So here I am in Athens, Georgia, which is apparently the hometown of the band R.E.M. (you could use that little bit of trivia if you're ever on Jeopardy...) There seems to be a bit of cultural dissonance between myself and the local denizens: I got into an argument the other day in which I said, among other things, that you must be either racist or retarded if you support the Iraq war. Now, I honestly don't remember the last time I insulted anyone over anything; that's not my M.O. But this guy was asking for it. He said that slavery in the South had nothing to do with racism and neither did war. I probably over-reacted, but this last month I've come to the conclusion that it's better to speak up and be disliked than to ingratiate yourself by being silent.

I'm off to see the world, or at least a few interesting parts of it. As a going-away present I scanned in my 100th drawing game!

See you suckers at Xmas!!!

Get your fresh Drawing Game scans while they're still hot!

I scanned in a few more things. It would be awesome if you clicked on the art gallery and scrolled to the bottom to check them out. You want to be awesome, don't you?

Here's a few color photos I've taken with a 35mm, polaroid, and digital camera.

Here's the first of possibly many technology tutorials. This one shows you how to download videos from youtube.

Just in case you haven't had enough yet, there's 15 new drawing-game scans.

Now I'm gonna go outside while there's still that big orange glowy-thingy in the sky.

Leave a message after the click.

I uploaded a photo gallery. These are all pictures of graffiti here in SLO county. You rilly ought to check out the bridge piece if nothing else. There are also some stencils, wheat-pastings, stickers, throw-ups, etc. I only include tags if they have a neat font or if I just can't find anything else... A good tag is modern calligraphy, a bad tag is an annoyance to everyone. If you feel like committing an art crime, try to put some 'art' into it!

I put up a page full of links to other websites. Go have a look if yer bored.

Also, there are now 30 examples of the drawing game on here. If you like 'em you should post a comment or something.

You know that point in a party where everyone is sitting around and no one can think of anything fun to do? Well, think no further because THE DRAWING GAME is the best thing you could ever do!

I just bought my first scanner. Now I can start digitizing some ARTWORK. It's pretty freakin' sweet. And it only cost me 3 dollars. Don't act like you're not jealous...

My darkroom is finally done! Now I can start doing professional black and white photography. Take a look at the links in the top left corner and check out what I've done so far.

I'm thinking of writing an article on how to build a darkroom on the cheap to share my experience with the rest of the world but I dunno if I'll get around to it.

I do need to build a larger portfolio of work so don't be surprised if I point a camera at you.

Hi, I'm Christoph. I'm a pal of Jeff. I hope to bring some stuff to this site, let you know about some film projects that I'm working on, some with Jeff, if anyone is ever interested in working on films I'm always up for working with people. so drop me an email if any future projects i post seem interesting to you.

After months of fighting with my previous webhost I'm finally free!

WARNING!!! What follows is an overly-technical rant that is not intended for anyone to actually read unless you need some advice about webhosts. I mostly wrote it to get a few months of frustration out of my system. Continue at your own risk.

I had made the mistake of having my domain name registered by the same folks who also hosted my website***. So even after I switched webhosts no one could get to it because the domain name pointed to the old site which no longer existed. But that's easy enough to fix, all you have to do is change the DNS entry, just a couple of words, and then wait a day or so to let it propagate. Everyone with a competent and responsive webhost step forward... Everyone who uses page-zone.com, not so fast.

I sent them an e-mail and received no response so I sent them another... and another. A couple weeks later it's now Feb. 1 and I post a ticket about it on their support forum. Another week later they still didn't respond. Maybe I was unclear, so I post a reply to clarify but I feel rather silly doing so, as if I'm having a conversation with my own echo. I decide to go the old-fashioned route and look up their phone number. Turns out they're based in Ohio. Anyway I call and, helpfully, there's no answer and no answering machine. The operator disconnects me after a dozen or so rings. So on Feb. 12 I try posting a ticket in the billing section instead of tech support since I figure they check that one more often. The next day I get a reply from Lindsay saying that she'll have Penny look at this a/s/a/p. On Feb. 21 I'm beginning to wonder what 'a/s/a/p' stands for... 'at someday after procrastination'? 'as slow as possible'? Your guess is as good as mine.

By now I've actually already purchased a domain hosting account with another registrar and spent some time searching their forum and googling about this and that and I discover that as far as domain registration goes page-zone.com is actually a reseller for enom.com. Well, if my domain is actually hosted by enom.com then I should be able to get them to help me! This new approach yields more red-tape, but at least I get to talk to a human being on their end of tech-support. He tells me that I have to send an e-mail specifically requesting page-zone to unlock my domain within 24 hours, wait 24 hours, and then send him a copy of said e-mail. So I do all that and while I'm waiting I find out that page-zone will give you a login/password for enom.com so you can modify your account yourself! Wow, don't I feel sheepish! I post a ticket asking for that and then make another mind-blowing discovery: they're testing out a 'live chat' for tech support and there just happens to be someone on at this hour! So I click and wait until someone comes on and explain my situation and a few minutes later he gives me what I need. I say thanks, goodbye, and goodluck before I'm on my way to try it out. I login at enom.com and a page comes up with my DNS entries which I dutifully change from "ns1.wwwroot23.net" to "dns1.freehostia.com". And soon it's pointing in the right direction. Now all I have to do is take off the registrar-lock so I can switch registrars. It's just a matter of unchecking a single box.

Only I don't have access to that check-box. I didn't lock my domain, page-zone did and they're the only ones who can unlock it because what they gave me wasn't an actual account with enom but just a way to change the info in my part of their account. So I ask enom if I can have an account with them myself, instead of through page-zone as a reseller, since my domain is already hosted there and they reply that sure, that would be no problem so long as I pay an additional $30 and buy another year of use from them as well. WTF!?! They do give me another number for page-zone support, but again no one answers.

So the 24-hour waiting period is over and I call up enom again. I ask if he can unlock the domain for me and he says that I have to wait 24 hours. I try to explain that I already have but he says that, no there's no entry in their computer yet, that he'll put one in now, but THAT entry has to be 24-hours old before he can do anything. So I resign myself to browsing the page-zone forum some more and find that Lindsay has sent me the EPP code(basically a password that's sent to the sys admin) I requested. That's good news, but my domain is still locked so it does me no good. Of course they think they're done from their end so they close all my tickets and their usual silence is now replaced by the repeating line "We've already done that". A few days later I call up enom and get quite a friendly tech-support gal in Washington state. I feel somewhat embarrassed as I spell out my domain name to her and explain my situation. She says to stay on the line for a minute and she'll send me an e-mail. Now all I have to do is reply to that and they'll change the status for me. She says it could take some time since they only have one guy doing transfers today... Even though they host 9 million domains, as opposed to page-zones 6 thousand, they have it unlocked within the day.

So, that's why the site hasn't been up, in case you were wondering. Now I'm gonna cross my fingers and hope the transfer goes through this time!!!



*** For you non-computer-nerds out there, a 'webhost' stores your files(pictures, articles, rants, etc.) on a dedicated server so they can be accessed 24 hours a day. Technically speaking, you could host a website on your own computer at home if you had a stable internet connection but no one would know where to look for it, it would eat up your computer's resources to constantly transfer data to everyone who wanted to look at your site, and your electricity bill would jump if you had your computer on all the time. So you buy a webhost plan and pay a monthly fee for a certain amount of digital storage space, bandwidth, and whatever extra options they offer. Bandwidth is like minutes on a cell-phone: it provides an estimate of how much data you're going to be sending through a network. Your service provider needs to know this because there's a limit to how much data can be pushed around at once. If too many people access websites on the same server it's just like too many people calling on their cell-phones from the same place(through the same tower) and the overload results in terrible service or none at all. That's why popular websites are slower when people get home from work or school and all try to access it at once. That's also why you often get charged a different rate for using your cell-phone at different hours or days of the week. There's only room in the datastream for so many fish to swim through at once.