I woke up early this morning, about 8, which is way earlier than my usual Wednesday waking time of 10:30. I listened to the Rick Emerson show, a great talk radio show from Portland, Oregon, that is now podcast at rickemerson.com and available on iTunes.

My editor is running the show at the paper this week, so I had to have my sketches in by 11 rather than the usual time around 1 (hence the earlier waking time). So instead of having cartoon lunch at McDonald’s, I had cartoon breakfast. And it was wonderful.

I got the big huge breakfast, which has a proper name I don’t recall, but it’s the one that has pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage and a biscuit and hash browns. Then, not only was I able to conjure up the required three cartoon ideas, but my fertile brain hatched FIVE ideas.

Then instead of going home and scanning my sketches to e-mail to my editor and then await his response, I just swung by the paper and he picked one on the spot. So by 11:15, I was home with an idea approved.

With all this extra time, I thought, heck, why not draw a picture of a vampire cowboy that my friend Walker requested. So I did!

I got the cartoon done by like 12:30, so then I called my dad because it’s his birthday. Then I went to the comic store and got this week’s haul. Then I went to McDonald’s for lunch, and it was GREAT.

Now I’m at school, where today is the first day of the last quarter of Advanced D.A.V.E. Maggie, to my left, is editing her documentary about the day last quarter when we just dropped everything and walked to the gas station to get junk food.

She is also narrating everything I type as I type it. Hi I’m Maggie and I eat poop.

Then tonight, I get to find out who gets kicked off American Idol, and even if it’s Lisa, I won’t be devastated. I hope it’s Chris or Ace or Bucky or Paris.

And there’s a new episode of Lost!

Great day.

The end. Now go back to B23, Maggie.

Well I was just a call-in guest on John Baylor’s show on KFOR in response to this cartoon. I was teased as “throwing a flamethrower bomb” in yesterday’s cartoon with “a blatant attack on the Republican party.” With that kind of an intro, I thought I was in for a tough time on the air.

But I thought it went really well. Mr. Baylor essentially wanted to know what I meant, and he gave me plenty of time to explain myself. I brought up the recent news with Sen Mike Foley, Right to Life’s contradictory logic on their Heineman endorsement and Tom Swartley as examples of people invoking the name of the Lord and the work of God who behave dishonestly. He asked me good questions forcing me to better explain myself, and other than talking about a mile a minute, I think I did okay. I can’t think of anything I regret saying.

He also asked which cartoon has gotten the most response, either positive or negative, and I mentioned that Paul McCartney cartoon from October, which has blown away every other cartoon in terms of response. He also brought up the infamous Danny Nee cartoon from early 2000, so he knows his stuff.

Stuff is finally coming together, and soon I will be a master of broadcasting.

When people ask why I haven’t graduated, I usually say that I just need to finish my thesis. That’s pretty much true, but not entirely. I have several other unfinished projects on the side that need to be wrapped up and approved before I graduate, but I’ve kind of operated with the attitude that nothing’s happening till I finish the thesis, so I might as well just use this extra time to polish everything extra pretty.

Of course that’s not how it always works. Sometimes it’s just an excuse to procrastinate. But now, finally, things are really getting done to the point where it all seems so very doable. The May graduation is going to be tough, but it’s possible.

I just bought a new hard drive tonight, which was a big hurdle. I bought a hard drive last summer to begin the editing process, but it filled quickly. So now I have a second, and the beauty of this one is that it’s portable. More expensive per gig, but built to be carried around and without the need for its own power source.

The KRNU NexGen manual is almost complete; the long-unfinished Planarian Man Flash cartoon merely awaits finishing touches; The Bad Seed just has a few small scenes (that I’m actually attempting to write out of the movie) left to shoot and then it’s all post-production After Effects work; the Wham! script is coming together nicely; and all of the primary travel/research work is done on the documentary. I’m in the middle of transferring all the DV tapes to VHS for logging, and it’s going to be fun once that’s done (that wasn’t sarcasm).

There was just so much work to be done before getting to this point, that it was one of those things where it just seems like you’re working and working and not getting anywhere. But now everything finally seems doable; everything seems like I’m on that downhill slope. That’s nice.

I’ve been a big cheerleader for Delta Web Hosting, the folks I use for this site and nealo.com, because they are ridiculously inexpensive for what you get. However, I’ve recently been extremely disappointed by their service. I’ve had databases go down and it takes about 8 hours to get a response from their “24/7 support” staff. Not to mention that the problem keeps repeating itself. The forums and the comic blog on this site have been down for almost a full day now and I still don’t have a response.

When the two most popular portions of the site are useless, that kind of defeats the purpose of having the site to begin with.

So I’m looking for anybody out there who’s had a good experience with a hosting company. The thing with Delta is that they’re *so* cheap…$3/month for 50GB bandwidth, 500MB disk space, unlimited email addresses and subdomains…I’ve never come close to using up my bandwidth or disk space. On one hand, it’s hard to be picky with prices like that. But on the other hand, I pay that price so that a site is operational.

If anyone has any advice / recommendations, please email me or post it as a comment. Thanks.