kirabug’s idea files

• Work is Under Construction, and has been Loud. Life from 5pm on is a headache in progress.
• The server upgrade to allow the play of Oblivion went badly. Graphics cards are being RMA’d, fingers are being crossed, RAM chips are being priced.
• The “service engine soon” light came on in Fluffy this evening, so we dropped her off at the local garage to find out what’s what. That means that instead of working 10:30am to 7pm, it looks like I’m carpooling in with the husband in the morning and working 7am to 7pm until I at least know what’s wrong.
• The Internet’s been up and down like a jackrabbit on a pogo stick. I think it’s actually our router acting up and could be related to the problems with the server but no guarantees. I wanted to do some scouting for some reference pics for Tuesday’s comic but alas, no freakin’ internet.
• More of the same tomorrow; do not be shocked by continuing radio silence.

So, uh, we were without a database for a little while this evening, but it’s back now.

…

I, uh, think I’m gonna go run some backups, just to ease my nerves.

Which reminds me: if you’re in NaNoWriMo, or you’ve done anything else of note in the past few weeks that you don’t want to lose by freak accident, this is a good time to back up. Yes, right now, while you’re thinking about it.

Go on. I’ll wait.

Yeah, so last night at about 11:30, I was working on some code for a little side-project while watching the Phillies game and generally trying to spin down from a crazy day. I got about 2/3 of what I needed done, and I tried to push a new stylesheet up to the system, when suddenly everything choked. Dreamweaver, which is prone to the occasional odd error message, informed me that it couldn’t upload the file in question because, well, the file didn’t exist, or maybe I didn’t have permission to use it.

And, well, that’s bunk, because I’m the ONLY one with permission to use these files, and this particular one had been uploaded mere minutes before. So I logged on to my web host and decided to manually upload the file instead…. only to discover that Dreamweaver wasn’t lying; the directory I was working in was empty. So were most of the others. Most of the pages here woudn’t load, and a good chunk of my other work was just plain gone.

Panic ensued.

I sent a note to the support team, waited a few minutes, and watched as one by one entire directories just poofed. No backup files, no forum, no wordpress… Another panicked note to the support team. This time, a response: they’re aware of it and working on it and it’ll be up within the hour. But that was at 1 AM and I have to be to work early today for a meeting. (yay meeting.)

Did you ever go to bed at night and wonder if everything you’d done was going to be there in the morning? Not a comfy feeling. I think I “get” Neverending Story in a whole new way now.

After a fitful night sleep, I’m back, and so is everything else. The support team was, as always, good to their word. And I am immediately applying what I learned. First, a backup was done. (I do these regularly, but not regularly enough.) And second, I’ve added a link to my Xanga blog in the links section. Strangely, when everything else was disappearing rapidly last night, the homepage was still there, so the links section was still functional. If all else has failed, I’m relatively sure Xanga will still be standing, and since it doesn’t live on the same server as everything else, it’s a decent place to post updates when I can’t post updates. Of course, in case of catastrophe, homepage mileage may vary, so you may want to make note of that one somewhere if you haven’t already.

So anyway, mental breakdown over, and I have to get my butt to work. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours contains fewer heart-attack inducing elements for all of us.

---

This “plot” stuff is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. Especially when simultaneously juggling the capstone for my Master’s degree and overtime working on a project for my employer. My appreciation for authors such as Pete Abrams, Howard Taylor, Steve Troop, and the hundreds of others who have successfully written story-based comics for years is growing by leaps and bounds.

See, the problem is that I wrote up scripts, and I’ve even drawn most of them… but I’m reading them myself I don’t think they’d make sense to anyone else. Obviously, elaboration is required, but that means I need to draw the elaboration comics NOW to post NOW so the stuff I’ve already drawn makes sense. NOW is a bad time. That’s why I have a six-to-twelve-week comic buffer to begin with.

Anyhow, I got two panels of the comic planned for today finished (yes, this is the same comic I’d planned to have up last Tuesday) but not four, and after having gotten less than five hours sleep every night this week, I’m going to bed early. The server’s going to be down for maintenance sometime between midnight and 5 am anyway, so even if I finished tonight, I wouldn’t be able to post before all y’all would be awake and reading. And events like this are the reason why I go trolling for bad AOL headlines.

So enjoy this doozy from a few weeks ago, and I’ll try to get all my work done. Tomorrow, I just have to clean the kitchen, make sure the finances are up to date, work on my capstone, write a food shopping list, go food shopping, and work on the comic. That shouldn’t take more than, what, eighteen hours?