Chris and I have spent much time over the last few months developing the story and artwork for the first issue, in order to start approaching publishers with our concept.  The finished work would be a graphic novel appearing in 8 installments.

We are currently in preliminary talks with a few publishing houses and will be evaluating our course of action.  In the meantime, please check out the Black Thursday website that we set up to showcase the artwork and story!

www.black-thursday.net

I had the pleasure of designing the logo and identity for this site through my work at POP Interactive.  The logo was just featured in the Law Blog on the Wall Street Journal, among other reputable legal sites.  Wow -- a logo I designed in the Wall Street Journal!  I never thought I'd see the day...!

I've had a tumultuous relationship with Netscape. The first version of the browser was developed by a fellow alumnus, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and was released in 1993. It was based on the code for NCSA Mosiac, the first graphical web browser to gain popularity in academic circles. NCSA, or the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is a unit of the University that provides cutting edge resources for the students and faculty to use as they develop software projects. I wasn't around back then (I was 13), but the excitement at the potential for the World Wide Web generated by those first steps was still in the air when I got there in 1998.

By that time, Microsoft had released Internet Explorer. Through successive iterations from 1995 to 1998, IE had met and exceeded the features of Netscape, leveraging the massively scaled distribution power of Microsoft by being bundled free with Windows 95. Interestingly enough, IE was also based on Mosiac, but on a version of the software built by Spyglass, a company owned by the University of Illinois whose mission was to try to develop UIUC's software projects into being commerically viable. Spyglass licensed the Mosaic code to Microsoft, which used it as a base for Internet Explorer 1.0.

By Version 4.0 of IE, Netscape was done for. Over the course of several attempts to outdo each other, Netscape and Microsoft fought what web nerds like me refer to as the first Browser War. Both companies raced to add new features, but they were so frantic to get code out the door that both products were quite unstable and incompatible for some time. I flirted with using Netscape a few times, but by this time it was so buggy that I got frustrated and stuck with IE.

Developing websites for these browsers was a huge pain in the neck, and lead to the old trick of "browser sniffing." These techniques used JavaScript to detect the user's browser type by examining the User-Agent string and by testing for the presence of certain features and DOM methods. Things have gotten a lot better for us web developers, but ensuring cross-browser compatiblity is still an issue which steals a lot of project time. Recently announced Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to more web standards than any previous version, and that's something to celebrate.

Under the threat of being squashed completely by Microsoft, Netscape created the non-profit Mozilla Foundation in 1998. This was an effort to "protect" their code base by making it completely open source. The happy ending here is that Mozilla took the next few years to develop what became Firefox, which rose from the ashes of Netscape and became the first browser to really challenge Microsoft's domination. (Mozilla, by the way, was internal Netscape slang from way back in the early days...it's short for Mosiac Killer.)

AOL bought out Netscape shortly after the Mozilla Foundation was formed and has been using the brand ever since, until their announcement this month that they would retire it.

Alas, Netscape, I knew ye well. R.I.P.

P.S. -- If you still want to use Netscape, you can always get the Netscape skin for Firefox :) 

Let's say we were going to graph a person's emotional range on an absolute scale.  Over an arbitrary duration, a person with a "normal" range of emotions might have a chart that looks something like this (with a little help from the Google Charts API):

Our Sulky Person is one who is never truly happy, and therefore can't experience Absolute Happiness (Ecstatic, on this scale) because it falls outside of their emotional range:

At her absolute peak of happiness, our Sulky Person might still feel only Neutral on the absolute scale.  I feel like I'm the opposite of this case:  I tend to be happy and laid back almost all the time.  Even when I have been at the deepest depths of my despair, I could still feel a little seed of happiness inside.  [This part is not theoretical...I remember the exact moment....but that's a story for another time :-) ]

This is not to brag -- in either case, both me and the Sulky Person are missing out on experiencing the full range of emotions.  Someone with the full range would be able to feel both crushing, suicidal despair and triumphant, ebullient ecstacy with an equal intensity.  Let's say, for example, Ludvig von Beethoven:

What about the people you know?  Where are they on the spectrum?

I whipped up some quick JavaScript to get the art portfolio moving, but as time allows I would like to implement this in a more sophisticated fashion.

Enjoy!

The company we went flying with was quite a class act -- good to know, since we've had relatives warning us about all the balloon crashes in the news lately.  They made sure that we were very involved in the setup process, and this first picture you see is me holding a side of the balloon as we use a FAN to inflate it.  Yes, a fan.  (Ballooning, at least the way we did it, is completely back to basics:  you attach the basket, blow up the balloon and lift off into the air.) Once the balloon got sufficiently full, our pilot fired propane jets into the balloon interior to heat up the air. 

Once you get it hot enough, the enormous balloon tips up, as you can see in the background with the other balloon in our group.  After that you all have to scramble into the basket as it strains to pull away from the earth, and as soon you get in they let go and you're OFF!

That first liftoff was quite breathtaking.  The rest of the journey took less than an hour.  We floated over the farms and fields of beautiful Sonoma County, watching the fog burn off in the emerging sunlight.  It's very peaceful up there, apart from the occasional firing of the jets, and yes -- it is, in fact, quite romantic.

As I mentioned, when ballooning you're completely at the mercy of the elements.  The only way to "steer" the balloon is by adjusting the height through the controlled heating and cooling of the air inside.  Depending on how high you are, different crosswinds will propel you in different directions.

We stayed low for the majority of the flight, skimming over vineyards and trees with leaves changing color.  According to the pilot, October is the best month of the year for ballooning.  We tried to end the journey with a little high flying, but there wasn't enough wind up there so we moved on to looking for a landing spot.

We were able to find a yard to land in and helped take down the balloon, then were whisked off to a pleasant champagne brunch on the grounds of the Kendall Jackson winery.  All in all something everybody should try at least once.

Here's my favorite photo from the journey -- this is the type of picture you can only get from a hot air balloon!

I think my favorite part about the ballooning experience was the unpredictability of it -- every balloon ride is different, because the ever-changing conditions require you to make decisions on the spot.  If we had been able to find a strong wind way up high, we could have ridden it back to the field we started from.  But we didn't, so we had to float around looking for a place to land.  Ballooning is the opposite of most of the tourism industry, since there is no linear path that they take you through -- it's probably the least touristy thing you could ever do in wine country.

Unfortunately I shaved off my awesome 70s mustache and sideburns that I had been sporting for Halloween the night before.  It would have been an excellent "Ballooning 'Stache" -- I'll have to post some pictures of it sometime. :-)

• I didn't want to pay more than the MSRP $250 by buying off of eBay, resellers, etc.
• I didn't want to buy a Wii bundled with a bunch of extra software that I would have no use for.
• I didn't want to have to go to a retail store and wait in line on Sunday morning (I'm not lazy...I just don't have a car.)

On Tuesday morning I just simply decided to put my mind to it -- that I would get a Wii.  It ended up being rather simple:  I searched around for some RSS-based trackers that I could set up in my Bloglines feed reader.  These trackers continuously check various online retailers for Wii availibility and report back via the beauty of syndication.

I ended up using WiiTracker and it worked out great.  I had to check up on the main site a few times (it didn't seem to be updating in my Bloglines), but I caught the Wii going on sale on Amazon within the first minute. 

I should note that I had already been looking at message boards on Amazon for some time, so I knew that Wiis generally go on sale for short periods on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.  Another factor that helped me out was that Amazon has recently instituted a policy so that people cannot buy too many systems in one time period.  It helps guard against all those eBay resellers.  And another thing to note -- One-Click ordering doesn't work on the Wii, so you should have your account set up to speed you through the checkout process if at all possible.

I admit I was probably a little lucky to check the WiiTracker at just the right moment.  The Wiis sold out in about 20 minutes.  I'll be patiently waiting for mine to show up in the mail.  In the meantime, I've already got Zelda and Metroid waiting on my shelf. 

So that's how to get a Wii, with minimal effort, in case anyone's interested.  Or did I just have a spot of good luck?

Either way, I ended up using the simplified installation that is available through my Yahoo Web Hosting, which simplified things greatly.

So now that that's working out, I'll be working on other parts of the site, but I still need to get the template working.  But I will officially be posting occasionally from now on.  So that's nice.

If you're reading this, please leave a comment...it's always nice to know that I'm not shouting into empty ether.

Rest assured, we are still working on this project, and there are a few other projects in the works as well... :)

We've also been interviewed by local culture site SFist.  We talk about our project, our city and the strangeness that waits around every corner in North Beach.  Here's the interview.

If you're interested, see our story idea HERE!

Well, Chris and I have made the Top 50!  As the next step, we'll be heading down to Comic-Con on July 26th to pitch the concept to a panel of 5 judges.  As I am the writer, I will have to pitch the concept alone, but Chris will be preparing some art for use as a visual aid during the pitch.  If we can make the cut to the Top 10, the contest will move on to rounds of internet voting....so we'll be needing your HELP!

But no point in counting our chickens before they're hatched...we're currently working hard on getting ready for the pitch.  I don't want to reveal too much about it at this point -- but all the pitches will be available online after ComicCon.  As part of the media sponsorship, AT&T has also been promoting the contest at their blue room.

Chris and I will be doing an interview or two as we lead up to the pitch, so I'll be sure to link from here.  Good Luck to all the contestants, and Good Luck to us!

I'm relaunching my website for the first time in what seems like a long time.

The old site served me well, but it's time to move onward and upward.  Enjoy.