Well, my worst fear concerning my computer crash came true: My Treo has apparently died, with its years of work-related telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, addresses and other notes. (Even birthdays.)
The good news is that I managed to back it all up on my new hard drive before the phone died.
The bad news is now I have to replace my Treo, which is a real “ouch” situation.”
Ten years ago this week, a Web site that would change my life (by introducing me to my future wife, among other things), went online. Or at least, it took on a non-links page form, which in turn would end up changing my life.
The site was ComicBookResources.com. When Webmaster Jonah Weiland decided to put up a fan site for the new DC Comics miniseries “Kingdom Come,” he ended up forming a central clearinghouse for fan info on the series (which is loaded with references and appearances by obscure 50+ year old characters) in an age when large fansites for any and all things geeky weren’t the #2 feature of the Internet (behind porn, of course).
I found the site when I went online after reading the second issue of the series, which I bought at the comic shop in the shopping center next to the Potomac News. I couldn’t figure out who the heck some of these characters were, so I went back to my desk, fired up my computer and used the then cutting-edge search engine, Altavista (which the years have not been kind to) to look up “kingdom come dc comics appearances” and found Jonah’s Kingdom Come Message Board. I found the answer to my questions about who was who in this series, and more than a decade before MySpace, I found an online community before I knew there was such a thing. Among those community members was Jenn, then a college student at Cal State Northridge.
When I moved out to California to be with her, I found getting to work for a new newspaper a little problematic (that’s what you get with moving to the #2 media market in the country, wise guy; all the jobs are locked down and there’s hundreds of people in line ahead of you for openings) and Jonah offered me the chance to scratch my journalism itch doing comic journalism. While I’ve never been Employee of the Month anywhere, I was Employee #1 at CBR. At the time (and still to a large extent today), comics journalism consisted of really painful Q&As.
(Free Journalism 101 tip: Unless you’re writing for a Playboy Interview, Q&A makes you look like a nimrod, more often than not, since no one wants to see your “humorous” back and forth with a complete stranger or the poorly phrased questions that elicit unclear and not worth reprinting answers. You bury that stuff with a shovel like the rest of us do, if you’re smart, and then bury the shovel. If you’re really, really good, you can do a Q&A. But honestly, few people are that good, in my not-so-humble burying-the-bad-questions-with-a-shovel opinion.)
I convinced Jonah to take a flyer on true article-format journalism, he handed over his contact list, and we were off and running, putting together years of journalism I’m pretty proud of. (Alas, more than a little of it has been lost to server crashes and such in those early years.) And with content came more readers and more advertisers and today, Jonah is one of two friends of mine who lives off his Web site. (The other is Greg of Greg’s Movies at Yahoo! Movies, formerly UpcomingMovies.com. I actually encouraged both of them to quit their “real jobs” in the same week, which Jenn had some strong opinions about, once she found out I was pushing them to become penniless and unemployed.)
Today, Jonah has a multimedia empire, as well as hosting pretty much everyone a geek could love. In Internet years, he’s been online practically as long as Al Gore.
I’m hardly alone in that CBR changed my life. I suspect big time comics writer Gail Simone (who once said I was among the least funny people she knew, and she’s a paid funny person) and many others can say the same.
My hat’s off to you, Jonah. If I wore a hat with any regularity, that is.
Well, maybe superhero might be too strong:
A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.
The gang members seemingly take delight in injecting humour into their raids, which rely on sheer numbers and the confusion caused by their presence. After they plundered Kobe beef fillets, champagne and smoked salmon from a gourmet store on the exclusive Elbastrasse, they presented the cashier with a bouquet of flowers before making their getaway.
The latest robbery is part of a pattern over the past several months, suggesting that the thieves deliberately set out to highlight what they perceive as the inequality inherent in German society.
However, the authorities do not agree. Bodo Franz, a police spokesman, said: “They get off feeling they are just like Robin Hood. There are about 30 in the group. But whatever their motives, they are thieves, plain and simple.”
Carsten Sievers, the manager of a luxury supermarket in the wealthy Blankenese area of Hamburg, recently watched the robbers run off with trolleys full of expensive foodstuffs, including Kobe beef which, at more than £100 a pound, is always on their illicit shopping list.
You can’t make this kind of stuff up.
Man, I wish the High Desert had superheroes. Monster Truck Man! Captain Commuter! The Amazing Off-Roader!
Well, in Microsoft’s continuing efforts to get me to buy a dual-boot Macintosh set-up, my hard drive has developed serious problems over the weekend, and each time I run chkdsk and restart the computer, more, not fewer problems occur. I’m now told that c: is corrupt or unreadable, which likely means the end of the road, as an amateur fix-it guy. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking in my computer to a local shop and getting a new master hard drive installed, with Windows, and seeing what, if anything, can be transferred off this machine to that.
Since Firefox is gone now, World of Warcraft is gone now, my personal information for Thunderbird is gone now, it seems prudent to back up (online, here) my list of podcasts now while I still can. (As opposed to the list of Firefox plug-ins which I’m going to just have to remember on my own once the new hard drive is installed. Argh, and the WoW mods as well.)
So here’s the current list:
Put those addresses into iTunes or Juice (or even TiVo, if you’re really ambitious) to get the feeds and see, well, hear what I listen to regularly.
- In other it’s-good-to-have-a-hard-copy news, the first season of Supernatural is coming to DVD on September 5. Awesome.
- It’s a trick getting your iPod’s music back onto a new hard drive — it’s not what iTunes wants to do by any means. Luckily, there’s all sorts of third party programs that will do it. I used PodUtil. It seems to have missed most of the artists whose names start with any letter before D, strangely, but I’m hoping the files got copied over somewhere.
Bards and Sages has just announced that the Koboldnomicon, with material by yours truly, among others, will be released in July.
No word on distribution methods, but going by history, it’s a pretty safe bet it’ll be available through RPG Now at the very least.
