Cartoons and comics of one sort or another are going to be in abundance at this year’s Greenbelt festival. As well as a talk on comics and a chance to see Si Smith’s ‘40‘ series I’m pleased to say that some of my work will be there in one way or another. I’ve done an 8 page mini-comic which will be given out along with a number of others at the Sunday morning communion and I’ve done a 12 page mini-but-not-as-mini ‘Guide to Greenbelt’ which the Church Times will be publishing and using as their publicity material. The cartoon above is taken from the latter. I’m hoping I might be able to post some more images soon but its taken a while post-computer-breakdown to get things done so I’ll have to see how it goes.

Posted by Dave at 10:08 am on August 19, 2005 and filed under Cartooning, Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt.

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Seeing as I’m not slow to criticise slack or unhelpful companies and bad service I should really comment when someone does their job remarkably well.

My non-functioning computer was picked up by a UPS courier on Monday afternoon. It was shipped to Germany, where Packard Bell replaced the fan, the mother board and the cd / dvd rewriter drive. It was returned from Germany and delivered by the same courier at 10.30 am on Wednesday, ie less than 2 days later. It happened that I wasn’t in, so I actually got it today, but that isn’t really their fault. At least they didn’t leave it in the wheely bin.

Posted by Dave at 11:58 am on August 18, 2005 and filed under Sundry posts.

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So asks blogger Andrew Careaga in the comments section of another blog. The full quote:

What a bit that CartoonChurch.com won’t let you link from their site. When are they going to “get it”?

Hmmm. I have e-mailed the writer in question asking for clarification but a week later have received no response. I think he is referring to the fact that I don’t allow people to use my cartoon images hosted on my webspace on their blogs, but I’m not certain, so I thought I’d respond here on the blog. I suppose there are two points here really, assuming that the quote in question means what I think it does:

1) Should bloggers expect to use other peoples images on their sites for free?
In other words, if I am paying to host an image should another blogger see it as their right to include my image which is on my webspace on their blog for free? My opinion, which I hold fairly strongly, is no. If someone gives you permission, fair enough, but if you don’t ask permission you are costing the owner of the image money by using the image on your blog and it really would be polite to ask. I might even go slightly further than that and say that using someone elses hosted image on your webspace is ‘stealing bandwidth‘ – ie theft.

One reason I don’t allow hosted images on this site to be used elsewhere is that it would cost me a fortune to do so. Effectively I would be paying other people’s webhosting bills which if I was feeling generous I might choose to do, but the reality of my situation is that such a thing is a luxury I can’t afford at the present time. I note that the images on Mr Careaga’s site appear not to be saved on his own webspace. Well, his choice I suppose – as long as he recognises that his ideal of cut and paste blogging costs people like me a lot of money. (Not on this site, but on others I run where image hotlinking is allowed).

2) Should a cartoonist feel compelled to give their work away for free?
The second implication from the cartoon above is that images such as the ones on my site should really be given away for free. You probably don’t really need me to tell you that if I were to do this I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills, but I will anyway. As a professional cartoonist my work is my main and only means of support, therefore for me to give it away free is (a) Going to mean I have to live on Value Sliced Loaves and Economy Beans, (b) Being unfair to my subscribers who are paying to use my work, (c) Slightly unreasonable in the light of the fact that I am already offering my work way below the market rates, not least because I recognise that many churches would struggle to pay standard non-profit rates let along the going market rate.

Having said this I am almost always willing to allow a blogger to use an occasional cartoon if they ask nicely. I value links from other bloggers greatly and I think that using an image or part of an image to illustrate a link is quite fair. But saying I allow use of my content in this way doesn’t mean anyone has a right to use it in any way they choose, and if they do use an image they should (a) ask, and (b) host it themselves unless agreed otherwise.

So. What does anyone else think? Do you agree or do I not ‘get it’? Please say what you think – I’m happy enough to be disagreed with.

Posted by Dave at 11:54 pm on August 17, 2005 and filed under Blogging, CartoonChurch progress.

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For the first year the Greenbelt festival programme includes a number of sessions of one sort or another about blogging. TallSkinnyKiwi is talking about ‘The Spirituality of Blogging’ which should be good value. There is also a ‘panel’ on the subject of blogs which I’m very pleased to have been asked to be a part of. Also part of it (I think – the e-mail is on my laptop on its way to Germany) are John Davies, Jonny Baker, Maggi Dawn and Pip Wilson.

So if by any chance you’re at the festival and you want to hear various people rambling about blogging and (if it comes up in conversation) me pontificating about the Wibsite community and/or the dullest blog in the world then I think Sunday 7pm is the provisional time.

Posted by Dave at 11:00 am on August 16, 2005 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt.

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Over the next few days I’m going to be posting about one of the highlights of my year, the forthcoming Greenbelt festival, which is the weekend after next in Cheltenham. I’m sorry if my posts on the festival bore or alienate a proportion of my readers, but its a risk I’m going to take.

The geek in me was rather pleased to see that Greenbelt has gone all hi tech this year, embracing splendid new technologies such as Technorati (a search engine for blog posts), Flickr (a search engine for photos stored online) and del.icio.us (A search engine for links which other people think are worth seeing). Hope that isn’t too technical. The idea is that blog posts, photos and links can all be ‘tagged’ with a special label (called a ‘tag’, curiously) which means that people who are interested in reading about and seeing pictures of the festival will be able to find them all in one place.

At the moment there is nothing to see really, but hopefully over the next couple of weeks that will begin to change. Try these links, then try them again in a day or twos time:

Technorati
Flickr
del.icio.us

Hopefully in a few minutes / hours / days my post will appear on the Technorati page. If it works I’ll explain how you can do the same thing on your own greenbelt-related website or using your greenbelt-related photos.

Posted by Dave at 2:12 pm on August 15, 2005 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt, Technical.

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I have noticed that in Internet Explorer this blog is coming up with an error along the lines of

Line: 3
Char: 1
Error: Object Expected

I have no idea what this means. ‘Object Expected’ – I think it wants a present.

If anyone can enlighten me and / or tell me how to mend it I would be most pleased.

Posted by Dave at 8:00 am on August 14, 2005 and filed under Mundane, Technical.

4 Comments

Good fun – Danny Wallace starts his own country with Citizens Required being the website. Not everyones cup of tea I’m sure, but I did really enjoy the TV show last week.

Posted by Dave at 8:00 am on August 13, 2005 and filed under Sundry posts.

3 Comments

Liz goes to see the Anthony Gormley sculptures at Crosby. I’ve been meaning to link to this for a while and I’d prefer to highlight an eye witness account than a media report. I’d love to go and see this if I lived a bit nearer.

Posted by Dave at 8:19 am on August 12, 2005 and filed under Art.

2 Comments

Upon returning from my holiday (yes, I will bore you with some pictures when the technology gets its act together) I enjoyed catching up with some of the nearly 100 blogs I follow (with differing degrees of keenness it must be said) on Bloglines.com. However, a few blogs have, if I’m to be honest, really rather overblogged themselves and so I’m afraid I won’t be wading through their posts. Here are the worst offenders:

The Top 5 Excessive Bloggers
as counted on my Bloglines list from 23rd July to the present.

5 Problogger (99 posts)
Sorry Darren – you’ve made my top 5 list of excessive bloggers. Actually I will probably be reading back over most of Darren’s writing as the content is superb and invaluable if like me you are writing a blog as part of a business or (less like me) relying on blogs for part of your income. But 99 posts put Problogger in 5th place, narrowly pushing Jordon Cooper from the rankings.

4 We make money not art (99 posts)
This should really be in joint 5th place, but life just isn’t fair like that. Recently featured in my top 5 art blogs, ‘We make money not art’ is nevertheless pushing out posts on wierd and wonderful gadgets and gizmos at a faster rate than I can read when I return from holiday.

3 Tim Worstall (151 posts)
Tim makes it to number 3 with 151 posts during my holiday, that’s about 8 posts a day. This possibly makes him the UK’s greatest overblogger, though there is probably someone out there clicking ‘post’ every twenty minutes just to prove me wrong. Take it easy Tim – have a sit down and some orange squash.

2 Global Voices (200 plus posts)
Tagline: ‘ The world is talking. Are you listening?’ To be fair Global Voices does have quite a large scope, ie the entire world’s blogs. But it has passed the 200 mark at which point Bloglines gives up and goes home to bed and so is officially at number 2 in my chart of excessive bloggers. The world is quite talkative.

1 Titusonenine (200 plus posts)
The good Canon Kendall Harmon is the official No 1 Excessive Blogger and is hereby named and/or shamed as such. He also managed in the two and a half week period to push Bloglines to the limit of exhaustion with rather more than 200 posts. Titusonenine is a continual torrent of Anglican and general religious news stories the reading of which is more or less a fulltime occupation, let alone the writing. But it must be said that Kendall is a great source of information and he’s always been very kind in linking to things when I’ve passed them on, so remains an example to us all. Well, sort of.

So are there any more excessive bloggers out there? The top 2 in my list are way past the 10 posts a day habit, but are there 20 a day bloggers? 30 a day? No, don’t be silly.

Posted by Dave at 8:00 am on August 11, 2005 and filed under Blogging, In-depth analysis.

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1) Oversleeping
I had to get up at 7.30 am to put the bins out and was so exhausted by the experience that I had to have a little lie down. The next thing I knew it was… well.. rather later than 7.30 am. No, not that much later you understand.

2) Going to the DIY supercentre to buy a very small screwdriver
As regular readers will know my really quite new laptop computer is broken because I pressed the ‘on’ button in the normal fashion. I phoned up the diagnostic helpline (Diagnostics are a little bit like agnostics except that they are trying to find out what is wrong with them) and was told I needed to unhitch my battery and reset the doofer. Unfortunately the battery is recessed somewhere deep inside the bowels of the computer and so one needs a screwdriver to open the back. It is a cross-headed screwdriver which has some sort of a technical name, I forget what. Unfortunately a common or household screwdriver will not do the trick – it has instead to be a mini ‘size zero’ screwdriver. Normally one has lots of these lying around from medium to expensive Christmas crackers, but on this occasion I strangely had no such thing and so had to go out and buy one. And of course in order to get one the right size one has to buy the deluxe model – the budget screwdrivers only come in sizes one and two. If you want a size zero you pay for it let me tell you. Upon opening the back of the computer there is of course no battery to be seen. I shall be reporting this to my diagnostic advisor next time I ring him.

3) Breaking the toilet by flushing it in the normal fashion
I flushed the toilet by flushing the flusher (Yes, that is the correct technical term) in the normal fashion but instead of going to a depressed position and then returning to its former position the flusher kept going round and round in circles. I took off the lid of the cistern and saw that the whathaveyou gizmo (Once again, yes, that is what they call it in the business) had broken in two so another reason to visit the DIY supercentre. Fortunately I was able to buy both things in one trip, but when I returned I was somewhat dismayed to find that the whathaveyou gizmo I had bought was rather the wrong size. All was not lost however, as a trip to the garage revealed that although no hacksaw was in evidence a pair of garden secateurs did the job of cutting a piece off the whathaveyou gizmo in a most efficient manner. The fact that the flushing action doesn’t really do its thing as well as it did before is neither here nor there.

4) Returning my overdue library books and being unable to find anywhere to park in the vicinity of the library
My library books were overdue as I had forgotten to return then. It could happen to anyone. I had to drive to the library as I was approaching from a distance of some 12 miles or so. Normally of course I cycle into town. Unfortunately Rayleigh Council’s transport policy (or lack of it) means that pay and display parking is only 30 pence, meaning that everyone chooses to drive to the town and has no reason to walk, cycle or use public transport, all of which are minority activities. So the carparks are jammed full and the rest of the town is a continual traffic jam of people driving around completely lost looking for more carparks as the existing ones are all full up. If you sense I am bitter it is nothing to do with the fact I had to park at the station and then walk all the way up the hill to the library, pay my £3.64 fine and then walk all the way down the hill again. Nothing at all.

5) Telephoning an organisation, being passed from one department to another, and then forgetting my own telephone number meaning I had to call them back later and get passed from one department to another in a confusing manner for a second time
I’m not going to tell you this story because it makes me look like an idiot.

Posted by Dave at 8:09 pm on August 10, 2005 and filed under Essex Life, Sundry posts.

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You’ll have to forgive some semi-uninteresting posts while I sort myself out. Though this link is mildly marvellous in it’s own way.

Project C90 – pictures of audiocassettes and their sleeves, found via Barky.

Posted by Dave at 12:53 pm on August 10, 2005 and filed under Art.

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Well, my computer was taken to the PC World megaplex and, after a long wait a technical advisor (in fact the only technical advisor in the whole place) took a look at my flex to see whether I was (Warning: Exaggeration, mild) plugging the right end into the mains electricity. She then proceeded to explain to me that computers aren’t mended in store these days – it’s all done over the telephone. So tomorrow I have to telephone an operative who will get me to undertake advanced diagnostic tasks like trying using different fingers to operate the unresponsive on button.

(I can, as an aside, see the day coming when everything is done over the telephone – you’ll do your car MOT over the phone, receive medical surgery over the phone and probably even go to church services over the phone. You’d think we consumers would fight back and actually insist on seeing a real person every now and then wouldn’t you. But – no.)

In the meantime I have only Maddie_C’s computer to use which is going to complicate things somewhat. Having the internet in a different place to my clean socks means rather more time spent driving up and down the A127 than is good for man or beast. Particularly ‘beast’ come to think of it.

One immediately frustrating aspect is that there is some e-mail received in the last two weeks which I read but no longer have access to. In particular I know one prospective customer wanting freelance cartoon work doing e-mailed me and I havent been able to reply. I’m finding this very very frustrating as I have no way of getting at the address. If by some slim chance this was you please do contact me again on dave(at)wibsite.com. Cartoonchurch e-mail remains inaccessible for now.

Posted by Dave at 7:29 pm on August 8, 2005 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

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