Small Hands, by Daniel Zezelj
Books: 18/52
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, by Rod Serling, Mark Kneece, and Rich Ellis
Buy The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street at Amazon
Books: 17/52
Altmann’s Tongue, by Brian Evenson
Buy Altmann’s Tongue at Amazon
Books: 16/52
DMZ Vol. 6: Blood in the Game
Brian Wood writes flawed protagonists whose arcs often involve becoming less selfish, more adult. Laudable and interesting themes, I think, and not assayed often enough. Matty Roth, the protagonist of DMZ, has been kind of naïve, kind of a jerk for this whole series. He doesn’t seem to be getting any smarter.
Books: 15/52
Pluto Vol. 1, by Naoki Urasawa
Books: 13/52
In the Flesh, by Koren Shadmi
Books: 12/52
I’ll Be at Webcomics Weekend
Everyone knows about the shaping-up-to-be awesome/important/historic Webcomics Weekend coming up in Easthampton, Mass., on March 20-22, right?
Here’s hoping that you do and that you already registered, because they’re full up and not taking new folks on. This thing looks like it’s going to be a pretty important gathering of webcomics folks - and I’ll be there.
I think I know exactly 0 people who will be there (unless Joey Manley is there; I don’t know him, but we’ve traded emails, so that’s a start), but I’m looking forward to meeting all the folks at the event. I’ll blog about any interesting developments upon my return.
Will you be there?
Upcoming Stories at Split Lip
Every year, Split Lip takes a little hiatus at the beginning of the year to allow me some time to recharge, write new stories, and build up a good stock of work to let us barrel headlong into the new year.
That hiatus is set to end in the next few weeks, with our first new comics of 2009 about to make their debut. But faithful reader, you don’t have to wait for that. Nope, I’ve got a sneak peak for you of the next few Split Lip stories, as well as some ideas about what’s coming after them.
Interested?
(more…)
Absolute Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Buy Absolute Watchmen at Amazon
Books: 11/52
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Buy Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe at Amazon
Books: 10/52
What I Did in February 2009
Another installment in my regular series of posts detailing, in brief terms, my professional life for the previous month. Last month, I spent my work time doing the following:
For Schwadesign:
- Vein and Aesthetic Center of Boston - writing web content, preparing website expansion and content updates, project management
- BioProcess - project management
- Advocacy Solutions - rebranding
- Providence the Creative Capital - writing, IA, sitemaps, editorial calendar development
- Highlander Charter School - began writing website content
- PAL - writing web and brochure content
- Proposal writing for a number of clients
- Process improvement meetings and actions
I’m #1 (or at least some of my sites are)
As I’ve noted in this space in the past, one of the big achievement for someone practicing search engine optimization is to achieve a #1 organic ranking in Google. This means that when a user types in a keyword or keyphrase, the site you’re optimizing comes up as the first result in Google. It’s a pretty solid indication of quality work and directs a lot of traffic to a site.
I’m proud to say that I’ve recently found that I’ve achieved 8 #1 organic rankings in Google for keywords related to my iPod site for About.com.
Those keywords are (click the link to see a screenshot):
- restart iphone - note that my site is ranked ahead of Apple
- iphone help
- how to reset iphone - ahead of Apple again
- reboot iphone
- reformat ipod
- transfer itunes - ahead of Apple
- aac vs. mp3
- frozen iphone - ahead of Apple
In Praise of Paper
If you’ve ever read any of my “What I Did In Month X” posts on the site, you’ve seen some photos of the slightly over the top to-do lists I make myself every week. The other day, Jim Hanrahan, the intern at Schwa, looked at my list and said, “That’s a pretty intense to-do list.” He wasn’t wrong.
And because they’re so intense - and because I’m paranoid about forgetting to do things - I decided to try an experiment earlier this year: ditch paper and handle all of my GTD (getting things done) on the computer.
For this experiment, I took the advice of my well-organized pal Jake Camara, who uses the Mac app Things for all his GTD. He’d raved about it to me a while back and since it’s got both a desktop and iPhone version, it seemed to not only have all the features I needed, but also the ability to come with me a little better than paper.
So, I gave it a shot. I entered my to-dos into Things, adding my recurring events, and went to work.
And barely three weeks later, I’m back to using paper.
I liked a lot of, uh, things about Things, but found that ultimately it wasn’t versatile enough for me. I need to be able to write on my to-do list, use it to make notes to myself, track my time, and be something that has, within the confines of the page at least, a fairly open framework. As much as I liked Things, I still found myself needing to use paper every day. Plus, all those to-do items on the screen made me feel like I wasn’t accomplishing much, when in fact I was rocking the to-do list.
So here I am, back at using paper. I can imagine a day in which my to-do lists will go to the screen, but it’s probably going to need to be a screen I can write on. For now, paper is just too easy, too versatile, too effective to ditch.
