A keyboard for pirates.

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." -- Ari Fleischer

The sad thing is that I think this is fairly indicative of the thought process of our administration. The truly horrible part is that most of the voting American public will probably think it a wonderful rationalization.

Two of my favorite authors collide as Stephen King reviews J.K. Rowling's new Harry Potter book. His review is pretty much dead-on, especially the bit about the excessive adverbs, which I noticed. That might be because I've read King's On Writing, though, which dedicates numerous pages to the same subject.

That said, both books are excellent, and the new Harry Potter is the best of the lot. I can't wait for the next one.

Phillip seems to have gotten image uploading working, so naturally I will abuse the feature to post pictures of adorable kittens.

Freaking great.

I am extremely psyched about the upcoming Comic-Con. Jumping up and down squealing excited kinda thing. Last year's was so much fun, and I think this year's is going to out-do it in just about every way. Comics all day, drinking all night. For a week.

I'm going to miss Amy, don't get me wrong. Being away from her for a week is not something I'm looking forward to. But it's going to be a good opportunity to hang with the Dumbrella folks specifically and hopefully some other cartoonists as well. I'd love to spend some time chatting with Tycho, for example, as he seems like a swell guy.

Also, there will be drinking, which I haven't done enough of lately.

Anyway, just a few more days and I will be there, in the nice weather and the creative vibe surrounding and penetrating everything... I can't freaking wait.

With Comic-con coming up in about a week, I'm somewhat crazed. I have seven strips to draw before I take off to San Diego. But I still managed to have a nice weekend regardless.

• Went to my friend Jay's house in Norwalk for the 4th; sailing, bocce and barbecue. Can't be beat.
• Managed to put up a new Sunday strip, which I think came out rather nice (despite having lost all my work about two hours into coloring -- hence, no shadows). Sadly, still no Patent Pending. I may have to take a day after the con to get one done. It's been too long.
• Vindaloo Update -- tried Cafe Spice with Amy this weekend. Not as hot as other places, but very tasty. A little expensive, though. I think I'm still putting Haveli in first place.

I think that covers it for now. I've got quite a bit of work to do, so updates will likely be sporadic for a while, unfortunately.

The MoCCA Art Festival was great this year, as it was last year -- lots of amazing talent and a generally fabulous crowd. I even got to meet Keith Knight and gave him one of our books.

One of the great things about the festival this year is that we also made a lot of good contacts, like the guys at Midtown Comics. According to an email Phillip forwarded, it looks like they're interested in stocking our books. This is a Good Thing. It'll be cool to see the books up on shelves at a store I can actually get to. Hopefully the other stores we made contacts with will follow suit.

Last night's dinner was Chicken Vindaloo followed by Brownie Batter. I don't think there are two more extreme flavors, but both are recent obsessions of mine. Baluchi's Vindaloo is probably the spiciest I've had in the city so far, but the dish at Haveli was much tastier, and the atmosphere and service were significantly better there as well. If Baluchi's didn't have their 50% off, as they do on weeknights, it probably would have been cheaper as well. The search for the best Vindaloo in the city continues. I'll keep you up-to-date as developments occur.

I made this post from my Sidekick, which theoretically means that I should be able to make entries anywhere I get service.

As an aside, the Sidekick's autocorrect feature likes to change "Mo" to "Month".

Let's call this the first official post. Howdy to all of you. This, A Small, Self-Centered Universe, is the semi-secret blog of Jonathan Rosenberg, Goats cartoonist and happy guy.

Let's set up some ground rules, shall we?

• I'll try not to censor myself in here, unless my wife complains -- her privacy is paramount (her name is Amy, but we'll call her SnuggleCheeks McGee from here on in so as to protect her identity). Everything else is fair game.
• Since I'm not censoring myself, try not to tell too many people about this. If you find it, good. If you know someone who might find it interesting, fine. But please don't go posting the URL on the Goats forums (or any other forums, or through any sort of mass communication, for that matter) without my permission. It would be appreciated, and in exchange, I'll be as forthcoming as possible.

I think that should do it -- rules suck, anyway.

So what is this blog for? For the most part, it's just a personal blog, allowing me to sort through my thoughts and findings, post new and interesting developments, and it's an ideal brain dump. You may not find it terribly interesting, but it's mostly here for my use.

It's also a way for me to better understand the blogging phenomenon. As someone who has an active interest in building web communities, I find that first-hand knowledge of these sorts of activities often comes in handy.

And finally, it's a good place for me to post stuff about Goats activities that fall under one of the two following categories:

• Stuff that wouldn't interest the general public
• Stuff that wouldn't be appropriate for whatever reason for posting on the Goats site.

Basically (for now at least), I can vent and fume about Goats and cartooning in general and assume that anyone who manages to find this is at least somewhat friendly. That's until the general public finds it, the URL gets passed around, and all the other cartoonists I slag form a lynch mob.

So, I was going to take off this Friday from the strip, partially because no one will be around to see it and I don't want to continue the storyline without everyone's full attention (my mom is a schoolteacher), but mostly 'cause I'm lazy.

On the way back from picking up lunch, though, I had an idea. Or, rather, I remembered an idea (since I can't possibly have any original ones left). I'm gonna break into the story for one day, confuse everyone, and then pick up right back where we left off. People who are away for the weekend won't miss a thing, and everyone else will get a nice non sequitur-ish treat.

I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking to myself. Which I am, of course. The scary part is that I think I like it.

Anyway, things are moving along swimmingly; most of the styles and general look and feel are in place; lots of items have been componentized for ease of maintenance, and I''m almost there. A few things left to do:

• Ask Phillip about image and file uploading -- right now there's a permissions problem with uploading images. This would be a useful thing to have generally on the site, especially if we can fix the next item, which is...
• Frequent mirroring to live isn't working. I'm pretty sure these directories are supposed to be monitored for changes, but it's not updating until the overall synching that happens each night.
• Because things don't sync properly, it's difficult to navigate the staging blog because all the URLs are absolute. I keep jumping to pages on the live server that don't exist.
• Probably most importantly, I want to create some evergreen content like a faq and bio and such, so people have a place to go when they first arrive. Assuming anyone ever sees this at all.
• Fix the bug that doesn't allow me to unset the Convert Line Breaks option in the prefs section.
• Figure out what the hell the pings stuff is for.

Well, that's a lot to do, so I should get to work, I suppose.

See? If you read the instructions, it helps.

If you put in convert_breaks="0" in your body template, it makes all those annoying breaks go away. And everything is good again. I think I'll cure cancer for my next trick.

Just testing out the extended entry bit.

For some reason, I can't get the "convert line breaks" setting to turn off. Meddling kids. I'll probably have to get phillip to look at it when he comes back. Frustrating as hell.

In better news, I've got basic styles working, although I'll want to try and get them included in the header -- they're loading slow in the body.

Apparently, there's a 'convert line breaks' feature. How cute. I guess paragraph breaks are out for now.

If this post goes up, it will demonstrate that I was able to remove the bits that comprise a post and give them their own separate template. As long as I'm doing this, I might as well make it as componentized as possible. This will also help things along when I'm trying to prettify the blog.

UPDATE: Agh, it seems that the format for archive posts and non-archive posts is slightly different. I may or may not be able to use a single component for both. I'm going to post this Extended Entry bit to see exactly what the differences are.

UPDATE DOS: Ech. Gonna see if I can get permalinks to individual posts instead of anchors in the longer page. I don't see using the extended entry feature that often anyway.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Basically, this is your standard test post. If all goes well, I'll be able to see it on the website (and so will you, dear reader). It must be nice to have such a simple purpose in life. Like squirrels.