song” button.

My Diet Vanilla Pepsi bottles have no iTunes “Free Song” codes under the caps.

Does anybody out there know which Pepsi products DO have said codes?

–Howard

Fascinating article here.

Upshot: employees may risk getting fired for what they put in their blogs — especially if they talk about who they work for. This kind of speech is NOT protected under the First Amendment.

My opinion: Duh. Just because you CAN say something without being thrown in jail for it doesn’t mean you SHOULD. When I worked for Novell there were all kinds of things that I was not to talk about openly, under pain of being fired with cause. It’s a no-brainer, folks.

The article also talks about NON-employees being targeted, and how they can defend themselves the same way mainstream media journalists do. In this case the First Amendment is pretty good protection. If what you’re saying is true, or at least substantiated, you can’t really be sued for it. And as a non-employee you certainly can’t be fired for it.

Anyway, the article struck home for me because of my relationship with Novell. For example, while employed by Novell I was not allowed to voice ANY sort of opinion about SCO’s lawsuits even though as an IT industry insider it’s obvious that I HELD an opinion. Following my departure from Novell, I cheerfully mocked SCO and McBride with impunity, expressing an opinion formed from publicly available facts and the application of the same intelligence available to any primate capable of walking upright.

The 21st century has elevated the street-corner soapbox well above “lectern” height and handed us all megaphones. Through the resultant cacaphony, there actually seems to be useful information… just be careful about discussing the fingernails of the hand that feeds you, dawg.

–Howard

I ran a couple of errands this evening — new URL cards for schlockmercenary.com (they’re slick — 600 of them feature some fresh artwork you’ve never seen before, 200 have a shiny Tagon Silhouette logo, and 200 have a plasgun logo similar to the one on the navigation buttons) and cough-drops. Well, at Albertsons, where I was picking up the cough-drops, there were five guys in line at the express checkout, and all five of them had the identical “on sale” plastic-wrapped roses in one hand, and heart-shaped-box-of-chocolates in the other hand.

“Honey, you shouldn’t have.”

I wish I’d had a camera. I did a double-take when I saw these guys in line. They were as different demographically as you can get in Utah county: an old white guy, two hispanic men, a teenage-looking guy, and a yuppie… the only thing linking them was “I’m coming home from work, and I still haven’t done anything for Her for Valentine’s Day.”

–Howard