Wednesday - November 10, 2004:

I own my fair share of furry comics, my favorite two have to be Rocket Racoon and Albedo though I can't find the former. I was surprised when someone asked for Albedo at the second show I did. It seems the book has something of a cult following, that or maybe the guy was speculating that as the grand-daddy of the furry genre it might be desireable one day. Of course, I went home, and dug the books. The next show and the buyer was nowhere to be seen. I did manage to sell a whole stack of Star Trek, The Next Generation comics at a dollar a piece. I don't think I ever finished reading all of them. My Koalas are still sitting in the box though.

I'm beat from a day of coding. I didn't think anything could be less profitable than a day at a comic convention. Then I took a stab at self-employment. I just put in a 14 hour day and not one minute of it is billable. It was necessary work, but I'm not sure it got me all that much closer to making any money from the teacher-tools I've been developing. Most of it was doing damage control on some bad advice I received from another programmer. Well, it wasn't necessarily bad advice, just incomplete. He suggested, "Just change the name of the table and drop all the fields that don't look like they're needed." Ten hours later, I finally rebuilt the missing fields and data, piecing them together from back-ups and redundancies in the database. For those of you who are not familiar with SQL, that just made no sense. For anyone who's ever made bad SQL decisions, feel for me. The lesson: backup your backup and back that up too. Oh, and measure twice, cut once. I'm a damn fool who won't make those mistakes again.

-Bob Stevenson