Kodiak pictures and project updates

Yes, it's pictures of Kodiak! ( As if posting pictures every other time I've gone to Kodiak wasn't enough! )

I'm starting to really want to do some sort of comic set in Kodiak. I've been there enough times and talked to enough people who live there that I'm starting to get a pretty good idea of what living there is like ... and I know people I can ask if I have questions. I'm kinda maxed out on projects right now, though...

I'm, surprisingly, a little bit ahead on projects just now -- I have next week's Kismet pages very nearly done (need to finish coloring Monday, and then I will be). I want to start spending a little more time on Freebird, making it look better and maybe doing some toning ... so there's that, but Freebird strips really don't take all *that* much time, maybe half a day. So my big project this weekend is getting organized. Or maybe making a down payment on getting organized ... I think it's gonna take awhile. It's getting to the point, though, where my clutter is encroaching on my work area, and I'm spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to find stuff.

Now that we have the attic over the garage, I think I'm going to pack up a bunch of my books and rarely-used art supplies, stuff I want to keep but don't necessarily need to be sharing living space with. That'll help right off. And I think I need to restructure my organizing of my various projects so that anytime I do a random sketch or finish a page, I have a place to stick it rather than just throwing it onto some pile somewhere.

OY.

About 200 yards (or so) upstream of the house is the junction of "our" creek with First Chance Creek coming down out of the hills. It tends to overflow badly in the winter, but the creek is pretty far down below the banks, and I never thought too much about it. Well, I went out there today with the dogs and the overflow is actually topping over the banks ... which means it's at the level of the yard now, and upstream. Overflow moves slowly, but if the cold weather doesn't break, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which the overflow flows into the gravel pit and our yard.

Also, perhaps someone can tell me ... does overflow happen elsewhere, or is it strictly a far-northern phenomenon? It's so ubiquitous up here that I never really thought too much about it ... when it's cold in the winter, water glaciates in layers above creeks and streams -- I remember times we'd end up with 15 feet or more of overflow on parts of the creek when I was a kid. I tried Googling for it, but could find hardly anything -- and you KNOW something must be rare if Google doesn't have it!

EDIT: Hey, I just learned something new from this page ... overflow ice is also called aufeis. Googling for aufeis gets all kinds of hits. Those wacky Germans, they have a word for everything.

There IS a God!!

I *finally* figured out how to change the resolution on my crappy scanner interface. I love you, VueScan! No, that's a lie. I still hate you. But you're much more useful than you used to be.

A brief history of Layla's scanner: Ever since I switched full-time from my ancient iBook running OS9, to my new-ish eMac running OSX, I've been stuck scanning all my pages on the iBook and using a USB key to transfer the files to the new computer, because my scanner (which, like the iBook, dates back to '98 or '99) doesn't work with OS X. A couple of months ago, Orion picked up an HP Scanjet 5200C at Value Village for about $10 in the hopes that it would work better than my other scanner. Still no OS X drivers, come to find out, but I went looking and found a piece of bug-riddled software called VueScan that claims to support over 400 scanners and scans things from the Scanjet in its slow, creaky, bug-riddled sort of way ... at a consistent 200 DPI. It has an option to increase the magnification, but this drops the DPI correspondingly, so you can end up with, say, a 16-inch-wide image that's only 40 DPI. And sometimes it will just give you a random DPI ... for example, on a test image just now, I set it to 600 DPI and the end result came out at 400, which is still better than 200, but not exactly what I asked for, thanks a lot, VueScan.

But since I'm cleaning today, I moved my old scanner over to the new computer and just for a lark, hooked it up to see if VueScan can see it. And it can! Not only that, but the DPI controls actually seem to work for the old scanner, just not for the HP one. At least, I did get a test image to come out at 600 DPI. VueScan being VueScan, it's possible that I'll scan something tomorrow and get a completely different result. However, I have found a new place in the scanner controls to change the DPI (it has about 15 different places where you can do that) and this one, unlike the rest of them, actually seems to have some effect on the outcome.

This doesn't help much with the old scanner's tendency to scan crooked, but at least I can scan at the right resolution, and without having to walk across the room to do it, even if it's slow as molasses.

Maybe one of these days I'll go down to Office Depot and drop $100 on a new scanner. Or something crazy like that.