Business Casual

For the next few comics, I'm trying to create jokes around a particular topic - SQL. This will probably be met with varying levels of success as I usually don't try and limit comic ideas. Also, I'm not sure exactly how much funny is in SQL. Do I fall back on lamer, old-school jokes like, "A SQL query walks into a bar and goes up to two tables. He says to the tables, 'Can I join you?'" or can I create something else? We'll see.

So why am I trying this when I don't even know if I can come up with SQL jokes? Well, there's a couple of reasons. First, I have my eye on a tech conference that specializes in SQL. I'm hoping that I can use these next few comics as a way to promote myself to the conference. Second, this also helps me practice in creating specific jokes for a specific topic. So, in the future, if I start offering a custom comic creation service for newsletters, etc, I can have some experience as creating topical comics on the fly.

Sometimes, I've looked at a project timeline and wondered if management was expecting me just to sleep at the office. The best one that I've ever received, however, was a timeline where if I would have worked 7 days a week and 24 hours a day, I still wouldn't have been able to meet the deadline. Thankfully, we were able to bring in some additional people to help so I was able to hold to a tiny shred of my sanity.

Also, in today's comic, I tried a new technique where I added a texture type thing to the background of the comic. I think I went too dark with it in today's comic, but it's something that I'll probably try again. I may even adjust today's comic later tonight as it just looks like the walls are dirty in the strip today.

In Business Casual book news, I'm getting closer to setting up a pre-order. I'm hoping to finish the book cover this weekend, and then I'll just have some a couple of pages left to do before I can send it out for my proof copy. My best guesstimate is that I'll have the book ready for shipment around the first week of May.

I've had the same Desktop PC at my house for about 9 years now. It's had some issues as I've had to replace a power supply and a case fan. I've also installed an additional hard drive back when 100 GB used to be a decent hard drive space, installed a wireless network card, and added some basic Bluetooth connectivity. So I have done a bit of maintenance to my machine. I also understand that I'm above the skill level of the average user so my experiences with computers may be skewed.

However, my gast gets flabbered when I hear of people that have to upgrade their computer after two years because it's running slowly. Unless you're an avid PC gamer or running some hyper-intensive programs that requires a lot of power, I don't see any reason why a computer shouldn't last at least five years. Most people only use their computer for a few tasks, and it doesn't take a brand new, state of the art machine to surf the Internet, email, play music/movies, and store pictures. The real reason is that they just can't keep their computer in good working order.

Am I being unreasonable here? Should people be replacing their computers every three years? Are Mac users exempt from the life cycle? The comments are always open if you have an opinion.