As this is in line with our standing policy for special strips, this is not
a hiatus, and thus the front page will not change today (Sunday).
Instead, last week's strip will be shown for two extra days and Tuesday's
strip will be shown for two less days.
Because of our standing policy, Friday's strip will take the place of next
Sunday's strip, which will give me the rest of next weekend to finish that
other 20%. See you Friday.
If you find debris from Columbia, do not go near it. It may contain toxic
substances. Instead, call (281) 483-3388. If you have pictures or video
clips that may help in determining the cause of this tragedy, please see
the instructions on NASA JSC's web site at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/instructions.html.
For more information, please see NASA's Columbia web site at
http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/ or follow the coverage
by your choice of news outletts..
I'm finishing the last handful of additions... hopefully this evening,
but at worst sometime during the week, which means that Tech Magazine
will return on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2003. Hope you enjoy where this story
goes from here.
This weekend, I won't be posting a strip because I needed a weekend
to work on all my other projects that ALSO got delayed for
the vacation. I'm currently buried in moving from a first draft
to an actual working draft of a sci-fi novel. It seemed a little
short, so I'm folding in some additional back-story that I had
originally omitted. I hope to have this process completed
this weekend, and expect the comic strip to return on January 19th.
Chuck Jones was one of the creators of such lovable characters as Bugs Bunny,
Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and many others. He made over 300 animated
films during his 60 year career, including the ever-popular "How the
Grinch Stole Christmas", which was recently made into a live-action movie
with Jim Carey.
Throughout his career, Chuck Jones made millions laugh throughout good times
and bad. He will be sorely missed.
Chuck Jones
Oh, and a cool news item. This web site has seen 1,000 unique visitors
this month! I nearly fell off my chair! (Oh, and in case you're wondering,
only two or three of them are me. ;-) More details soon.
Who will take the place of Tami while she tries to act? What about the
second AI? And what really happened to Bo Vine? Will Dave ever find
true love? Will Beth marry Mike, or will things get weird again? We'll
find out the answers to these questions and more this year in Tech Magazine.
2003/03/30:
Per the "unwritten" 3-day rule (which basically says that we won't put up
a strip unless it will be up for at least three days except during the
holiday season), Tech Magazine will not be seen this Sunday in order that
we may bring you a typically off-our-rocker April 1st edition on Tuesday.
2003/02/09:
This week's Tech Magazine strip proved entirely too complex to finish in a
single Saturday and still have time to work on my other projects.. I'm
considering taking a personal day from work on Monday to get caught up
with things, in which case, I would expect to finish it and have it on the
web on Tuesday. Failing that, it will be up next Sunday. We apologize
for the inconvenience.
2003/02/09:
Tech Magazine is on emergency hiatus. One of our servers lost a hard drive
during the week. It didn't contain any important data, but it was a wakeup
call. As a result, I'm pretty desperate to get our backup solution in place
and actually running. I got about 80% of the work done on Thursday night,
Friday night, and Saturday, so I hope to still do our traditional Valentine's
day strip.
2003/02/02:
This week's strip is dedicated to those who lost their lives aboard the space
shuttle Columbia yesterday, aboard various airplane test flights, and aboard
the Challenger and Apollo missions, 17 and 36 years ago, respectively, almost
to the day--to those who made the ultimate sacrifice--who gave their lives
that we might soar. May their courage inspire us, and may their deaths be
not in vain.
2003/01/27:
The extended hiatus has continued much longer than originally planned.
I finished the first draft of my novel a couple of weeks ago, and I've
been working on folding in a couple of rather large additional plot
lines. I nearly doubled the length of the novel in the process.
2003/01/11:
Apologies for the extended hiatus and the diminished strips over the
holidays. For the bulk of the holiday season, I was in bed sick with
pneumonia. I managed to force my head clear just enough to get a couple
of critical strips out over the break, but otherwise tried to rest.
I was still not feeling well last week.
2002/10/06:
There's no Tech Magazine this week due to circumstances beyond our control.
The laptop used for the strip suffered a screen failure, and the backup
laptop didn't have PhotoShop on it yet.
2002/09/11:
This week's strip
is dedicated to those who lost their lives a year ago today,
and to those who grieve their passing. We at Tech Magazine remember
Sept. 11th.
With all peace-loving people of the world, we mourn with you.
2002/03/17:
Welcome to the new, improved Tech Magazine. Thanks to our friends at
User Friendly (and a few days of perl hacking), we now have a working
comments system. While it has been tested somewhat in an off-line
capacity, it still may have quirks. Please report any bugs to
tm-bugs1@techmagazine.org.
2002/03/10:
Tech Magazine is on a one week vacation while I try to catch up from
two church gigs, two dress rehearsals, and two wind ensemble concerts
(and that's all in the last two weeks). By the time next weekend
rolls around, we should be back to being several weeks ahead. We'll
also transition to the new web server and site design for next week's
strip, assuming all goes well. More details later.
2002/02/25:
This week's strip is dedicated to the memory of Chuck Jones, who passed away
on Friday. Unfortunately, we got this information too late to do a tribute
strip.
1912-2002
2002/02/02:
Releasing early so that it goes up on the web site before the end of
Groundhog Day (today). I'm not doing another strip in the current
story arc this week, as I spent all my free time this week working on
the archive.
2002/01/31:
More improvements to the archive. Once I've finished filling in all the files,
there will be a description and complete text for each strip. Note that if
there's no description, the complete text isn't there yet, either, so don't
bother clicking. I'll be putting these in over the next few evenings until
they're all there. I'd have done more, but it took the whole evening to
get the CGI exactly right.
2002/01/27:
Check out our newly enhanced archive. No more looking at a list
of hundreds of strips. It's divided by year, and you can go from one
strip to the next without going back to the list. It's not perfect,
but it's a whole lot better....
2002/01/20:
Due to a small typo, the strip didn't go up today. I've manually corrected
the problem, and we're proud to bring you the 2002 season.
2002/01/13:
Tech Magazine is on hiatus. The holiday season put us behind somewhat
because color strips take many extra hours. While we catch our breath, enjoy
the Tech Magazine archive. The 2002 season premiere of Tech Magazine will
begin on Sunday January 20.
2001/11/18:
Apologies for not releasing a strip last weekend. Too busy with rehearsals
for Wind Ensemble. We're back.
2001/11/18:
This week's strip will go live on Thanksgiving day (Thursday)
instead of today (Sunday).
2001/11/04:
Apologies for the strip not showing up today. The strip is updated by a
cron job that runs in the middle of the night, and I didn't realize that
it had already run when I uploaded the strip at 1:15 this morning. (The
cron job runs at 1:02 a.m.) I've manually installed the new strip.
2001/09/30:
Due to some extra demands on my time for the past two weeks, I'm behind
on drawing strips. I have a couple of strips ready to post, but they
won't make sense until after the current story arc (the break-in) runs
its course, and the next strip in this arc isn't finished. We will
resume regular weekly posting next week.
2001/09/16:
Tech Magazine will be delayed one day this week. We are doing a special
strip in light of recent events, and we need the extra day to put on a
few finishing touches.
2001/08/18:
Apologies for not pushing a strip this week. I have been on vacation
with very limited net access. The strip that would have run last week
will run tomorrow. Now to read a week and a half of email.... :-|
2001/07/09:
I can't finish the last few tweaks on this week's strip because I'm completely
out of hard drive space and Photoshop won't let me open the file. I have a new
hard drive arriving later today, so this should just be a minor delay. My
DSL modem should also arrive today, which will help.
2001/06/28:
Okay, it's official. I just uploaded the first in a series of new strips.
It will appear on the site this Sunday. This week, Tech Magazine gets
evicted.
2001/06/25:
"Week or two" turned into a month because I still don't have DSL at my
new place and got laid off from work, making network access difficult.
Today, I started in a new job at Apple... as a tech writer. I expect
to have a new strip up this Sunday, or at the latest, a week from Sunday.
2001/05/29:
As you have noticed, Tech Magazine has been on extended hiatus during the
"crunch phase" of my Master's thesis in computer science. Things are
going to be nuts for another week or two, but I felt that I owed TM's
readers an explanation for its continued absence. We'll be back before
you know it.
2001/03/27:
Tech magazine was delayed slightly because the dialup connection I was using
in Tennessee wouldn't let me connect on Sunday (or Saturday or...). Now
that I'm safely back on wireless ethernet here in CA, I've uploaded the next
month's worth of strips, with another half a month or so in progress.
2001/03/12:
Okay, so I lied. I've been hopelessly behind in two major projects and in my
schoolwork. Since this is finals week, and since I will be out of town
next week, Tech Magazine will officially return on Sunday, March 25.
2001/02/25:
So much for getting ahead. I've spent the entire weekend trying to bring
this web server up into the 21st century due to the sudden realizatioin
that it was a security hole waiting to happen. We're on hiatus for at least
another week. Hopefully, this will be the last week for a while.
2001/02/18:
In case you hadn't figured it out, we're on hiatus this week for
Presidents' day and lack of time. This weekend, I'm planning to get
ahead a few weeks.
2001/02/14:
Author's note: In case you were wondering, my V-Day was spent watching
reruns of Star Trek Voyager and working on my master's thesis research.
Here's hoping my readers had a happier Valentine's Day. And yes, I did
draw this from midnight to 2:30 this morning. Thanks for asking. ;-)
2001/01/28:
This week's Tech Magazine is dedicated to the memory of Phillip Ralston,
my fraternity brother and friend. I found out yesterday evening that
he died in a car accident Friday. He will be greatly missed.
2001/01/26:
The network problem has been corrected. We suspect that they may have been
caused when a firewall lost power due to a rolling blackout. We have moved
the techmagazine.org server to a different network which is working correctly
and do not anticipate further problems.
2001/01/21:
Due to network problems we are on hiatus this week. This week's
comic will appear on the 28th. Too bad, too. The whole inauguration
thing had so much comic potential.