GPF News Archive

Greetings, gang. Just thought I'd pop in another news update (a full one this time, and not just another quick update) to let you know about a few things. Nothing major, I suppose, but just to keep you up to date:

Status of Jeff's Eyes: As of this writing, my eyes are returning to normal. I ended up going to the eye doctor every single day last week (well, weekdays, not weekend) for various reasons. The corneal erosion I had Easter morning has pretty much healed, and the contact lens the doctor put on as a Band-Aid came out on its own. (Well, after a then-harrowing and now-laughable episode of my wife trying to get it out when it kept wrinkling and folding over on its own. There's a reason I don't wear contacts.) At this point, the doctor does not think I'll have to have another surgical scraping, but he hasn't ruled that possibility out if things don't improve. Needless to say, I'm not happy about the situation as a whole, but at least this particular incident is wrapping up. My vision is still blurry in my right eye, so I'm not sure how well I'll be able to fill my comics quota this week.

Sunday's Corrupted Comics: As some of you early risers discovered, Sunday's comic—both the regular and the High-Def versions—were somehow corrupted. After doing some investigation, I discovered that those weren't the only strips screwed up; it turns out that about half of the comics for the next two weeks were similarly corrupted, and which days were affected were completely random. Since my redundant backup copies were perfectly fine, my only guesses as to what went wrong involve Keenspot's FTP server. Either the files became corrupted during the upload, or something corrupted them during the two months they sat on the server waiting in the queue. I've checked most of the other comics in the queue and they appear fine, so hopefully this was an isolated incident. Thanks to the TON of you who e-mailed or made forum posts about this (but please forgive me if I don't respond to each of you individually :) .

GPF Store Temporarily Offline: Starting today, the GPF Store will be going offline for a temporary but indefinite period of time. Long story short, the server that runs the Store is my personal Linux box, which until now has been running Red Hat Linux 9. Well, as those of you in the Linux community already know, Red Hat is no longer supporting the free version of its OS and has since spun it off into a separate project called Fedora. Red Hat 9 officially becomes unsupported at the end of April, leaving me in the sticky situation of migrating to a replacement. I'm not entirely sure what I'll end up doing, but I'll probably be migrating to Fedora; failing that, I'll probably try another feely available distribution. Since I'm not expecting this move to be a trivial one, I'm taking all possible precautions and backing up all the machine's data before I make the move. I don't know how long this will take, but since we haven't had any sales in the store for months, I suppose now's just as good a time as any to do it. I'll make sure to announce here when that machine comes back online.

Jeff's Other Addiction: And since I just happened to finish this off, I might as well put in a plug for my newest addiction. I don't consider myself a "gamer" by the hard-core definition, but I do like to play the occasional PC or board game, and I do have a few personal favorites. However, I just finished playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and let me say, it's definitely worth all the awards and praise that has been heaped upon it. Although parts of the main story seem to have borrowed heavily from the Neverwinter Nights original campaign, it does have a nice twist that really gives it its own spin (and by "nice" I mean nice in an Evil Cartoonist sort of way). If you are a Star Wars fan and you've got a fair number of hours to kill, this is a great way to slaughter those hours with sufficient bloodlust. If you're not a Star Wars fan, this game might just turn you into one. It definitely has this player's seal of approval.

That's about it for now, gang. Don't forget that the Fred plush dolls are still available, and that you can help me decide what to do with my Microsoft anti-trust settlement in this poll thread on the forum. While you're there, feel free to give me your thoughts on a little proposal I've made about a change to how the News Blurb on the main page works. And check out the Shows & Cons site for updates on where we're planning to be in the near future.