not too bad
Got a call from the Apple store last night… Hikari is back, fixed and ready for me to pick up. yay! Now i just need to head out to Novi and pick her up. I’ll have you know that i chose to finish Friday’s comic rather than pick her up last night. Just so you know. 
It’s been a weird week. I started the week with a ‘this week is going to be better than last week’ attitude, which of course just led to more things going wrong 
Ah well, all you can do is sit and look at it all with some semblance of humor. I suppose the thing that really put the biggest gloom over my was worries about all the folks down in the gulf coast area. I was watching/listening to a live stream of a Houston TV news station while working on the comic yesterday and it was… sobering. As i sit here comfortably, sighing in relief over managing to pull 3 ok comics together this week and thinking about what Sarah and i might do this evening - there are a LOT of people, including many, many of my readers, who are finding life uprooted and all sense of security taken away from them as they brace for the landfall of this massive storm bearing down on them.
When you watch national news, you stort of just roll your eyes and get a little numb to the over sensationalization that seems to be part of the job of news reporters these days, and you just sometimes feel that they are over-reacting or trying to make hay from the ‘big story’, desperately just trying to fill in the 24 hrs of coverage with whatever they can get thier hands on… coverage that is tuned to a national audience not directly effected by the storm.
Watching the local news is different. Listen to the raw feed of people calling concerned about where they should run to, or scared because it’s taken 8 hours to go 10 miles and they are worried about being stuck in their car in the storm, or running out of gas, or having decided to stay and finding themselves suddenly more in the path of the storm than they thought they would be.
thats gets to you.
If you are in the area and will be effected by this storm. Be safe. I think we are all worried about you.
sidenote: the table repair for the MT forums is still going - really hoping that it finishes later today. Going to be moving to add the 2nd server to the mix in a few weeks so we can try to prevent this from happening again. Also, the RSS feed for the this blog was borked because of some problems with the way Movable Type was coding the japanese in one of my recent blogs. Now looking into fixing it, if i can.
- pirotunes: Gel-Sol - Few And Far Between -
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:59 pm
yea… i know how you feel fred. ive been watching all of that too. I really do hope all you ppl are safe.
Ok,..not to get of topic or anything but i got all excited because today i went to Walden Books, a book store,…. and i saw MegaTokyo there!!! All three volumes! I thought that was awesome. I bought the first two.
September 23rd, 2005 at 2:08 pm
I am alive and well. We’ve been getting evacuees by the ton. Austin is also starting to run out of gas. I’m worried that what could now be a state-wide gas shortage will turn into a nation-wide shortage.
This scares me as well. It’s the second time that I’ve ever been this scared (Katrina was the first). Visions of “End of the World” was dancing in my head, causing me great anxiety.
Fortunately, I have people here online who can take my mind off such things. God bless ‘em.
September 23rd, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Hmm… the RSS is fine for me.
Anyways, glad you got your PowerBook back… my friend just got his new 12 PowerBook yesterday. He bought this one PowerBook to replace one or two of his desktops. He lost 5 of his 7 computers in his house, and the 2 remaining are sucky computers that he doesn’t really use.
The hurricanes won’t leave anybody alone. It’s depressing to see so many live broken… I’m still not over finding my home without carpet.
Oh, and you use bork too? What a small world…
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:16 pm
i am not a US resident, yet i know a little of how these disasters truly affect people. I have freinds whose lives were devastated due to the tsunami, one of my closest friends lost his entire family. I realy cannot comprehend such an event, to have everything lost in a single night…….what words of consolation can i truly offer to people who are devastated to this magnitude?
I pray for the safety of the eople affected by the hurricanes. That and donating my pocket money to charities, is about all i can do.
September 23rd, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Fred, don’t discredit your efforts. Yes, you may be safe and comfortable, far from the tragedy, and continuing to write comics. The thing is, writing your comics is an important role. Imagine, if you will, a fan displaced from New Orleans, now safely ensconced in a community far from the coast, who wanders over to the public library, logs onto a computer and sees your comic continuing. It is a piece of normalcy in a life gone haywire. It is a sense of somewhere, somehow, something is still going right, and perhaps somehow, some time, life will be all right again.
For myself, when my life fell to shambles, it was a small comfort to turn to Megatokyo and still have the wonderful comic I’ve followed for a long time now. It was one piece of life that still felt in place, one additional fixture that helped stabilize my attitude so I could square my shoulders and move on.
In all honesty, the role of the entertainer is probably pivotal at this time. How well can we cheer those displaced, who have lost family members, loved ones? How well can we raise morale, so that tomorrow, they can feel capable of taking charge once more and rebuild their lives?
September 23rd, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Novi is a suburban hellhole and I don’t recommend you spend more time there than you absolutely have to, heh - I can’t believe there isn’t an Apple store closer than the one in Twelve Oaks.
September 24th, 2005 at 12:22 am
it is the one in twelve oaks. To me, twelve oaks = novi
September 24th, 2005 at 12:36 am
Whew… thank God I evacuated to a place with internet… I could actually watch the local news at http://www.click2houston.com in real time.
Evacuating from a Category 5 (at the time I evacuated, it was a Category 5) is a very tough thing, not only because you’re running against time, but also that everything you own has some sort of sentimental value or memory that is important to you. It’s a feeling that is kind of like, “Which memory should I let go? Which memory should I keep with me?” because more than likely, if it is a category 4 or 5, your house will more than likely be destroyed by flooding or the devastating winds.
But those things they said about the traffic going out of Houston? Absolutely true. I came from the Zone C evacuation area many hours before they issued the mandatory evacuation in my zone around 4:45 pm and it took me until 5:30 am on Thursday to get out of the HOUSTON AREA. And the traffic was that bad all the way until Interstate 20. I could only sympathize for those that left after me more because the later you leave, the more people are likely to evacuate, clogging up the roads. Not only that, but the officials will block off other roads preventing you from branching off evacuation routes. It was hell. I only slept about 5 hours in a whole 30 or so hours from the Clear Lake area to Lubbock. Austin and Dallas hotels were fully booked, and some friends of mine were still on the road about 5 hours ago.
September 24th, 2005 at 1:07 am
LAND HO!!!!
Outer eyewall made landfall at 1 AM Saturday. Inner eyewall in one hour.
September 24th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Thank you for thinking of us. It’s the little things like this that can let one strive longer.
^_^
September 24th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
just applied to take a Genius gig to build some income for the baby.
September 24th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
just applied to take a Genius gig to build some income for the baby.
September 24th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Head’s up, Fred. The following error occurred on the MT site when attempting to access SD from the main forum page:
mySQL query error: SELECT DISTINCT(mtposts.author_id), mttopics.* FROM mttopics
LEFT JOIN mtposts ON
(mttopics.tid=mtposts.topic_id AND mtposts.author_id=33370)
WHERE mttopics.forum_id=8
and mttopics.approved=1
and (mttopics.pinned=1 or mttopics.last_post > 1125017467) ORDER BY pinned DESC, last_post DESC LIMIT 0,40
mySQL error: Incorrect key file for table: ‘mtposts’. Try to repair it
mySQL error code:
Date: Saturday 24th of September 2005 07:51:07 PM
Pass the word along to whoever needs to work on this.