Someone's freedom, rights, and dignity are not something that can be put in a Christmas stocking or wrapped up in a bow. They are something built into their existence that we use oppression and degradation to rob them of.

So I created this graphic...

TO PLEAD, PRINT OUT THE ENCLOSED TICKET AND SEND IT TO TOWN COURT, CHATAM HALL., PO BOX 117

Then there's a .zip file attached. DO NOT OPEN THE ZIP FILE.

The e-mail I got actually originated in Spain, not New York. It's disguised to look like it came from nypd.gov, but it didn't. Furthermore, after receiving a number of these kinds of notices (long story, paperwork mix-up that got another guy's tickets sent to me), I can tell you that they don't come from the state. They come from the city or county court that has jurisdiction over the violation. They come on paper and they identify both you and the car involved specifically. They also identify the location of the violation and the officer who is certifying the evidence of the violation.

It's a good trick, seems legitimate. Basically, since they can't shove a virus down your throat, they're trying to trick you into swallowing it. When you open the zip file and double-click the file inside, you're going to get a virus, and you'll have given it to yourself.

Here's a link: Disney Cruise Line Internet and Cellular Services

They charge $0.75 a minute unless you buy a pre-paid block of minutes that lowers your per-minute rate to between $0.55 and $0.30. You cannot upgrade from one pre-paid block to another nor are unused minutes refundable. Service is slower than normal WiFi hotspots and not guaranteed to be available at all times. And if you're on a 6-night cruise, you can buy a package of 100 minutes for $40, but if you're on a 7-night cruise, the same package costs $55.

But the worst part of all to me is not the perminute rates, but that they charge per minute at all. Anyone who knows about networking knows that data is "bursty". Someone will use data intensely for a few seconds while they download something, then they'll spend some time using little or no data while they process/read the data they just downloaded. So you really only need the wifi for the 3 seconds it takes to download a web page, but Disney bills you for the 3 minutes you spend reading the web page.

The amount of time someone is connected to the network is not, in and of itself, a good indicator of how much they're actually using the network.

And it's not like Disney is creating a new connection to the satellite for every user who is on their network. The connection to the satellite provides a data stream which can then be shared throughout their onboard wireless network. There is little or no incremental cost for each user who is connected to the shipboard WiFi network, but not activelty transferring or receiving data. Their cost really only comes in general maintenance for the network and for the data being moved.

Charging each user by the minute is disingenuous, because they're not incurring costs by the minute for each user. Furthermore, their system is slow by their own admission and I've read complaints of it taking 10-15 minutes to send an e-mail. If they charge by data usage, then whether it takes 1 minute or 10 for sending an e-mail, you're paying for the data, so it's the same price. If they charge bt the minute you're paying extra when the system is especially slow. While it would still be annoying for it to take 10 minutes to send an e-mail, it becomes infuriating if every extra minute is costing you $.30 to $.75.

I looked into mobile satellite internet services for businesses and internet-addicted RV'ers who want a connection while they're outside the range of most cellular nets. Prices were generally on a monthly basis with a DSL-comparable speed (3-5 megabit downloads, 1-2 megabit uploads) with a usage cap of 3-9 gigabytes. For a 5 megabit plan with a cap of 9 gigabytes, it was 839 a month.

Assuming Disney is getting better speeds and better rates because of their ability to run more/bigger dishes and negotiate bulk deals, their cost is $0.09 per megabyte or less. If they added on an over 200% mark-up, they could sell a 100 megabyte package that let you check your e-mail and a few favorite sites every day and post a few photos to Facebook for $30. Or maybe they could sell the 100 megabyte plan for $50 and do a 500 megabyte plan for $150. It would still be pricy, but it would be based on how much data you actually used.

But since there's no competition once you're onboard, you pay what they charge and you pay it based on the unreasonable metric of how long you're connected to the network instead of based on how much data you use.

I was surprised and pleased to find out Disney Cruise Lines didn't pull the trick of making juices and other sugared beverages free, but charging you $2 a pop for diet sodas. But I guess some of the cruise line overcharge mentality had to worm its way in somewhere and it's wormed its way into how Disney charges for internet access onboard. Such a shame.

Chicken Tortilla Style Soup

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion
1 lime
1/2 tsp each coarse ground black pepper, dried oregano
1 tsp each caldo de pollo (chicken bullion), kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons each ground cumin, curry powder, ground new mexico chile
3 tablespoons choped fresh cilantro
2 Knorr garlic minicubes
1 Knorr chipotle minicube
7 ounce can fire roasted, diced green chile
14.5 ounce can fire roasted, diced tomato with garlic
29 ounce can hominy (drained and rinsed)
4 14.5 ounce cans chicken broth
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Combine your spices, bullion, and minicubes (crushed) in a bowl and set aside. You can usually find Knorr minicubes and caldo de pollo bullion in the Hispanic foods section of your local supermarket. If you can't get them, you can substitute 2 chopped garlic cloves, a cube of regular chicken bullion, and a seeded, chopped chipotle pepper.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in your stock pot and begin sauteeing the onions over medium high heat for about 5 minutes, giving them some time to soften and mellow. Add the can of diced green chile and crank the heat up to high and sautee for another 2-3 minutes so you can boil off some of the liquid given off by the onions and chiles.

Add the spices and stir until they bloom and become fragrant, then add the tomato and crank back down to medium high. Cook this for about 5 minutes to get all the flavors melded. Add your chicken broth and hominy. While bringing that to a boil, zest the lime into the pot, then add the juice of the lime and a little bit of the lime pulp.

When the mix is up to a boil, cover, reduce to a simmer, and let it bubble away for around 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes, prep your chicken.

While you butterfly each breast and season with salt and pepper, get the last tablespoon of oil hot in a sautee pan. Brown the breasts over high heat, 4 minutes a side, then remove to a cutting board, cover loosely with foil, and let rest for 10 minutes (if you prefer you can grill the breasts). After 10 minutes, cube them up into nice bite-size pieces.

Your thirty minute simmer should have just completed about now. Skim the fat from the soup, then add the chicken pieces and any juices on the cutting board into the soup pot.

Bring the soup back to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer covered for another 15-20 minutes. Around the end of that period, chop your cilantro. Add the cilantro to the soup, stir, and let it bubble away another 5 minutes before removing from the heat and giving 10-15 minutes to cool a little.

Ladle the soup into a bowl, sprinkle with some shredded cheese, mix in a half a handful of broken tortilla strips, and serve.

I will be joining my wife and our children at our ranch outside Everett, Washington, where I can do some soul searching and figure out how I can best use my sexiness to help the American people.

Thank you and God bless.

Here's the text:

Thank you for your interest. After viewing your resume on careerbuilder.com, we have decided to contact you.

We have an excellent opportunity for you.

We are looking for:

Responsible and motivated individuals to assist in Company’s financial business. We value the exceptional people and provide our employees with an environment conductive for productive and long-term employment.

We offer:
- New concept. Commissions without sales.
- VERY competitive salary plus attractive bonuses plus commissions with each order
- No Fees
- You can start tomorrow
- Compensation: $85,000 - $95,000 per year
- Employee Type: Full-Time/Part-Time
- Vacation (2 weeks for Exempt employees)
- 4 paid Company Holidays / 2 paid floating holidays

Large and stable corporation

Requirements:

- MS Office (Word) - basic knowledge
- Internet access and e-mail
- A sufficient level of work ethics
- Ability to learn fast and perform tasks in a timely fashion
- U.S. resident or green card holder
- You are not required to quit your current job.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Assist in company’s financial business.
- Perform financial tasks.
- Make reports.

We offer opportunities for internal advancement for the responsible employees. During the initial stage of work you will receive precise instructions and any possible help from the company’s Manager. Qualified candidates will be offered flexible schedules of work, competitive salary, bonuses and other benefits. Company covers all the reasonable expenses.

You will be able to plan your own working schedule (few hours weekly).

Please reply to this email if you are interested.

Hiring Department

The reply address is diagnosticparts@aol.com.

Read through my "job scams" tagged posts and you'll see this come-on over and over. Financial job, easy hours, work from home, perform financial tasks, good pay. Sounds too good to be true... because it is. The job usually entails receiving "customer payments" via forged checks or hacked PayPal accounts. You cash out the payment, take the cash to Western Union, and wire it off to your "employer" in another country. You're instructed to take a percentage of the payment for yourself as your commission.

Sounds great until the check fails to clear or the PayPal fraud is discovered, as always happens. Then the money for it is pulled out of your account. If you had enough to cover it, you're out the amount of the check. If you didn't, the bank that gave you the money wants it back and will involve the police.

No legitimate company needs a U.S. representative to cash checks for them and wire them the money via Western Union.

If someone you don't know offers you an amazing job cashing checks or receiving and forwarding packages (stolen goods paid for from hacked PayPal accounts or with credit card fraud), they're usually a criminal and they're trying to make you an unwitting accessory. They will leave you owing money you don't have, and maybe a few weeks closer to financial ruin because you weren't out job hunting because you thought you had a new job.

Be safe out there people, and if you are job hunting, good luck.

First thing I found out, caffeine is cheap. I picked up 400 grams of caffeine from Amazon.com for less than $23 when I "subscribed" to auto-shipping it. The average can of Mountain Dew contains 54 milligrams of caffeine. That means I picked up the same amount of caffeine you'd find in 7,400 cans of Mountain Dew for the cost of .3 cents per can. With coffee running 2x-3x the caffeine of Mountain Dew, I realized the caffeine in that $3 cuppa from Starbucks has a street value of less than a penny.

Second thing I found out, caffeine is bitter. If you just take the powder, stir it into a drink, and chug, it's mostly going to taste bad. I say mostly because putting milk in your coffee seems to have some science behind it. Of the different things I stirred straight caffeine powder into, milk neutralized the bitterness fastest and best. A little milk, some Kahlua flavored syrup, and a scoop of caffeine... perfect buzz shake.

I researched ways to neutralize and minimize the bitterness and found out three things:

1. Caffeine powder needs time to dissolve. If you drink the beverage right after stirring it in, it will be more bitter than if you give it a few minutes.
2. The warmer the water, the more caffeine you can dissolve in it. Boiling water can dissolve 670 grams of caffeine per liter and hold it in solution. But as that water gets cooler, the caffeine will precipitate back out. At room temperature, the solubility of caffeine in water drops to about 21 grams per liter.
3. The best way to add it to beverages is to dissolve it in water first. Not only does that pre-dissolve it so you don't need to wait, but adding powders to carbonated beverages makes them react almost like you dropped in a Mentos.

Learning the last bullet point allowed me to start successfully adding caffeine to beverages. Having a handy source of pre-dissolved caffeine in an easily measured, non-powder form made experimentation a lot easier. Measuring out 100 milligrams of powder is very difficult and precise work, but if you dissolve a larger, more easily measured amount in an easily measured amount of water, you have a quick and easy way of pouring caffeine shots into carbonated and non-carbonated beverages. Here's my recipe for caffeinated water...

Put 10 grams caffeine in a large measuring cup (1 liter or greater). Pour in enough boiling water to bring it up to 1 liter. Stir. When it's cooled to room temperature, put it in a bottle.

Now you have 1 liter of solution at a concentration of 10 milligrams of caffeine per milliliter of solution. A teaspoon is 5 milliliters, or 50 milligrams of caffeine, which gives you the approximate caffeine of a Mountain Dew. A tablespoon is 15 milliliters, which gives you 150 milligrams of caffeine, approximately equal to a strong cup of coffee (anywhere from 80-180 milligrams), a 5 Hour Energy shot (138 milligrams), or 2 cans of Red Bull (80 milligrams per can). You can add as much as you feel you really need to any drink.

From this point on, it's all about personal preference. I found a quick and easy energy drink that costs less than 25 cents is to take a 1/2 liter bottle of inexpensive drinking water (Costco's is about 10 cents a bottle), take a sip, add a packet of Hawaiian punch or Wyler's lemonade (available at 8 to 10 packets for a dollar at Walmart or Dollar Tree stores), and pour in up to 1 tablespoon of the caffeinated water solution. Cheap and easy energy punch.

If you want to add it to sodas, remember that it is bitter. You will want to add it to sweeter sodas or add a little sweetened syrup. For example, you can pick up a 2.5 liter bottle of lemon lime Shasta at Dollar Tree, giving you an 8 ounce serving for 10 cents. Add a tablespoon of caffeinated water and a tablespoon or two of grenadine and you've got what I call a "Shirley Temple on Speed". Meanwhile, the more sugary Shasta Tiki Punch can stand up to a couple teaspoons of the caffeinated water without help.

ONE CAVEAT ON CAFFEINE: Just as with many legal recreational substances, caffeine is lovely in small doses, and toxic in large doses. It's hard to consume enough caffeine to kill yourself, but you can. If you consume just 5% of what you need to have a heart attack, you can start feeling sick with symptoms like a panic attack. If you know your limits, pay attention to them. If you don't, proceed cautiously.

But What About Vitamins?

Many energy drinks contain propietary blends of herbs, vitamins, and amino acids. The B vitamins are very popular, as are vitamin C and the amino acid Taurine. Some of them contain megadoses while others contain more moderate amounts. This is where things get tricky. You can buy various vitamin supplements in powder or liquid form. They can be bitter, sour, not dissolve well... I made a bottle of "vitamin water" with a bunch of B vitamin complex capsules. It came out an ugly shade of a sort of orangey brown with powder floating on the surface, looking and sort of smelling like a bottle of scummy pond water.

If you like vitamin C, you can buy ascorbic acid, a powdered form of vitamin C. Adding it will be like squeezing some lemon into your drink, so if you use a lot, you'll need to add sweetener to compensate. And, as with any powdered supplement, dissolve it in water before adding it to carbonated beverages to prevent messes.

As much as I'd like to do custom mixes of vitamins and minerals, if it becomes too much work, it stops being something I can do regularly. Enter Vplenish, which is currently $25 for a 2,000 packet box at Amazon (with free shipping and a $5 discount code which is available on the product page as of this writing). It looks like a packet of sweetener you'd get in a restaurant, but it's pretty much neutral in taste and can be stirred into non-carbonated drinks without needing any extra flavorings or sweeteners to compensate. Two packets of Vplenish gives you the approximate vitamin profile of generic vitamin enhanced waters. So, for less than 3 cents, you can vitamin enhance your beverage.

Note that these aren't megadoses like you'll find in some multivitamins or B complex supplements. A packet of Vplenish provides 10% - 30% of the RDA of its various components instead of 1,000% - 3,000%. But the thing about megadoses is there's a valid question of whether your body needs that much or can even use it. Common wisdom is that most of these megadoses are like trying to put more gas in your car when the tank is full. The rest just spills out and makes you pee pretty colors.

Vplenish and the vitamin enhanced waters/punches with low doses take a more moderate approach of topping off the tank instead of flooding it. I take a multi-vitamin and a B supplement in the morning, then top off periodically during the day.

As for other additives like Taurine, guarana, yerba mate, and any number of other vitamins or minerals, you can usually find powdered or liquid versions at your local health food or supplement mart, and you can almost always find them online. Just remember to pre-dissolve any powders you plan to mix into sodas.

Advice For Energy Shots

In these cases, I tend to make a punch at quadruple strength, whether it's sugar free Hawaiian Punch or a punch mix. You're not going to have 6-8 ounces of the beverage to dillute the bitterness of the caffeine and all that sweetening power to counteract it. A quadruple strength punch allows you to get 5-6 ounces worth of punch flavor and sweetener into one shot. You can also do a mix with a flavored syrup at 2 or 3 parts water to 1 part syrup.

Use a 2 ounce shot glass, or save some of your energy shot bottles, wash them well, and re-use them with a funnel. Toss in two packets of Vplenish, two or three teaspoons of of your caffeine solution, and top off with your quadruple strength punch or watered down syrup. Give it a chug and you're good to go.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

What Is A Heatmap?

Thanks to siewlian for our underlying photo

A heatmap is a way of visually overlaying hostspots of incidence/concentration on a grid. The hotspots can represent a clickstream (I set up a little AJAX script to record every time I clicked on the photo above and then rendered the data of where I clicked as a heatmap), or it could be the incidence of robberies or concentrations of zombies on a map.

Long story short, I got curious about heatmaps last year, but all the solutions I'd found were not in PHP, used the ImageMagick library, had a complex API, produced a heatmap I thought sucked, or multiple elements from that list. Eventually, because it produced the kind of map I wanted and could work simply, I first ported "The Definitive Heatmap" from Ruby to PHP.

I still didn't like the fact that it used ImageMagick (because many people on shared servers might not have access to ImageMagick), plus it executed the ImageMagick commands to the shell, which is not as secure as I'd like. So I re-wrote the whole thing to use PHP's built in graphics library, GD. That came with its own set of pitfalls, most notably being that GD has no Multiply blend mode. I had to create a GD Multiply blend in PHP from scratch. For those of you who arrived here specifically because you were Googling for a PHP script to do a Multiply blend with GD, you'll find that code in the overlayDot() method of the class.

I added a few functional modifications, did about an hour of testing to make sure it worked, wrote up the README, and packed it up.

The download package contains the class file, a README with instructions on how to use it, and a graphics folder with a color strip and dot image needed to create the overlay images. You'll need a basic knowledge of PHP and arrays to install this and make it work with the sample code.

Enjoy the class and if you have any questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, or just plain praise, please post your thoughts below.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

September 2011
Nominee
Vote

I ordered 2 Android phones with a family voice, text, and data plan. I gave them the two numbers to port from Sprint. And I waited. The phones shipped a day later than I hoped, but that was not a big issue.

On the morning of the delivery day, problem 1 occurred. They ported my number off my Sprint account and to my new phone before it was delivered. For the next 6 hours, I had no cell service. It's been my experience in the past that you order the phones, you get them, you call to activate them, and the number is ported then. This was new... and annoying.

When the phones arrived, there was no indication which had which number. In fact, the Android phone identity screen in the settings said the phone number was unknown on both phones. I called T-Mobile and they told me to call #6# to find my number. This is where we encountered problem 2: they had ported my number, but had not ported my wife's. They put my wife's number through the porting system and got it from Sprint, but then there was an issue with the SIM card being "reserved" and they couldn't issue my wife's number to her phone. They said they could request the reservation be removed, but that would take 24 hours and might not work.

What were my other options, I asked. They asked if I had a spare SIM card. Yeah, I'm coming from Sprint which doesn't use SIMs, so how would I have a spare SIM lying around? I asked what I was supposed to tell my wife when her phone was basically out of commission for two or more days. They suggested I call Sprint and ask them to port her number back until they'd run the fix through their system. "Um, hi Sprint. I know I just tried to leave you, but could I come back for a day or two while T-Mobile gets their asses in gear?" Seriously?

I asked if I could go to a T-Mobile store and get a new SIM from them. Yes. So off I went to the closest store. First thing that happened was I pissed off the manager... not intentionally. See, web orders started 8 days before the stores were supposed to get the phone, but T-Mobile had told the manager they wouldn't be shipping until close to the store release date. Instead, I had mine 6 days before store release. But he assigned me a service guy who took the phone, put in a new SIM, called T-Mobile and got my wife's number put on the phone.

If only it had ended there...

Problem 3 occurred when we discovered that somehow in all that craziness from problem 2, my wife's data plan got stripped off her phone. We never really noticed because she mostly used the data features at home when the phone was getting its data from our WiFi, not T-Mobile. But when she was out with the kids on Sunday and trying to Google something, she was told she did not have a data plan and would need to upgrade to one.

I called T-Mobile that night, after we got back from "Captain America", and they told me that was correct. She had no data plan. I'd have to add one for $20 a month. I said I'd signed up for a family plan with voice, messaging, and data for both phones... just give me the plan I signed up for. No, they said, we had to upgrade her data plan. I gave in, figuring if the numbers didn't add up, I'd haggle it out with billing. They said it would take 2 hours for the data plan to kick in.

At this point, the stress of them switching my plan without my authorization and the rest of this bull gave me a massive stress headache. So when the 2 hours was up, a bit after midnight, I was still awake, because I had this terrible headache that wouldn't respond to ibuprofen and wouldn't let me sleep, and I could determine that it wasn't fixed. Luckily I was still awake from the headache at 3 a.m. when their east coast customer service opened for the day. I was too worn out to be upset, and yelling would have made my headache worse. I got on with a rep who tested various things, escalated it when they didn't work, and basically got it fixed. Somewhere around 5 a.m. I got to sleep, but I had to call in sick to work, and since I'm a contractor, I have no paid sick days.

Today, I checked my account to see how they'd screwed up my service and encountered problem 4. According to their web site, whatever messed-up stuff they'd done had raised my monthly charge by $40. So I got on chat with customer support. They said the web site was wrong and I was on the plan I signed up for at the rate I signed up for. So why was the web site wrong? Maybe I'd briefly been shuffled onto something more expensive, but it was corrected, and the web site can take 72 hours to update.

They also mentioned I had two activation fees pending. I said they should pay me activation fees for all the trouble I'd had to go through cleaning up their mistakes. They said they couldn't do anything.

I pressed. This had taken so much time, been such a series of screw-ups on their part, why shouldn't I just return the phones, demand my money back and be done with them? They hemmed and hawed, then said since they messed up the activation on my wife's phone, they'd give me a $35 credit for the activation fee, but that I was only allowed one "goodwill credit" on my account, and if I accepted it, I would not be able to ask them to compensate me for anything for the rest of my contract term. I tell him that it's not enough and their massive series of screw-ups demanded a greater level of consideration.

Then the guy addressed me as Richard (my name's Greg) and I asked him if he was trying, in a veiled way, to call me a dick. I demand to talk to his supervisor. He said his supervisor had reviewed the account and approved the $35. I reiterated it wasn't enough. He said that's all they would offer. I said it wasn't enough. He asked if there was anything more they could help me with, and I said "I think you've done more than enough to alienate me, Richard."

The problem is I love this phone. There is no phone currently on the market that presses my buttons like this one does. But I've got a 14 day return window that I'm only 5 days into.

T-Mobile insists on not only screwing up this badly, then low-balling me on the "goodwill credit" AND telling me that if I take it, they're free to screw up as much and as badly as they want and I can't ask for anything again.

I'd have to switch to a phone I wasn't as wild about on a more expensive carrier, but I am so gobsmacked by T-Mobile's unparalleled combination of incompetence and arrogance, it's really hard to justify staying. I mean when I had a problem with my DVR on Verizon FiOS, they comped me a whole month of my cable bill to say "sorry". They showed they meant it and I stayed.

T-Mobile says "sorry" too, but an offer of $35 to cover what they put me through PLUS a stipulation I can't ask for another credit if they screw up again? They're not sorry, and they're either telling me that I'm a grinder who they think will try to get a credit at every turn or they're so sure they'll screw up again that they want to make sure they cover their butts.

Either way, I've got 9 days to decide if I'm returning these phones. Unless T-Mobile has a serious attitude adjustment, I can't see why I'd reward this kind of mistreatment by keeping them.

It all started when my Facebook friend, Ray Everett-Church, posted a link to a newspaper article on the growing popularity of small ramen shops. Unlike Top Ramen, these were noodle houses that slaved for hours to make the perfect noodle broth and were drawing a legion of American fans who were learning the difference between "real" ramen and the pale packaged imitation we knew here in America. It made me realize that I could make up some Top Ramen, "improve" the broth with a little soy sauce and ginger, and add some meat and vegetables to actually make it a passable meal that my two young sons might actually eat.

The general recipe is to warm a package of frozen broccoli, a package of frozen corn, and around a half pound of Chinese barbecue pork (chopped into bite-size pieces) in a mix of ramen broth and "improvements" while more broth comes to a boil and the ramen is cooked in it for a few minutes. Because my youngest is two years old and hot broth does not mix well with that age, the noodles are pulled from the broth pot and put in the veggies and meat pan to soak up the last of the improved broth and release a little starch to thicken whatever broth is not absorbed.

It's like porky, chickeny, Asian spaghetti, full of veggies, and the boys love it. I make it about twice a month as a special treat. Even my wife likes taking leftovers to work in her lunch. One day I'd love to step up my ramen game with a slow cooked broth and some higher quality noodles. But as a quick meal that's ready in about 20 minutes and gets my kids decent portions of three food groups, it's something I don't hate, and even though saving money isn't as high a priority as it was, it's still nice that the whole thing basically makes 6 portions for less than the cost of two Happy Meals.

It's awesome, but doesn't run often enough... or didn't. Recently, Brock Heasley brought on Spooky Doofus and Boxcar Astronaut artist Marc La Pierre to draw while Brock writes, so they could put out 3 strips a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)! Marc's really shown himself to be an incredible comics artist and Brock's an amazing writer. The combo means more fun for all!

Here's a teaser poster for the new team-up...

And don't forget I've started a little webcomic of sorts. My wife and I are publishing the doodles we draw on our son's lunch bags at LunchaDoodle.

No perm offers yet, but I'm keeping my head above water and have one interview scheduled with another likely to be scheduled. And both of those positions are interesting roles with cool companies. Really hope one turns into an offer.