Happy 2009 everyone. I hope the first day of the new year is kind and that your favorite hangover remedy treats you well.

We're sitting in the departure terminal at the airport in Jackson, Mississippi. They provide free wireless access, and in honor that I've posted a picture of my daughter experiencing an airport for the first time:

December has been a rather poor showing for me as far as updates go. I'm off to Virginia to introduce our daughter to my side of the family, so that poor showing will continue until Monday at least (though I might manage one more update this week. We'll see.)

I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas have a good one. The same goes for those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and any other seasonal holiday I'm overlooking.

Lately I've found less and less of a reason to bother booting into my windows partition. I've used Linux as my primary operating system for at least 6 years, but I always kept a windows partition handy for when I wanted to play games. Now, The Wine Project has advanced to the point that all of the games I currently play I can play in a Linux environment, and all the windows applications I currently use are supported by Wine and by Crossover Linux, a Wine derivative customized to run windows office software.

My distro of choice is Kubuntu, a version of Ubuntu that is integrated with the KDE Desktop. Kubuntu has gone through some growing pains of late, since the latest version has formally adopted the latest version of KDE's desktop, KDE4, as it's official GUI. Unfortunately, KDE4 isn't quite finished yet and it looks like it won't be a real boy until they release KDE 4.2. Those birth pains are worthy of their own rant, but that's a topic for another day.

Today's topic is the utterly abysmal way that Ubuntu and Kubuntu support mouse buttons. And it is today's topic because not only is their support of mouse buttons abysmal, but as of their latest release they've actually taken a step back and gone from abysmal to nearly useless.

This week will be uneven as far as updates are concerned. It's the week of Thanksgiving over here in the US so on Wednesday we'll be traveling to visit with family and I'll probably not have regular Internet access from there on out.

And on Monday -- cross your fingers -- I might be in New Orleans on a three week tech writing contract. So next week may be spotty as well.

Of course, there's always a chance I'll get my act together and build up a queue of new comics to bridge the gap...

Thanks the kind donation of server space by one of my readers, Ubersoft.net has moved to a new server location for a while so I can save on server costs until my financial situation rights itself. Well have to see whether or not the new site can survive the strain. For the moment, only Ubersoft.net is active - EvisceratiNet and Eviscerati.org have gone dark until such a time as they can be let back into the wild. That's OK, for the moment, since I didn't really have any content to put there yet.

Meanwhile... I'm still trying to get my email account working. It isn't yet.

Update: Email now working!

"A toast! A toast! A toast to Mama Dollar and to Papa Dollar, and if you want to keep this old Building and Loan in business, you better have a family real quick."
- George Bailey, It's a Wonderful Life

Every Christmas my wife and I watch a number of old Christmas movies. It's a tradition: on Christmas day we get up, put on a pot of coffee and put in movie after movie after movie: The Bishop's Wife for one, Miracle on 34th Street for another, and, of course, It's a Wonderful Life. At the very end of It's a Wonderful Life, the whole town of Bedford Falls descends on George Bailey's house and donates enough money to keep him from going to jail.

I was never in danger of going to jail (that I know of) and I wasn't as desperate as George was in that movie, but you, my readers, remind me of that town.

This post is probably much longer than it needs to be, filled with anecdotes and reminiscences. For those of you who don't want to bother with the buildup, the summary is that I'm running out of money, and as a result I may have to take down EvisceratiNet (eviscerati.net, ubersoft.net, evsicerati.org) for a while until I can afford to resume publishing. There are ways out of this predicament--a sudden influx of money from enthusiastic supporters, a sudden offer of a decent job, a sudden winning lottery ticket--but given the current economic climate I'm thinking the lottery ticket is my best shot.

I go into more detail after the break.

On his blog Rick Marshal asks "Which candidates would your webcomic characters vote for?" He only asks the question of a few specific webcomic creators, none of which are me, but I have no qualms about crashing the party. Below the cut I talk about which characters in which comic would support which candidate (and why).

All day yesterday I was in a great mood. I'd decided to spin off the "PCtown" storyline into its own mini-run comic in order to resume the M-F publication schedule of Help Desk and it felt like things were going to return to normal.

Late afternoon I received a notice that Drupal, the CMS I use to publish Help Desk, had released an update that fixed a critical security flaw. So I downloaded the update, applied the update, and updated the database...

... and the site broke. My relatively good day turned into a pretty horrible evening... and a pretty lousy today, too.