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Yes, okay, I updated the site late again. What excuse do I have this time? Well... a pretty good one, actually. I was unable to update the site sooner because I didn't have FTP access to it. Why not? That remains a mystery to me. I could still access the webpage just fine with a web browser, but any attempt to connect to it by FTP yielded at first the promise of a successful connection, but then a timeout before listing the directory. I called my hosting company's 24-hour tech support, and got someone on the line with an incomprehensible accent. I mean, I don't really begrudge companies hiring foreign personnel for their tech support, and certainly I don't have a problem with people speaking with accents, but in this case his accent was so thick it made it virtually impossible to understand anything he was saying. I think he said a few times he was resetting the password, but (a) that obviously wouldn't fix anything, since I was logging on successfully before getting the timeout, and (b) it doesn't actually seem to have happened. So... either I misunderstood him, or he said he'd do something but didn't follow through, or he just didn't know what he was doing. Under the circumstances, I'm not sure which of those possibilities is most likely; any of them seems quite possible.
He then said something about it not working on his end either, and that he would do something I didn't understand to the server. (I mean I didn't understand it not because he used technical words that went over my head, but because due to his accent I couldn't make out what words he used in the first place.) He then claimed the problem should be fixed, and asked me to try connecting again. When it didn't work, he said to try again, and, of course, it still didn't work. Then he said it wasn't working on his end either again, and that he'd have to pass it on to someone higher up, and I'd be contacted when it was fixed. Which, needless to say, I did not see as good news. And it wasn't, in fact, fixed until just now. And I do mean just now (about 10:00 a.m. Pacific time); I tried it a few minutes ago and it still wasn't working.
For reasons not worth going into here, I'd been thinking of switching to a different webhost anyway. This experience certainly motivates me further in that direction. (Not so much the tech support guy's accent, which, despite my repeated mention of it here, really wasn't that big a deal, as the fact that this problem happened in the first place, and took this long to fix.)
Now to what I had originally written here about the strip, before inserting the above addendum about its lateness:
Ah, yes. I think I remember
drawing this strip. As I recall, I was drawing it while visiting my brother in San Francisco, where he was attending grad school at the time, and I was using a borrowed laptop. And I was utterly unable to work on the entire strip in one Adobe Illustrator file, because the laptop's memory couldn't handle it. I had to draw the strip in six pieces and then assemble them in Photoshop—which later became standard operating procedure when that happened in the future (which it often did). At least, I think this was the first strip that happened with, though I may be remembering wrong. (Oh, wait, looking back this actually wasn't the first strip that happened with—that would be the October 1 strip. And it also happened with the October 8 strip. So never mind. It had apparently already been standard operating procedure well before this strip; my memory was somewhat in error.)
I have no idea what is going on with those clouds.
Weird clouds notwithstanding, I'm getting far enough along now to the point the art is passable enough I'm considering removing that header warning about the bad art again. Especially since it's now slightly inaccurate; by the time this strip ran originally, I'd fallen far behind from my daily schedule, and this strip was more than four months late. So the statement that it was "drawn nine years ago" is somewhat inaccurate. Well, I'll think about it.
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