dsandler.org/wp

The national Do Not Call
Registry opened for business today. Unsurprisingly, the registration site is completely
overloaded.

I need to force myself to draw more.

My line of work and time commitments have reduced me to doodling on the sides
of source-code printouts and on Post-It notes.

This has got to stop. It’s just not right.

I have proof that I’m letting this part of my brain go to seed: I’ve had the
same sketchbook for almost three years. You’re supposed to go through
them faster than that. At least, I’d like to go through them faster.

For your viewing displeasure, and my unending shame, I took some truly
miserable photographs of select pages
and drawings from the book. The autogallery is set to preserve the
order, so you can see the progression from eVilla
(2000) to
dieselsweeties
sketch (2001) (cf. the finished product), to some figure
drawings (2002) (1, 2, 3, 4), to the arrival of the
Zelda Master Quest (2003) (0, 1, 2).

You win some, you lose some. Internet is back up — has been since
midday — but digital cable is out again. Well, I won’t be disabusing
Time-Warner of the notion that I’m experiencing a complete outage; at
least, not until they come out tomorrow morning. It’s like Darryl says: do not tell tech
support the truth if you want service.

From Jenny. I pass it on without
further comment.

Hmm.

Red 6/26/2003
7:21 AM TW-HOUSTON

Road Runner is currently experiencing issues
with the cable network. Subscribers in the affected area(s) may
experience a loss of connectivity, usually indicated by flashing
modem lights and/or a loss of video services. Our engineers are
working quickly to resolve this issue. We apologize for any
inconvenience this may cause.

Cable modem still out; TV service going in and out. (Sometimes we have
nothing; sometimes we have analog only; sometimes we have digital
stations too.) The “CABLE” light on my cable modem (Toshiba, PCX2500)
alternates between dark and slow-blink, both of which seem to mean
“badness 10000”. I’d like to think that all this variability in the
behavior of the network is the sign of technicians hard at work at this
very minute. (Deep in my heart I know that this is not true; that,
instead, things are so horribly wrong that they can’t quite decide just
what kind of wrong they are.)

Erin and I just had a little epiphany. Yes, the cable is out; yes, the
internet is down … but our TiVo will gladly play back all our saved
programs for us. Yes, yes.