I looked at Today’s APOD, in which the Huygens probe photos were used by an artist to create an “artist’s concept” of Huygens sitting on Titan.

Consider… the parachute is still attached.

What if the parachute had come down on top of the probe? More than a billion kilometers from home, with 90 minutes of battery power, the probe would have gotten pictures of the inside of the chute.

I’m not accusing anybody of poor planning, or anything like that. I’m just imagining that happening, and giggling quietly. There would have been no artist’s rendition, but cartoonists all over the blogosphere would have drawn funny pictures. (Well… at least one of us would have.)

–Howard

I mentioned “books to teach me how to draw” in my last post. Along with the monitor I ordered a book on drawing “dynamic wrinkles and drapes” and “dynamic hands.” These are the two places where my drawing needs the most improvement. Tagon wears a skin-tight uniform and stands at parade rest a lot because I don’t know how to draw a) wrinkles and drapes for clothing, and b) hands.

The artists on my friends list will certainly have noticed this, and have probably been wondering when I’d get around to rectifying the problem.

The books haven’t shown up yet. This is too bad, because I’m getting ready to draw some civilian clothing, and I’m afraid it’s just not going to drape properly.

–Howard

Kudos to wls_xenolith (my cousin Kurt) for blogging about (and therefore calling my attention to) this monitor, which I turned around and bought for $279 from Amazon.

I’ve only had it for a couple of days, and it’s working out really well. I checked Amazon, though, and it’s no longer available. They have the “gamer” version” of the monitor, which costs $100 more, and which I decided wasn’t worth the extra $100 to me. Interestingly, when I unpacked my cheaper monitor there was a sticker on it that said “fast 8ms response time,” which I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t PAY for that kind of response time. Maybe the sticker was just there to make me feel good.

Sandra has been watching episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on my PC some evenings, and this new monitor ghosts LESS than my old tube did — a true technical accomplishment, especially when you consider that the scenes shot in the dark come out looking clear, too.

The monitor I replaced was an NEC Accusync 19″ monitor whose brightness was starting to go, and which was getting blurry down towards the bottom of the screen. Since I sit in front of a computer every day, that would just never do. So now I have a monstrous-footprint monitor on the floor in the corner of my office, heavy enough (but not dense enough) to be a boat anchor. If I could figure out how to turn it into $50, I’d buy some more books to teach me how to draw.

So… Kudos to Kurt. He may wonder whether anybody pays attention to his blog — I certainly do, if only to see what kind of weird image he’ll dig up next.

We all know that Alexa ratings are “tainted” at best. Alexa requires a browser plug-in that most folks would call spyware, and that only runs under Win32 and Internet Explorer. That skews the ratings pretty hard for audiences full of technical types (though that doesn’t stop Slashdot from having a great Alexa rating), and we can only assume that there are other statistical shortcomings.

Okay, fine. But today, ladies and gentlemen, Schlock Mercenary’s Alexa Rating for both “rank” and “page views” beats the Alexa rating for Sluggy Freelance.

Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that because the sample size is small, there are dramatic peaks and valleys in both our graphs, and they are not in phase. But part of this is ALSO due to the fact that my Alexa ranking has been on the rise for two months now.

Pete’s work was part of what inspired me to head down this crazy path six years ago, and this little patch of graph shows us like we’re EQUALS. I feel a little bit like Sandra felt a few years back when she realized that we were making more money than her parents were (and oh, the fall from THAT patch of hubris… try an 80% salary cut sometime, Dad!)

So… for today, anyway, I love Alexa.