I may be slow to respond to mail or comments in the next week or so, because I have no working internet connection at home.
Last Monday, my home PC refused to boot up. I now know that the problem is with the motherboard, which, as it turned out is in a kind of customer-service limbo: it's no longer being made but still under warranty. The store says they can still get it but it'd take a while. They also offered an inexpensive replacement mo-bo of a slightly different type that would fit the chip, but I expect that I would end up having to spend an afternoon reinstalling linux (after first backing up my financial data, correspondence and ROCR website archive just in case I wipe my file system again) just to get a few tiny details right, so right now I'd prefer waiting for the warranty replacement.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to get the iBook online. Looks like getting online at @home.nl is to join the surprisingly long list of things I just can't figure out how to do with a Mac, even after two tech support calls. It's the first one that's actually important, and failure to get it done will affect either my future use of Apple computers, @home.nl's internet service, or both.
While not being able to get online from home has its advantages, it's bad on the whole because I couldn't get to my business email, some of which I had to act on that very morning, and I couldn't check on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site at update time. I will have to urge all my contacts to direct their correspondence to reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com, but I can't make them. I still get non-spam email at samizdat@bart.nl, which hasn't been my public addess in ages, and I still hear from people that they've tried to contact me through reinder@despammed.com, which hasn't worked in over a year.
As for the updates, I guess I'll have to double-check them before they go live, and the loss of my home connection has also served to remind me that I need to buffer as far ahead as I can. So yesterday I spent several hours setting up my future updates through to the end of the guest comics reruns. I now know reruns will continue until December 12 so if you want to contribute a guest comic, that will be your new deadline. I do plan to keep the number of new guest comics low, simply because they'll come at the end of six weeks of guest comics - but at the same time, I want there to be some new ones to finish off those six weeks.
It's pretty inconvenient for this to happen during my busiest month in years. I'll muddle through, I guess. Let's at least hope that by tonight I'll have the iBook online.
