A Week in the Heat

Well, I'm off for Arizona. I'm going to be doing a ton of writing while there. Temperatures in Arizona have been averaging 110 lately- a veritable heat wave. For my purposes however, the extreme heat will be a blessing- I won't feel so bad that I'm not out sweltering amid the beautiful scenery of the Arizona desert as much as I am kicked back in the shade (or air-conditioning) with my laptop.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Whoosh! It's been hot here in LA these days. Not that this is unusual for Los Angeles. At least there's no humidity. I've been trying to stay cool by running the swamp cooler, and doing as much writing as humanly possible.

The Milos have gone south of the border to Cabo San Lucas, where they're enjoying a nice vacation. Luckily they are safely out of the path of Hurricane Emily that is ravishing the beaches on the Yucitan Peninsula of Mexico right now. Best wishes to all of those in places like Cancun and Cozumel.

Well, back to do more writing!

Support Books For Soldiers

Books for Soldiers.com is a great site with a truly noble cause: it's a place where US soldiers serving overseas or in VA hospitals can request books, CDs, DVDs, and other needed items. BFS members (it's easy to sign up) can find out what the troops need via online requests, and send them much-needed and appreciated care packages to make their service seem a little closer to home.

This site provides a great opportunity to show your support for the brave men and women who serve our nation honorably. Please take a little time to cruise over to the BFS website and check them out!

Blogger's rotten Image controls pt. 2

Man I totally agree! I hate it! It seems Google, great thought they are, has screwed up.
I sincerely hope they fix this mistake.

Ignoramooses

An Ignoramooses cell setup from 1998.

Charlie Hippo 4th Desktop Pics

I've been asked what happend to the Charlie Hippo desktop pictures that we had available only from the site's front page during the 4th of July. Well, they're still available. Unfortunately, I haven't finished a revamped 'Stuff' page yet that will showcase many new features and the new desktop pictures. Until such time as I can get it working, I'll just have to post links to other stuff here.

Here's Mike's original layout drawing for the 4th:

Later Mike did a finished pencil drawing, which I then digitally inked, and colored, the result being:

You can find the original desktop images available for download here.

Arrrgh! Blogger's new image controls

[begin off topic rant] Have to vent. I don't know what prompted the change, but Blogger's new image controls are terrible. Makes posting much more of a hassle. Where to start?

First of all this blog will probably always be pretty image heavy, as we love to post a lot of animation pictures and book-related illustrations. So image control is important on the blog.

For some inexplicable reason, the good folks at Google (who now own Blogger) have seen fit to all but ruin the image posting controls from the online Blogger posting application. Now every image uploads by default as a linked image- either to a (badly) generated thumbnail, or even sillier- to a copy of itself! This results in my image server filling up quickly with rediculous duplicate files.

Those of us who want neither thumbnails of our images displayed, our files renamed with long, useless strings of numbers, or duplicate inline copies of the same image files strewn all over our servers, are forced to prune out the added link code and delete extra space-wasting image files via FTP. All in all, it makes posting images a huge hassle, whereas this used to be a lot easier. My wife was reduced to hair pulling frustration the other day with one of her Blogs- she loves to do her own very precise image and text layout- the new controls have made that a nightmare.

Even linking to pre-uploaded images produces the same hassles.

Some controls, such as align functions that one used to have to hand-code are welcome, but no choice when it comes to linked images, files being renamed, duplicate uploads, etc. is wretched.

An adequate solution would be as simple as leaving the links out of the choice 'full size' on image uploads, and just uploading the full, unaltered file as before. But anyway, not really sure why I'm babbling about all this here- just frustrated. [end off topic rant]

Happy 4th of July!

Just for today, the Zaptoons Journal has gone red, white and blue in honor of the United State's 229th birthday. Wow, has it really been 229 years?

What's amazing to me, is that I can remember celebrating the nation's 200th birthday as a kid, and that was *gasp* almost 30 years ago! Time sure does fly.

Hope that everyone here in the states will be heading to some sort of get-together with lots of family, friends, food and fun. I'll be hanging out at the annual party hosted by our good friends the Milos.

So to my fellow countryfolk: happy 4th of July! Cheers!

Whoops! I blew up the website!

Oops! I spilled coffee all over Zaptoons.com!

Aww man! Aliens have attacked Milowerx.com- looks like the movie "Independence Day"! (Sorry Mike!)

Want to wreck your favorite (or not so favorite) websites? Go to Netdisaster.com and enter the link for the website you want to wreak havoc upon. You can choose from a great assortment of site-destroying goodies -everything from meteors to dog poop, to chainsaws and paintballs. Perhaps set a toddler armed with a magic marker loose against some unsuspecting website? Or maybe you prefer the not-so-subtle... lasers, torches and nuclear bombs?

Not all the possible fates are disastrous. The Zaptoons Journal can even be touched by the Almighty!
Not to worry: no websites were actually harmed in the making of this post!