Friday - December 31, 2004:

I guess I'm comfortable enough with the five panel format. Adding it up, I guess with nearly fifty HB strips in the hopper, that brings my life-time total to about a thousand strips. At least a few of those were genuinely funny, but more than a few were formulaic, so for those I apologize.

As for the future of HB, I've decided to put the strip on hold with number fifty or thereabouts. The boys have a few reviews left to do, and I may add a strip from time to time, but too much of my time has been spent on comics that just aren't paying the bills. In addition to HB, I've been working on More Fun over at Graphic Smash, several smaller projects and the occasional review for WCE and GNR, none of which pay more than a couple of bucks. Since I don't have the fan-base of the Norm, I won't bother asking for donations to keep the strip going. It was always an experiment for me, to see if I could still meet the deadlines and play around with blog-strip combo.

I will continue to post sketches and strips at the site whenever possible, perhaps even some HB strips. Hopefully, I'll be making lots more progress with "Journey into History: Isle of Demons." I plan to make a go of self-publishing it. In any case I'll keep you posted.

I have been working on much more than comics over the past four months though. In addition to building a couple of dynamic, data-driven web-sites as a private consultant, I've been working on something of a top-secret project related to education. I guess it's not actually all that secret as Google's already gotten ahold of it and it is a public website. I'm just not ready to advertise for it yet. When I left teaching, I thought it would take me at least a year to build the technology (I'm a programming hack), and another year to add enough content to demonstrate its potential. Well, the technological backbone is close to functional after a little more than four months of work, thanks largely to several open-source projects that I had no idea existed when I started out. Now comes the hard part: filling it with useful content. I had a meeting with a couple of marketing guys to talk about its potential and, well, I've still got a ways to go.

On this New Year's Eve, I'm thinking it's time for me switch gears a bit and concentrate more  on what I'm probably best at, teaching. The next several months are going to be lonely ones, full of books, and notes, and writing, and revising. I am confident, though, that at the end of it I'm building tools that will help teachers and students to do a better job of that toughest of jobs, making each other think and learn.

To keep my hands in the art, I'm thinking of taking a painting class at a local university, a scary prospect, as I've only taken two art classes in my life, ninth grade art foundations and a basic drawing class in college.

Thanks for visiting the site. I appreciate your clicks and comments. They made some lonely days of coding a bit less lonely.

Happy New Year.

On a political note, I am disappointed in my government's disturbing lack of compassion in the face of the recent floods and deaths in the Indian Ocean. we've found tens of billions to pay for war and our own storm reconstruction. Certainly we can do better than the few million I've heard the President offer so far. He is a fool to let yet another opportunity for unity and improved US-World relations slip away.

-Bob Stevenson