My earlier theory about Garfield only being produced by clip-art seems to have been borne out today; apart from the speech/thought balloons and a couple of inner detail lines, the first and third panels of today's strip are exactly identical, and the second panel differs only in Jon's facial expression. The character outlines in all three panels are the same.

Once I've finished making some more changes to the blog code, it'll be time for the Jim Davis Lazyometer (patent pending).

Via a link on Moira's blog, some interesting quizzes on the Guardian Unlimited site.

I got a perfect score on the Simpsons quiz, the spelling quiz, the "Intellectual" quiz (though I chose the answers I thought would receive a perfect score, not necessarily what my answers would be). Sadly, I missed one question on the Gunpowder Plot quiz, and I got a 5 out of 8 just by selecting random answers on the beards quiz.

And I did horribly on the Literary London quiz: "You clearly don't know your Arsenal from your Eltham." I got all the historical questions right, but obviously I have no clue about twentieth-century writers...

And the winner of today's "weirdest search engine hit" award is... "the nurse put the nitrous oxide mask on me -birth -dental".

Is that a fetish thing?

Page two is finished. It took Thursday night to do the layout and goldleafing (of which there ended up being more than I'd anticipated), and about twelve hours on Saturday to do the painting (Friday night was taken up with band rehearsal).

I decided to do a "landscape" page rather than one of the geometric borders. Took less time to lay out, but I think the orderliness of a geometric page is more to my liking. Had to buy a couple of new paintbrushes this morning, since the one I bought last Sunday is pretty much worn out.

Since just about all of the calligraphy I've done in the SCA has been for awards, I don't actually have any of my own work; it's all hanging on other people's walls. I'm glad this one is for Karen; it's by far my best work to date, and it'll be nice to have it hanging on my wall for a change.

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

I know it's against doctor's orders, but when I'm pushing myself to work past 2AM every night, I need a little caffeine to get me started in the morning. Just a bottle of Vanilla Coke, no Mountain Dew or Afri-Cola — but I still feel guilty as I drink it. Well, I can sleep when I'm done.

Or perhaps while I wait for the OpenOffice 1.1 beta to download. Zzzzzzzzzz...

While toiling away on Karen's award, I've been occupying the idle parts of my brain by listening to DVDs. When I'm all finished, I'll add up the running times for a rough estimate of how long it took.

So far, I've watched Angel season one, Buffy seasons one through three, Twin Peaks season one, the pilot for Lexx and twelve episodes of its second season, Galaxy Quest and Dark City. Throw in the couple of TV shows I watched, and it pushes it over the 80-hour mark.

Watching all those Buffy episodes back-to-back brought up a question: they showed more than once that Xander retained all the military skills and knowledge from when he was magically transformed into a soldier — so why didn't that extend to the hand-to-hand combat skills he would have gotten from basic training? And why, later on, did he display an utter ignorance of military hand signals?

I just received an email that began:

New greetings to you gode Maister Godfrey de Shipbrook.

After three expository paragraphs, it went on to read:

The bard in question I am seeking is Maister Godfrey de Shipbrook.

I am hoping you may know them, or know how to contact them in order to get permission to add their work to the songboke.

I'm not quite sure how to answer that.

I was working on updating the Trimarian Arts and Sciences site, and I noticed that crufty old Netscape 4 wasn't downloading OpenOffice documents properly. (That's not the least of Netscape's troubles, but the little things can be fixed immediately.)

So I fired up telnet, edited my server's configuration file, added the MIME type for .SXW documents, and tested it out. It worked.

I pulled up trusty old WS_FTP, downloaded a copy of the new configuration file to my home machine... but no! I'd hit the wrong transfer button, and an incredibly ancient version sped its way over to the Web site, obliterating the correct one!

My heart sank, but suddenly I realized — I hadn't yet exited out of the editor in the telnet window! It still had the correct version in memory. (Hooray, we are saved.)

The moral of the story is: a cluttered desktop can avert careless disaster.

Okay, so Æsop I'm not.

Ten and a half years ago, courtesy of the Westisles History of Trimaris:

Talewinds, January AS XXVII, 1993  On 1-29/31-93, the Barony of Wyvernwood presents Hero of the Chalice held at Camp Keystone. The site is under new ownership and problems from previous events have been corrected. The site has been inspected, and it looks great. The pigs are gone. Activities for the weekend will include Hero of the Chalice Tourney; Bar-Room Brawl and Standard Rapier Lyst; IKAC, Obstacle Shoot, Advancing Barbarian & Wench shoot, and, of course, the Royal Hunt Archery Competition. for boffer will be Pillage the Pirate Ship and Human Joust. There will be The Quest for Something or Another, Battling Rabbis, Dancing and Bardic circle. Autocrat Diego Alejandro Miranda de Saavedra y Madrid and Lord Godfrey de Shipbrook. Feastcrat Baroness Ceridwen o Cahercommaun.

Battling Rabbis?! I have absolutely no recollection of that. I remember painting the barbarians and wenches on Friday night of the event, setting up the various archery fields, and everything else (except what the "Something or Another" actually was), but the "Battling Rabbis" baffles me.

Apropos of nothing, whenever I randomly think about somebody I haven't seen in years, I'll Google his or her name just to see if anything pops up. This morning, on the drive into work, I found myself thinking of someone I used to know in Boston, when I went to Carolingian events. After I'd moved to Florida, I ran into her one Pennsic and she filled my ear about a particular cheating fencer from Wyvernwoode. She died a little over a year ago, under suspicious circumstances.