Oldbie.org

My God, I am in heaven. They're doing a second printing of the amazing Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, the collection of many of Winsor McKay's greatest Sunday Nemo pages. This thing is just beautifully made. It's actual size, too; each comic is lovingly restored at 16x21, as originally printed a hundred years ago in the pages of the newspapers in which they ran. These strips are what Bill Watterson held Calvin and Hobbes against, questioning the comic syndicates' obsession with page real estate. Back before Scott Adams and Jim Davis perfected the three panel picayune (in bland black and white, of course) for Knight Ridder and McClatchy, folks like Winsor McKay and George Herriman were making huge, sweeping pieces of sequential art for William Randolph Hearst.

Anyway, they're getting new copies in at Chapel Hill Comics. I have a distinct feeling I'll be dropping a good chunk of change on this one. Like most my age, I didn't discover Nemo through the funny pages, but thanks to the video game tie-in to the 1988 animation. Later, in high school, I came across a bulky, threadbare collection at the Durham Public Library, and kept it for a solid summer. I revelled in McKay's vivid artistry and imaginative storytelling, warts and all. The man could rarely fit his vision into the speech bubbles his characters emitted, and I doubt that even this exquisite collection painstakingly edited by Peter Maresca will contain all of the splendor that is Slumberland, but there's no way I can go without this.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's lovely when you open your browser and half your Google Homepage tells you that Information is temporarily unavailable. Then you click your RSS reader and it, too, does not work. Then you check the forums that you regularly read, and they're down.

Add to the mix that you, yourself, aren't feeling up to par, and it really seems to be shaping up to be quite the day.

This bit of second-person Bitching and Moaning brought to you by Google, which is ruining everything

Posted by Michael Harrison at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I moved back to the Triangle from Greensboro, I grudgingly closed up my box at Parts Unknown and forgot all about comic books in the hustle-and-flow of the Big Relocation.

Every single time we've gone for a stroll down Franklin Street, though, I'm drawn to the big blue awning next to the Mediterranean Deli and Moshi Moshi. The one with the yellow text that says, quite simply, "Chapel Hill Comics." I always have to stop in. It's inevitable. The place is just too damn attractive.

I was going to write on how different Chapel Hill Comics is from the other comics stores I've frequented in my life. Sure, places like Parts Unknown, the Werehouse in Boone, and the late Capitol Comics of Raleigh have their geeky, dimly-lit, milk-crated-back-issues charm. To be honest, though, they're not the most inviting environments to those who have never had a marathon D&D session in the parents' basement, complete with swords hanging from shag-carpeted walls and maybe even a d100 thrown in for good geeky measure.

Anyway, I was going to write about how Chapel Hill Comics is like a Hansel-and-Gretel gingerbread house: bewitching to Franklin Street passersby due in large part to its bright and clean decor, stylish window display, and gracious clerks. A little research into the store's genesis (reborn from the ashes of my old high school comic book haunt, which fit all the above descriptors to a 'T') turned up Alex Wilson's great journal entry about the store and its move from Rosemary to Franklin, so I'll just link to it and leave it there.

More or less, the store is a sight for sore eyes, and goes against the grain of your typical comics purveyor. And it's celebrating its 1st year on Franklin with birthday cake and a really kick-ass comic book sale next Friday, March 24th.

I will be there with bells and whistles (and large amounts of cash money).

Posted by Michael Harrison at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The weekend is here, and almost half gone. Today was a whirlwind of going to bed too late (yes, we went to bed late enough to consider it today), waking up too late, and then rushing off to Kinston for a cousin's wedding. It was a quick thing, but good to see the family. We were back in time to pick up some BBQ and a video at Visart, but when we settled down to actually watch the thing, the player kept skipping it over.

Honestly, I have no idea why these "Digital Versatile Discs" have propagated as much as they have. Everyone was bitten by the "digital" bug back in the late nineties and rushed to adopt anything that bore a "D" in its catchy acronymous name. They never stopped to think about the other faults with analog technologies, such as scratches. You'd think that, in the twenty-first bloody century, we'd know better. But of course we're still burning incandescent bulbs in our light sockets, we're still guzzling fossil fuel in our cars, and we've yet to adopt scratchless media. All of which means I'll be returning Possession to the video store tomorrow and switching it out for something else. I'm leaning toward Howl's Moving Castle.

Maybe we'll get with the program, barring any further unforeseen interruptions by the MPAA (who has recently admitted to pirating the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated "because it had implications for [their] employees"... the hypocrisy is palpable!). Even if the video that folks can download onto their iPods is DRMed all to hell, at least it's being transferred through a fairly reliable medium. Sure, we'll lose a little bit of that nostalgia involved with unpackaging a physical artifact and inserting it into our music/movie/game player of choice, but when digital delivery services become the norm, then I won't ever have to get in my car and drive down the street to the video store at 10 o'clock at night.

No, I'll just have to make a phone call to India because my download isn't completing. The future, folks. The future, today.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have officially reached The End of the Internet.

Waiting to go pick up the wife, I've been browsing for what seems like ages. And I think it's time to go read a book.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really can't express how annoyed I am with the way the Livejournal feed treated my archives, unloading them all into everyone's Friends list like so much dump-trucked manure. The worst should be over, but, again, I'm really, really sorry about that. First I make you re-add me as an LJ syndication, and then I take over your Friends page. It wasn't on purpose, but is lame nonetheless.

Just a note to let everyone know that my intentions will be, ultimately, to write a script of some kind that will post both to my MT blog and Livejournal, but time is in short demand as of late, so it will have to wait.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looks like the new addition in August will come complete with block and tackle. Everyone, say hi to Liam.

He was an active little fellow today, showing off for the camera as it were. Quite limber, too.

Again, I can't stress how excited I am to meet the little guy.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Greasemonkey: Completely and utterly required on every installation of Firefox on every computer I use. Why? Because it lets me install user scripts like:
  • Mihai Parparita's GMail Macro: Mihai works at The Google, on the Google Reader team, and they use Gmail internally. He has written a kick-ass user script that shortcut-keys the hell out of Gmail, which means that I can live the dream of never having to lift my fingers off the keyboard while I process my inbox. A million thanks, Mihai. Note: I used the gmail-macrosMK.user.js version.
  • Gmail Spam-count Hide: Their headline says it all: "Never see how much spam you have, since you don't care about it anyways." Damn straight. Let Gmail delete it for you.
• View Cookies: This puts a nifty tab on the Page Info dialog that shows all cookies associated with the current webpage. Great for web development, when I'm trying to figure out how Google Analytics is setting its cookies on various sites.
• Web Developer: This gives you an awesome toolbar for checking CSS, HTML, and JavaScript validation. Lots of other nifty tools, too, for developers.
• ColorZilla: Get a color swatch from any point in the browser, zoom into the page and measure distances, use the DOM spy to gather info on DOM elements. Great for graphic design stuff.
• del.icio.us: Complete integration with the del.icio.us social bookmarking system. Two toolbar buttons are all you need to add and view your bookmarks. They've set it up so you don't have to replace Firefox's built-in bookmarks, which is kinda cool.
• BugMeNot Extension: Bypass compulsory web registration via Firefox’s right-click context menu. Compatible with Mozilla and current Firefox releases. Visit bugmenot.com for full details of their service.

• Live IP Address: Grabs your IP address and sticks in in Firefox's status bar. Great for development purposes, and for setting internal IP filters in your favorite web analytics utility. I know my IP addresses by heart now, so I got rid of this one to de-clutter. Still, it's great for what it does.
• CoComment: This nifty little extension captures comments you make on blogs all over the Internet (most of the major ones have built-in support) and saves them in your CoComment account. You can then reference these comments on your own blog, or just keep track of them privately from within CoComment. It's cute, but a combination of slow-down and incompatibility with some other faves has dropped this one to the "Nice But Not Necessary" list.
• VideoDownloader: Download the videos on YouTube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion, and a ton of other video sites. Pretty much any embedded object in a webpage is forfeit, including mp3s, flash, etc.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to the new blog. If you're a LJ-er, just add the user czechharrison to your LJ friends list, or login, go to http://www.livejournal.com/syn, and search for my RSS feed (http://www.oldbie.org/michael/atom.xml), then add that syndication to your friends list. You can also go to http://syndicated.livejournal.com/czechharrison/ and then choose to add it.

Posted by Michael Harrison at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)