This page is very much a continuation of the last update. They are really meant to be displayed as a spread in a book, but I could not figure out how to do that gracefully on the web page. Of course the rules of story telling demand that Tam’s estimate of their chances of getting caught will be completely wrong. I am sure I am not giving anything away when I say that.

Someone commented to me that among the changes to the site are the much longer and more complete comments below each comic, like the one your reading. It’s all the fault of Word Press, ComicPress, and Comic Easel. In particular, when I am posting I now have a lot more tools than I did on my little home made form. I have formatting tools, I have a nice large high contrast writing area. I have spell check, and even some grammar tools (yay!). Almost more important than any of that, WordPress also saves a draft of what I am typing every minute or so. This is critical because it was very common with my little home made form that I would write some long description and then it would all get lost due to some problem during the update process, and on the re-try rather than re-create everything I had before I would write the functional equivalent of ‘meh’. That happened enough times that it would discourage me from even trying to write something of consequence. Moving to WordPress would probably have been worth it for that alone.

But wait! There’s more! Now that I am using these tools, I found that I can use my programming ability to do even more customization than I could before. A good example is the like button that is on this post, and every other post. That wasn’t available in any of the Word Press tools that I found, so I wrote it into a function in a child theme and was  able to add it with a slick little snippet that Frumph gave me. Critically I was able to have it show up on every single post, and link to the actual post not to the page the post happened to be on, and I did it with about a grand total of 10 or 12 lines of code.

Now how much would you pay!

I couldn’t have done all that as simply on my old site. Sure it took me hours to figure out where to put that code in the huge  Castle Gormenghast that is the structure of WordPress, its Themes, and its plugins, but it would have almost certainly taken me longer to go ahead and program the feature from scratch. Moving to WordPress has definitely put me ahead of the game.

And there we go, five hundred more works (give or take) most of which I would not have written unless I had moved. Ok, its only four hundred and eighty-eight.

The drawing for this page and the next page is an excuse for me to do a big two page spread of Richardson Bay, the Marin and Tiburon peninsulas, and the Golden Gate bridge. The ‘action’ is just Kay and Tam walking back to Schoonmaker marina to get his dingy, and that didn’t feel like action at all. My initial write-up of this book had Kay meeting up with Alex and Rachael, characters from the old comic, but I found that I didn’t have room to re-introduce them and get all the information that I felt I had to get into this intro. That left a little extra space right here, and I wanted to go ahead and draw a big scene.

We will almost certainly run into Alex and Rachael again.

Oh, and for those who may not know, an ‘Order of magnitude’ means to be ten times as large, or one-tenth as large, while ‘Two orders of magnitude” means one hundred times as large, or one one-hundredth. So when Tam is tell Kay that she may be one or two orders of magnitude faster, she is really saying she could be about ten to a hundred times faster, and that is a pretty big range.

And yes, I can also hear that guy in the back saying, “Years for backup hardware and two weeks for a fusion reactor?”. Well, yeah. The fuser design is actually uncomplicated, while the quantum processors that Tam uses are much more complicated (an order of magnitude at least! maybe two! See you learned something!), and would take longer to create. A key point is that some people build fusers at home, but nobody builds modern day integrated circuits at home.

Just one more page.

It does feel good to be on track to make this first deadline. As you can see from the thumbnail sheet there is only one space left. The first and last pages are next to each-other on the sheet so that spreads can be grouped. If you look at it you may notice that I tried to layout the spreads, not just the pages.