I Would Totally Use the Orphan's Week Orphan if it Were an Option

February 06, 2013

Man oh man has it been a while. Sit down children and let Ol' Uncle Danny tell you what the hell I've actually been doing for the past five weeks. First off it was after the holidays, when I typically take a break for a few weeks or so, and during this break I had the lofty goal of converting the website too a database format. After a week off I sat down at my computer and readied to punch some code in the face. It was at this point however the universe felt it necessary to disagree.

First our entire house had crippling internet slowdown, loading pages, let alone uploading pages had become an unrulely ordeal. After a few days of fiddling with stuff on my end, and calling Time Warner to fiddle with stuff on their end, the internet was healed and everything was running smoothly, for about a day. After that initial day of running smoothly my laptop ran into it's own slowdown problems. I'd turn the computer on, it would run fine, and then without warning the entire thing would just freeze up. No blue screen or anything, just freeze up and stopped responding to any and all stimuli, save waggling the mouse, but a waggling mouse is a far cry from a working computer. I trying everything, ran virus scans, they found nothing, unistalled crapware, no change, consulted my friend Brian, (a.k.a. real world Brad,) who is actually kind of handy when it comes to computer issues, still nothing he suggested seemed to help.

Finally after exhausting all my avenues I had no choice but to bring it in to Best Buy where I originally got it, paid them for a year of Geek Squad coverage so that they would work on my system, and they found that the hard drive was dying, and that I'd have to get a new one. It was a relief. A new hard drive was a lot cheaper than having to get a whole new computer, that and I really can't afford a new computer at the moment, but I digress. The good news is I had backed up all my website stuff when all these shenanigans started, so I didn't lose anything there. Additionally the hard drive I had them install is twice the size of the old one, so once I got my laptop back it would run smoother than ever! Oh how wrong I would be.

Now don't get me wrong when I got my laptop back it ran great, the problem was at since they had to scrap the old hard drive they needed to do a fresh reinstall of Windows, which they installed, oh boy did they install it! They fucking installed Vista! Why the fuck would they install Vista! Actually I think I have a pretty good idea of why the installed Vista, my laptop originally had Vista on it, but I bought it a week before Windows 7 came out so I was eligible for a free upgrade. So now over three years later when they installed the new hard drive they only had my laptop's original serial number specs to go off of, and since they said Vista they installed Vista. Sounds very reasonable when you think about it, however I just have to proclaim shenanigans because they had the damn thing for almost a week, did no one notice it was running 7. Also, Vista, seriously? Vista? Does anyone who knows anything about computers run Vista if they can help it? Anywhosles When I contacted them about their mistake they informed me that while they felt bad about the whole thing, they weren't obligated to give me Windows 7, seeing as I couldn't prove I was running Windows 7 since I didn't have an activation code, and they said they couldn't just give me one, I'd have to pay for a new activation code, which in itself is shenanigans seeing that that I didn't have an activation code for Vista, yet they didn't charge me for that, but I digress. I didn't know my activation code for 7, but I knew who did, my slowly dying original hard drive. So one last time I brought my laptop to Best Buy, had them put the dying hard drive back in and I crossed my fingers that it had enough life left in it for them to retrieve the activation code from it. Thankfully it was successful, and once again I had Vista stricken from my laptop.

So now it's about two weeks ago and I finally have a working laptop, time to start posting new comics right? Wrong! Now it was time to do all that work on the website I wasn't able to do for the past two and a half weeks. Thankfully while I was unable to do any work my friends Chris, (a.k.a. real world Misterpher,) and especially Jae, (a.k.a. doesn't have an analogue in the comic, but totally deserves one.) had been at work at it. By the time I came back Jae had, for the most part wrote all the code I'd need to run the site and was working on populating the database. So for the next week I spent my free time populating the database with all the titles of the comics, dates the comics were originally published on, and their corresponding blog posts. It was, slow boring work, but I got though it, actually that's not quite the truth. I only loaded the comic number, comic title and publication dates, I'm still in the process of loading all the blog posts, but I've loaded enough to make the site workable, and that's what really matters, that and by the time I got my laptop back up and running Jae had already populated 75 out of the 478 comics, so yeah, again I can't thank her enough. But oh no, our tale's not done just yet my friend!

By the time I had the database done my Mother had decided that she was going to switch from Time Warner for cable, phone and internet, to Direct TV for TV and Verizon for phone and internet, so due to the switch there was a few days when I didn't physically have any internet, but that's not all. In order to make use of Verizon's internet services we needed a router specifically made for them. Ordinarily You'd expect the technician that hooks everything up to provide the magic interwebs box, but Verizon instead mails it in advance, only problem we never received said magic interwebs box, which in itself if a story worth telling, ... ... ... so I'm gonna tell it.

UPS is fucking stupid, unfortunately we have to rely on them for package delivery, so there isn't much we can do about it, but I digress. Without giving my real address away, lets say I live on 75 East Downtown Road, and a few streets over there is a 75 Downtown Road. It would be a reasonable mistake for them to mix up the addresses every once and a while, only thing is 75 East Downtown Road is a residence, and 75 Downtown Road, is the fucking Norman Rockwell Museum! And it isn't every once and a while either, it's like about 75% of the packages that are meant to for us end up at the museum, and it's not a one way situation either, we get their shit too, which makes sense, you know because the small little house I live in with adequate parking for maybe six cars tops totally can be mistaken for a multi-million dollar museum that can accommodate hundreds of patrons. On at least five occations I've found packages meant for the museum left on our front step, two of them actually being Norman Rockwell original canvas paintings. Long story short UPS delivered the magic interwebs box to the Museum, so it took another two days to finally get it at it's true destination. So now here we are five weeks since my last post and I'm finally ready to start posting again!

So now that that's all said and done I should probably talk about the actual comic I posted, seeing that it is of an unusual sort. Today's comic was written by me, and drawn by my friend Christine. You can take a look at her stuff at her site, here. Anywho today's comic is a WoW comic. Hurray WoW comic!