Tag Archive for 'HandRooster'

I wish you a Merry Leap Day and a Happy New March

Published
by
Mike
on February 29, 2008
in Books, Comic, Photography, Web, Wood Carving, Work and Writing
. 0 Comments

Leap day - it seems to be a symbol to me of the lost. It is a day which comes so little that one feels as if he should take a close look at his life and spend the day doing something crazy in order to remember its very special nature. I don’t really plan on doing that, mainly because I can’t think of anything crazy, but also because something crazy enough might get me kicked out of the country. I wouldn’t want to jeopardize any future attempts at British citizenship, would I? The answer is no, children. Can you say that? No.

Seriously, though. Maybe I’ll make a Youtube video. I’ve never done that. That would be the craziest thing I could do in comparison to my normal nature. I was going to take a photo of a pork pie today, but Steph ate the last one yesterday because she was starving. I was sleeping at the time, so I couldn’t protest. I wanted to take a photo of it because I actually like them. I hadn’t tried one before, but the pies made from humans and gooey bug stuff in the Sweeney Todd movie made me want to try one. I did, and it was delicious - not at all like the movie, of course. Anyway, I was sleeping because my schedule was opposite of what it should been. I basically got up at night and went to sleep at the morning, so I didn’t sleep the night before last, and then stayed up all day until 6pm. Then I went to sleep and woke up at around 7pm with a horrible cramp. I won’t say anything more about the cramp, but you can investigate it here if you want. It seems to happen to me sometimes if my diet isn’t varied enough. I’m probably going to seek out fruits and vegetables today, because it is one of the most horrible things that I experience in life.

In recent personal news:

We have been working on HandRooster, and it seems that not everyone has left us. Our web hits aren’t massive like they used to be, but I’m hoping that will come with time and good comics, so we’ll just keep making them. I haven’t carved wood in ages, mainly because the house is still cold. I usually carve in the living room but I don’t have any wood or coal right now so the living room is cold if we’ve got the fan heater in the computer room. Steph never spends time in the living room, so I don’t want to steal the heater from her. Perhaps I’ll get some wood or coal soon and heat it up in there so I can carve. Otherwise, my hands are too cold and they hurt while I’m carving. I’ve been writing a bit - mostly small journal posts, HandRooster scripts, and little poems. I’ll remind anyone that is interested that most of my poems are in the poetry section of my website. I’ll probably be making individual pages for them or rearranging the page I have because my friend Lewis suggested that it might make them more readable. I agree, so I’ll get on that soon. If you read them and have any comments, email me or leave a comment. There is some contact info here Hmm. What else? I got some books yesterday. I intend to do book reviews on all of these at some point, but here are a couple of links. They are quite good books. This author writes very different fantasy books. They are a refreshing change to the usual:

Golden Fool
UK version
Fool’s Fate
UK version

Anyway, those are the latest two I’ve received and I intent to start reading them right away, although I have many other books to read. After I’m done, maybe I’ll finally get around to doing some book reviews. I guess we’ll see.

I hope you all have a Merry Leap Day and a Happy New March. Do something crazy!

Pleasant sunny day

Published
by
Mike
on February 16, 2008
in Comic, Photography, Web and Writing
. 1 Comment

Ah, so this post is to serve as a sort of main course to the sort of starters I’ve been making lately…if you’ll accept the food analogy.

First of all, we’ve almost finished the cosmetic updates on my website. I think it looks very nice and Steph has done a good job adding the birds into the header. It’s pretty cool, and it keeps the idea behind the theme the same. I really like it, and it makes me want to post a whole lot more than my previous theme, which had some problems displaying images correctly and just did some screwy things whenever I’d try to format things the way I wanted them. This theme is clean and simple, but remains visually pleasing. Anyway, enough of web stuff.

I thought I’d mention that I’ve added a poetry section to my site, and I’ve got a bunch of my poems on there. Now, I’ll just state for the record that I haven’t really made most of my poetry available to just anyone to read before this, so please realize that this contains a ton of my stuff, some of it left unfinished or without any editing yet been done. Stuff will change on the poetry section as I add/remove/edit poems. I also hope that nobody makes fun of me. I write from the heart, but I haven’t always followed the rules for some of this stuff, I’m sure. It has mainly been a way for me to express my emotions, which I’m usually really bad at doing. Anyway, if you want to read them, feel free. If not, that’s fine too. Just don’t send them to tons of people in chain emails making fun of the crappy ones. Oh, and don’t claim them as your work, just in case one of these babies turns out to be my cash crop. Yeah…..that’s going to happen…totally.

HandRooster: The comic is coming back. It is coming back soon. It is coming back this next week. This week’s scripts are done and they have been sent to the beautiful artist who is my wife, and she will be working on them tomorrow and later this week. I hope we haven’t lost our fan base entirely, but if you read this and you used to read the comic, get your RSS news readers ready..or just go to the site later next week if you’re old school like that. I must admit that sometimes I prefer to go without a newsreader myself. I call it “going newsreader commando” and it can be quite an exciting experience.

It was a nice sunny day today, so Steph and I walked to the shop in Strathtay. On the way, I took some pictures which I will share below. I had been wanting to get some photos of a couple of little waterfalls near the path, so I got those and a few others. I hope you enjoy them, because I had a problem with my Aperture plugin which uploads photos and I couldn’t get most of them on for hours. Now that I have conquered that problem, I present them to you.

Small falls near River Tay

Little shaded falls

Sun drenched stream

Shaded waterfall

Old stone thing - I have no idea what it is

Building waterfall

Mossy stone post

Moss

Last year's leaf

Snowdrops

Tiny smooth falls

Honestly, this post was going to be longer. I want to talk about some books I’ve been reading and also some work stuff, but I think I’ll do proper book reviews at a later date and work can wait. I’ll leave you to what you were doing before this rude interruption. Have a good one, as required by law.

Birthday

Published
by
Mike
on February 10, 2008
in Comic, Nonsense, Photography, Wood Carving, Work and Writing
. 1 Comment

It was my 28th birthday the other day - on February 8th. Steph and I took the day off from work and went to Loch Tay where I found some nice driftwood for possible carving and stick making projects. We just drove around the Loch, mostly. It was quite a windy day, though it was sunnier than it has been of late. I took some photos:

Driftwood on Loch Tay

A windy day on Loch Tay

Loch Tay waves

Horn wagon

Horn carver

The banks of Loch Tay

So I must admit that I still haven’t done any carving lately, and I have yet to post my latest carving project photos in the projects section of the site. That’s partially because I realized that I only have photos of one of my projects. There is another set of photos on Steph’s camera and some I have to dig out from my email somewhere, as I forgot to take pictures before I gave the carving to my Dad and he sent pictures after I got back home.

Nothing is really happening today. We might go for a walk a bit later. There is a beautiful little stream I’d like to get a photo of if I get a chance today, but Steph’s still in bed. We went to bed quite late - I think at around 4:30-5:00 am, yet I woke up at 10 am and felt wide awake. I fear I’ll have burning eyes and a weary body later in the day to punish me for my silly sleeping schedule. There is really no reason other than being too lazy to go to bed. John and I have been working lately on a big project for a popular gaming site but we’re now almost done. There are a lot of little things to fix and clean up but overall it is in much better shape than when we inherited it. I don’t really want to give away the name of the site, but suffice it to say that John and I have been mentioned in several site and forum posts and we were mentioned in two of the weekly podcasts, which are quite popular. It was kinda cool to have the experience, and it was good for learning, but I’d rather have a regular schedule and more time to accomplish tasks. What I’d really like to do is learn to do custom vBulletin mod stuff and more server side scripting for maintenance (maybe with python or something - something useful for cron jobs and not horrible to look at, etc) and then be able to work independently on my own projects without having to kill myself over them. That way, I’d hopefully be able to get a lot done yet keep time for myself for writing, etc.

Speaking of writing, I guess things are going moderately. Not too fast, because I don’t really do much at the moment. Since my book is going to be based on my life experiences living in Scotland, I’ll need to get out and meet more people and do more things if I want this to really happen. I intend on making some changes soon. I have a few ideas, but I’ll leave those until later, as I’m not sure what I’ll do yet.

On the HandRooster front:

I know we haven’t done a comic in months. I know it’s probably annoying. I know I keep making excuses when I get emails. Believe me, I want to do this. I think I’ve finally convinced Steph to go forward with it, but we may be making slight changes in the way the art is done. At the moment, it just takes her too long to do them. It isn’t something we get any money for, and it seems like a lot of time to her to spend on something when she doesn’t always appreciate the humor or when she’s slaving away for hours on something I’ve written in 2 minutes time. I really feel her pain. I wish I could draw the thing, but my unsteady hands and warped sense of perspective would probably have people calling for my head. I don’t really want to go to low quality stuff after having broken the 100 comic barrier. Anyway, we should be moving on soon. I think Steph may be doing some comics next weekend, should I provide her with the material. I have some ideas, so we’ll hopefully have some good news for you before too long.

It has been so long

Published
by
Mike
on January 16, 2008
in Comic, Military, Nonsense, Photography, Web, Wood Carving, Work and Writing
. 2 Comments

Well I’ve realized that it has been over 3 months since my last entry and another 3 since the previous entry. I’m sorry. I’ve been busy, but probably not that busy.

Most of you probably know that we’ve made the move to Scotland. We live in a little place called Strathtay near Pitlochry and Aberfeldy. Our house is called “Tayview Cottage” and as the name suggests, we have a view of the River Tay. It is a beautiful and peaceful place, but my peace comes mainly from the knowledge that I am now free of the military for good. I am no longer involved in all of that nonsense. I’m a civilian. Yay! I just hope all of my friends who are stationed all over the world are safe and happy, and not being forced to do anything horrible.

Steph and I are doing web development work with my brother in law, John. We’ve been starting at about 10:30 am and working until the late afternoon. It isn’t necessarily glorious work, but it is much better than what I was doing before. I’ll be getting into some server stuff at some point, which should be more what I’m used to. I’m also doing some writing, in an attempt to compile a book based on my experiences here in Scotland. I hope it will be good, but I guess it all depends on what I do here, what kinds of people I meet, and the activities I do. I also want to take a lot of photos and do a lot of walking. The scenery is great here. In fact, I’ll put a photo from behind our house below so you can see it.

We really haven’t gotten a chance to do much here yet, as we just got back from a 3 week visit to the states. We visited my family and had a good time. It was very snowy there for the majority of the visit, which was nice. We got to see my young nephew again and got a chance to see my sisters, my parents, and a couple of friends as well as some other relatives. We ate way too much food, which was enjoyable but bad for us. We also got some very nice Christmas presents. I carved a few things for presents before we left, so I’ll post pictures of those when I get a chance in the Projects section of my website.

I really want to get started on HandRooster again. We had quite a bit of success with it and had tons of traffic at the height of our relative fame, but we just didn’t have time to keep it up while we were getting ready to move and while I was getting ready to get out of the Air Force. That, and I was too stressed out to really concentrate on it. So, I really want to start again but I think that Steph is less keen on the idea. It really is much harder for her, as she has to spend a lot of time on the illustrations. My part isn’t as hard each day, but can be a bit difficult when I’m hurting for ideas. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes. I hope she comes round to the idea. I have a few ideas already, but it all depends on how much time we have.

Well, I’ll put 2 photos below. The first is the view from behind our house and the second is a photo taken from my parents’ balcony in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Enjoy, and I hope you’re all doing great.


River Tay

Sun Setting over Coeur d'Alene Lake

Book Review - Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life

Published
by
Mike
on June 20, 2007
in Books, Comic, Religion/Spirituality and Writing
. 1 Comment

Several weeks ago, I got an email asking if I would like to review a new book which was being released. After agreeing that the content of the book was something which related to the general content of my blog, I responded that I’d be honored to participate in what is now being called the Book Blog Tour for Brad Swift’s Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life.

Glancing over some of the other blogs participating in the tour, I see that the book has thus far received overwhelmingly positive feedback. I’m pleased that I’m not here to argue with the other reviewers. Dr. Swift’s writing is genuine and warm, and you can definitely feel the coaching roots of his prose. While I don’t think I am in the target audience for this book, I can see how it could help those who find themselves in the bewildering position of what can only be described as an identity crisis.

Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life is a detailed step by step method of discovering purpose in life. When Dr. Swift writes of a life purpose, he rejects the traditional western association of career with identity and presents a more balanced approach. He suggests that through thought, intuition, and contemplation, we can come up with a sort of guiding statement for our lives. This statement is meant to be the cup which holds the liquid of our lives. The book is scattered with helpful and inspirational quotes from famous thinkers and utilizes spiritual insight from multiple schools of spiritual thought. Those familiar with Zen and Taoist philosophies will notice many familiar techniques utilized in this system, which to me is a fantastic thing. Dr. Swift’s methods advocate contemplation and meditation techniques, as well as learning to live in the moment in order to keep our life purposes on track. The book is filled with exercises and techniques for discovering what kind of life purpose you wish to have, and for keeping the things you do within the context of that purpose once you’ve found it. Some of the most helpful parts of this book (in my opinion) were the sections dealing with what Dr. Swift titles the Inherited Purpose, something brought about by our past experiences and which influences the way we behave and the decisions we make in our lives. These sections really bring to light the history of your actions and the things which shape the person you’ve become.

While reading through this book, I sometimes felt that Dr. Swift’s directions were tailored for a child, or a very slow learning adult. I also felt that this book was written mostly for an audience of burnt out baby boomers. Despite these things, I always felt that Dr. Swift had my best interest at heart and if you can overlook these small and unimportant points, I’m sure you’d feel the same way too. If you’re lost in life, looking for meaning, or finding yourself constantly switching jobs, partners, or life circumstances, I would highly recommend this book as a system of self healing. Go into it with an open mind and a warm heart, and only good can come from the endeavor.

Oh, by the way - all the talk of a life purpose brought up an idea for this comic.