Whatever you do, don’t ask me about my computer. I might just tell you, and the strip’s up late already. Just suffice it to say I haven’t gotten home earlier than 9:00 all week and I’m less than a happy camper. Tonight looks about that same. At the very least, I can say I got the comic up!

In today’s strip, we get the first glimpse inside the K’s house. For reference, this is Tooey’s room. Of course, I had to go about “building the set” as Jim calls it, and that took a while. I get picky about these things I want them to look a certain way, but know my limitations with the pixel art and our style in this comic. Anyhow, I wanted something a tad nicer than Leroy’s room, considering the K kids’s father is a politician and would be a little more well-off.

Oh, those poor kids. I have to admit, I have been the “mean ol’ mom” on more than one occasion. As with most families, our kids play video games, and even did a short stint on WoW. Most of the time they are good about getting off when I ask. But, on the times they don’t, I have been known to pull the plug mid-game to teach them a lesson. I do admit, most of the time I wait until a lull in the action, and sometimes I’m generous and even let them go quickly save their game first. But, there have been a couple of heated battles with bosses which I’ve interrupted. Though, truthfully the BMW kids handled it a wee bit better than our kids. There is usually a lot of screaming and crying and lamenting when the switch goes unexpectedly off here!

Anyhow, I enjoyed this little detour into the game, and I’m also happy to get back on track on other storylines. Be sure to check in tomorrow.

Of course, I sound like such a broken record about an update (you see I even created a category in this blog for it). But swear on a stack of Batman comics, things have been nuts!

First of all, I have to ask a question. If you have a virus, a nasty virus, but your computer is running okay, do you remove it? My first answer would have been yes, that is until after yesterday. As the tech at my work installed the updated anti-virus and did his magic to fix my computer up, inside little gremlins were doing their duty. Needless to say, after 2 hours of “fixing” my computer was far worse off than it had been before. I was there until 9:00 last night and did not want to even look at computers–even for the comics–when I got home.

Now, most people would say, “So what, don’t you have a home computer? You could have worked on it at home sometimes.” Sure do, and I do most of my art on that normally. Problem is, this particularly line of strips I did at work. My office computer is limping along, but it will not allow me to open certain folders and programs, including my graphics package. So, I’m stuck…for now. I did manage to grab certain files and will be bringing them home, but that is going to delay me until this evening.

Now, I should note the reason I’m not up on this is because this strip diversion into Cosmic Dungeon was not planned. We wanted a little padding out of some other storylines, and came up with this little sidetrack. So, I have been doing it on the fly. I probably should have just stuck with the other stuff, since most of that is done. Ugh.

So, thanks for the patience. I do feel better offering you our amusing fillers. The good news is they have earmarked me to get a new machine at work. Just wish it didn’t take something like this to get me there.

At my last job the big push was to get everyone certified. Honestly, the company really didn’t care if you knew how to do the work, they just like to brag that all of their employees were certified. I took classes, and I boned up with study manuals. I passed tests too. Though, to this day if I had to recall much of it, I couldn’t. I can program. That’s something I can do. I’ve been doing it for 27 years (I’m not that old, I started when I was 11). My last several jobs were programming jobs. Yet, when I went on interviews, I was constantly being asked to take these tests to prove I could code. Granted, I know there are a lot of script monkeys out there who manage to do okay writing little scripts and such, and they want to weed out the casual coder from the hardcore programmers. Still, I hated being treated like I didn’t know what I was talking about when I had done this for how many years. So, what did I have to go and do? Get certified.

I guess my big gripe is not certification in general, but the move Corporate America has made to have *everyone* certified. That whole idea that it’s not good enough for you to do your job, but you have to have a piece of paper to prove it.

Oh, and the fact that all of it COSTS so much. Seriously, thousands of dollars for classes, hundreds of dollars for study materials, and two or more Ben Franklins at a crack just to take the test. Frankly, I think it’s a big conspiracy to make all of these testing companies richer. But, hey, that’s just me.

Issue 11. The father is too upset with the older kids to bother taking what Max has to say seriously. Of course, any parent can relate to this, particularly when a child keeps calling your name incessantly even though it’s obvious you’re in the middle of something else. Our kids do it all the time. Though, you have to wonder is it because they don’t *get* we are busy, or do they sincerely feel we can’t hear them over the other noise. Anyhow, we did try to stress in the next issue that despite the horsing around, the kids settled down and did help. Our kids are like that–hard to motivate and between the goofing off, do manage to get stuff done.

Hey, I got a question from a reader about the “terminal” in issue 8. Yes, that is an Audrey, the defunct internet appliance made by 3com many years back. And thanks to my brother-in-law, we happen to be Audrey lovers. We have 3 in our house, though only 1 is set up right now. Nice to have one in the kitchen to get recipes and such over the ‘Net. It was before it’s time, yet obsolete at the same time. Then again, isn’t so much of technology? Our reference to it is one of many tech jokes we have planned for the comic. Honestly, in a lot of ways, even though the term most people use to describe the strip is “cute,” we have a lot of satire planned, and much of it at the expense of our computerized world. And while we will aim to keep those jokes timely enough for a general audience to find amusing, we are also aware there will be a few obscure references and site gags that us “old-timers” and computer geeks are going to get that some others might not.