The news headlines today are talking about the US Post Office possibly ending service on Saturday, and you know, 20 years ago this might have bothered me, back before email, and back at a time when I still looked forward to letters, magazines and newsletters.  But thinking about it, that’s all nostalgia now, and really all USPS ever brings me these days are bills, catalogs of material I can’t afford anyhow, and the occasional media rate book.  Would I really care if Saturday was cut?  Nah, not really.

Back in high school, and even into college, I enjoyed corresponding with several different people via postal mail, and in a strange way there was something fascinating with the post, back in those pre-email days.  It seems odd to me, thinking back, that there was ever a time when I looked forward to getting mail.

But if USPS wants to cut Saturday service, then I really don’t care anymore.  The post office locally already closes early on Saturday (the ONE PERSON working the counter only works until noon then leaves, I guess) so that’s no big deal, and I really don’t care about the mail on the weekend anyhow.

Besides, I’ve noticed that I usually get bad news in the mail, like a massive medical bill or a cryptic note from the IRS, on Saturdays, oddly, to ruin the day with a notice that I can’t do anything about until Monday, so maybe eliminating service that day wouldn’t be all bad.

I wanted to weight in on my general thoughts about Entrecard, an entertaining and yet at times frustrating system for blog advertising and promotion.

As a software QA for the last 10 years, nothing irks me more than finding buggy software that I don’t get paid to fix. Entrecard has a massive body of users, so it’s frustrating that their software isn’t more robust (do the EC developers even work with a QA organization? Do they comprehensively smoke test this stuff before rolling it out?). I could write out numerous issue reports of bugs that I’ve found with EC, but I’d prefer that they had just caught most of these bugs prior to pushing this software out. Anyhow, here are some general thoughts and considerations about EC:

1) High level summary: Entrecard is a neat way to find a diverse collection of blogs (and bugs!)It allows you to, via a straight-forward card-dropping system, to advertise and share advertising with others, while being able to approve all ads before they go through.

2) The EC toolbar makes it a lot easier to visit blogs and drop cards.  Additionally, having a toolbar category for ‘Favorites’ is a nice touch in that you can easily revisit blogs that you like on a daily basis. However, you can have blogs saved in favorites that suddenly no longer use the EC code. So if you jump into your favorites eventually you’ll find a non-EC site that CAN’T be removed via the toolbar. This isn’t a problem if you still enjoy the blog content, but it is a little concerning that the toolbar isn’t smart enough to bypass non-EC blogs.

3) Another thought about the toolbar: the various categories seem to be chock full of blogs that no longer exist, or no longer have the EC code, or link to unrelated sites, and yet are still in the directory. Is it really that hard to write code for the toolbar that, prior to opening a site, checks for the presence of EC code and, if not present, excludes the site? I’ve also had EC directory sites that have mistakenly directed to non-EC adult sites(!), which again speaks poorly of this code to retrieve current, relevant blogs of Entercard members.

4) Some additional enhancements that I think would make a lot of sense:

• The ability with the toolbar to BLOCK certain sites. Considering that some sites either don’t have the EC code, return 404’s (or worse) it makes sense to give users the ability to block certain sites that they don’t have any intention of visiting again. Of course, this functionality could be abused, but that decision is ultimately up to the EC user and what they choose to, or not to visit.
• More EC credits for hitting 300 drops. Seems like there should be more of a reward for hitting this goal, even if it’s just a bonus 50 EC.

Entrecard is a fine system, and a great way to find new blogs and also draw in traffic, but the system is plentiful with bugs and could really benefit from some more robust quality assurance prior to being rolled out.

I just found this on my computer: this was a panel that was going to be in issue #3 but never got used.  December Sun, returning from his epic loss to Bullbeast, loses his direction and hits a tree.  I think I cut it because, at that point, I felt the character had had enough abuse, so I never bothered using this particular panel.

What’s odd is that this was at a time when I was really experimenting with the medium, and this panel was inked on a piece of scrap paper that I was going to scan in and use for the issue.  I’ve since learned that (duh!) medium IS important and that all I use now is illustration board.

I just wrote a guest post over at Unsolved Mysteries of the World, an entertaining blog I found through Entrecard that has numerous posts about the paranormal and unexplained.  I’ve long been fascinated by the legends regarding Jesse James and his hidden stash of gold in the Wichita Mountains in southern Oklahoma, where I used to live, so I wanted to write up an article on this.  The post is half mystery about the hidden gold, and the other half is just nostalgia about living in Lawton/Ft. Sill years ago.

I spent a lot of time when younger hiking various trails around parks of the Wichita Mountains, and the legends of hidden gold out there somewhere was just one of those things you knew about and speculated about whenever out hiking.  Every nook and cranny of every mountain could have been a secret hiding place for lost treasure.

So I put the legend into print and, since it didn’t really fit here, I offered it as a guest post over at Unsolved Mysteries.  I’ve been doing a lot more writing this year: in addition to guest posts, I’ve been hammering at the ‘bad science’ December Sun book and also writing out DS 6-8.  I just hope I can keep up with the webcomic, but at a page-a-week rate it shouldn’t be a problem.

Back before I started dscomic, I had a sloppy google site at decembersuncomic.blogspot.com.  I recently went through and cleaned this up and scrapped a lot of the posts (most of the semi-relevant ones I just moved over here to dscomic) and I converted this old blog into one devoted only to music and songs that I like.  Many of the posts are YouTube links, but there are also some comments about songs and various tracks and artists.  I enjoy a lot of music and could easily tie up a lot of space here with commentary about music, so instead I decided to just move most of the music chatter over there.

Here are some images that I cut from issue #4 of December Sun.  I’ll try to post a bunch of these over the week, if for no other reason than the fact that they are just taking up space on my hard drive.

Two panels today were some experimentation that I did on newsprint.  I used a LOT of newsprint paper in college, as its an excellent medium for charcoal and conte chalk.  In terms of sequential comic pages, though, I wasn’t crazy about it.  Here are some panels from a page I started and quickly lost interest in.

One of several blogs that I follow with Entrecard is a site called “Robot Armageddon”.  I really enjoy the content as it basically talks all about current developments in robotics and in a tongue-in-cheek manner describes how these advances will eventually lead to robots taking over and/or destroying humanity.  The site ranges from the factual and informative to the downright creepy, which is why I find it so fascinating.

Anyhow, I was honored to get to write a guest post the other day, and I wrote up a review of the disturbing Sico II robot that appeared in a number of films and TV shows in the past, most notably as Pauly’s robot in ‘Rocky IV’.  I gave a write up about this particular robot, noted some of its appearances, linked to the site that developed this machine, and discussed the implications of Rocky traveling to Soviet Russia to train in the mountains while a maniacal robot was left at home alone with his unprotected family.  It was fun to branch into something new and write about robotics, even if done in a silly way.