Business Casual

Sometimes, depending on your audience, you may just want to leave out the details. It will make the conversation go quicker, and you'll deal with less confused stares.

And speaking of confusing details, why is it that no one on Star Trek never looked at all confused about what crazy idea the engineering department came up with? Most managers don't know every inner working of a project, so how can I expect the management of a starship to know that they even have a tryonic displacement generator, nonetheless know that when we reverse the polarity of such a thing we can increase the stability of our warp core? Can I see a scene in the next Trek movie where Kirk just tells some engineering or science office to just shut up and do it because he doesn't care how it works or the reasoning behind it?

Well, that wasn't where I was expecting to go with this post. So, uh, read the comic and stuff.

For the next few comics, I'm trying to create jokes around a particular topic - SQL. This will probably be met with varying levels of success as I usually don't try and limit comic ideas. Also, I'm not sure exactly how much funny is in SQL. Do I fall back on lamer, old-school jokes like, "A SQL query walks into a bar and goes up to two tables. He says to the tables, 'Can I join you?'" or can I create something else? We'll see.

So why am I trying this when I don't even know if I can come up with SQL jokes? Well, there's a couple of reasons. First, I have my eye on a tech conference that specializes in SQL. I'm hoping that I can use these next few comics as a way to promote myself to the conference. Second, this also helps me practice in creating specific jokes for a specific topic. So, in the future, if I start offering a custom comic creation service for newsletters, etc, I can have some experience as creating topical comics on the fly.

Sometimes, I've looked at a project timeline and wondered if management was expecting me just to sleep at the office. The best one that I've ever received, however, was a timeline where if I would have worked 7 days a week and 24 hours a day, I still wouldn't have been able to meet the deadline. Thankfully, we were able to bring in some additional people to help so I was able to hold to a tiny shred of my sanity.

Also, in today's comic, I tried a new technique where I added a texture type thing to the background of the comic. I think I went too dark with it in today's comic, but it's something that I'll probably try again. I may even adjust today's comic later tonight as it just looks like the walls are dirty in the strip today.

In Business Casual book news, I'm getting closer to setting up a pre-order. I'm hoping to finish the book cover this weekend, and then I'll just have some a couple of pages left to do before I can send it out for my proof copy. My best guesstimate is that I'll have the book ready for shipment around the first week of May.