One of the sports writers at the local paper lives in my neighborhood and, because this is Utah County we’re talking about, attends the same church I do. He asked if he could interview me for their annual “Progress Edition,” and I agreed.

This is what got printed

Last night I posted this to appease community members clamoring for the strip.

This morning I have news.

1) Canaca cut me off without warning because apparently more than 100 of you attempted to read the comic at the same time (and no, Canaca did NOT tell us this might happen).
2) We’ll be executing our 30-day money-back guarantee with Canaca, and moving elsewhere.
3) The site should be operational by early afternoon today.

Re: point number 1 above, it makes SENSE to cut someone off if they’re hogging server cycles. Schlock Mercenary serves static HTML, so that shouldn’t have been a problem. We suspect that some OTHER site on the server was executing php a little too aggressively, and that when the techs went in to take a look they found that MY site was the one with all the users hitting it. After all, within about 10 minutes of the new strip airing, there are typically between 1000 and 2500 readers online requesting it.

So… while it makes sense to cut off a problem site, it’s unlikely we were actually CAUSING a problem. It’s much more likely that the techs at Canaca don’t understand how to configure Apache. (Hey, if any of you Canaca techs are reading this, I just challenged your tech-mojo. BRING it, bay-bee. Your kung-fu is just dung-poo.)

As a result of all this I lose between twelve and eighteen hours of Google Adsense revenue, which, interestingly enough, easily amounts to a couple months’ worth of hosting at canaca.com. Oh, and Canaca loses my business for the next three years, as well as the business of anyone currently reading this.

The hosting company we’re moving to has stated up-front that their policy in this regard is a little different. Rather than holding your site hostage and defecating in the open mouths of your customers, they’ll email your technical contact if there are problems, and give him/her three days to solve those problems. This sounds much more reasonable, don’t you think? They cost a little bit more (about 50% more over a three-year period), but I’ll still be able to pay for three years of hosting in (mumble mumble count-on-fingers) 20 days or so.

So… sorry for the pain, folks. We’ll have it sorted out by the end of the day.

–Howard

Being sick at Penguicon was frustrating. I managed to discharge my critical responsibilities (wrangle chaos, do panels, be “visible”) with flair, but I didn’t get a stitch of drawing done. I brought a week’s worth of scripts in the hope of at least pencilling on them, but I just didn’t have the energy.

I got home and realized that I’d been running on fumes. Monday and Tuesday were almost total write-offs. Lots of naps, lots of lounging around, lots of coughing… very little drawing.

Tuesday morning the colored-and-uploaded buffer stood at 4. I managed to pencil and ink two strips. Today I’m on target to ink the rest of next week, but the colored-and-uploaded buffer is at three — Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have a full week inked, colored, and uploaded. I can feel my strength returning slowly, and I need it all back, because having 9 strips ready to go isn’t nearly enough. I need a month in the can so I can dig in on some other projects without having to worry about what’s airing next at schlockmercenary.com.

–Howard

Monday I dropped off the net for a few days. It’s been nice for a number of reasons. Unplugging is important because it demonstrates that being plugged in is NOT. Oh, and apparently while I was gone there were people saying unkind things about me over in Keenspot Central. By the time I found out about it they’d moved on to saying unkind things about each other.

I haven’t bothered to go read it, mind you. By the time I got a connection back I had more important things to do, like play with Sal’s dogs, visit a disc golf course I’d never played before, and read some Ringo.

Quick travelogue: Monday I flew into Detroit, and spent the evening in Dexter, Michigan with Sal Sanfratello and the Aegis crew. Tuesday I slept in and played a round of disc golf at the Hudson Metro Park. It’s easily the best course I’ve played. The grooming is nice, and there is lots of variation from pin to pin.

The course was so nice I went back on Wednesday. It’s a good thing, too, because there’ll be no opportunity to play again this weekend. The weather system that slammed Utah and Idaho earlier this week is going to sock Detroit with rain and perhaps snow this weekend.

Thursday Sandra flew out here to join me, and today (Friday) we kick off Penguicon 3.0. My principal project while here — wrangling Evil Stevie’s Convention Chaos Machine — hasn’t begun yet because the machine hasn’t arrived. It’s due to show up “any minute now,” in Rob Landley’s vehicle, and then I’m going to be suddenly, suddenly busy.

I’m looking forward to it. Vacationing has been nice, and being “off the net” has been nice, but it’s convention time, and that means Game == ON.

–Howard