Way Back Machine: The almost way too coolest net tool ever.

I found out about his a few weeks ago. What it is and archive of websites going back ten and fifteen years ago. It is mind blowing.

Note the title has the word almost in it. It's kind of buggy.

Right in the eye catching middle of the page is a search box. You type into it and are taken to the current site. Not an archived site, the one that is there right now, not the archive. The actual archive search is in teeny-tiny box in the no so eye catching upper left corner of the page.

You need to know the exact URL. No guesses allowed. You would think that Web Site #9 would be website#9.com or something. Nope. Fortunately The MSTing Mine still has a dead link right on the front page.

Sites are not fully archived. You get bits and pieces on one date, and different bits and pieces at a different date. Some sites don't get archived at the right time. Web Site Number 9 only got archived after in was taken down. I did manage to save a couple of fanfics that are not available elsewhere. Video Night at Mako-chan's and the Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle. However I didn't save La Bleu Sammy. I only regret having read it.

When sites are saved by the Way Back Machine, sometimes the original coding is messed up a bit. Like CSS documents aren't saved and such. Things like frames and scroll bars are scrolled way off where you can't see them.

Bookmarking is a bitch. I can't seem to bookmark individual pages like a normal site. Sometimes it won't work, other times it will take me back to the Way Back Machine's homepage. Once in a while I'm lucky enough to at least be able to bookmark the home page of the site I found.

The Way Back Machine's archive is not searchable by Google. A real major draw back.

One major bug is that sometimes there is confusion of an old snapshot with a current one. Once in awhile the hacked version of The People's Sprites will show up in 2006.

Speaking of which, y'all might find this interesting. I don't put a lot of weight behind that declaration. Remember that the Deccus Wily Sprite had been removed. I imagine for a reason. Too bad the sheet itself isn't there. None of the other snapshots have it. Like I said, it's buggy.

I did look up mine. Interesting, I had forgotten a lot of tings. Like when I was posting a bunch of comics. I was truly mystified as to when certain ones went up. Now I know. I have been wanting to change from calling them seasons and go with the year of publication.

(Yikes! As I write all this out, I am looking at many different pages at once, one of them is mine, (of course.) I just noticed a mistake in the comic posted and promptly fixed it.)

I did go through earlier snapshots and have to constantly wonder why this was saved and not that. I'm not going to comment on the construction; because unlike other comics that annoy me when the cartoonist digs up old comics to (A) apologize for his work, (B) make us feel sorry for him, or (C) brag about how great he is now and we all should bow before his greatness. I try not to be that annoying. I'm mildly satisfied by annoying people by pointing the boney finger of indignation at what annoys me about them.

Weren't we talking Deccus a few paragraphs ago? Here is Those Beyond Time dot com. Yes it really did exist. Unfortunately 2003 wasn't archived. So the actual comic is lost except to those of us that manged to find it originally. You can at least read Warped Reality the way Deccus had intended.

(By the way, if you Google Those Beyond Time you will find a blog about an elf chick who likes to draw elf chicks. Interesting.)

Now I am not at all pissed, ticked, annoyed, or anything negative emotionally at all the bugs the Way Back Machine has. These are people spending what little spare time they have and what little money they have in a labor of love. The archivers are having to deal with over 15 years of thousands of different styles and evolutions in web coding. Trying to make it all work in current browsers that are constantly being changed.

I am happy enough to have finally found Shadey Theatre.

I am currently going through and doing what I should have done 8 years ago. Too bad there's only a handful of comics saved.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 49.

Click Here.

I have a choice of subjects. I can talk about how I got shit on by AVG, or I can go positive and talk about the latest issue of Rosario Vampire. We all know what I usually do.

Got a warning message that my AVG subscription was about to expire. How could that be? It's brand new. Model number 2011. I installed it in a fresh install of Windows 7 just a couple of months ago. I retyped the license key many times. No effect. I registered, nothing happened. I did get a hold of a technician on the phone. He gave me a new license, but it only extended the deadline by a few more days. Then he went and told me the original license had been activated in 2009 and made it sound like that I was trying to cheat them. I knew then and there that they had fucked me. You see, how do you activate a license in 2009 for a product that didn't get released until late 2010? Then wasn't purchased until late 2011 and installed.

This tricked had been employed before. Remember CompUSA? When they went out of business, I bought a bunch of anti-virus software for everybody I knew. A few days later I started getting multiple ears full of complaints that the software had expired. I learned later that some software manufacturers put an expiration date, or even deactivate unsold previous version licenses when new software comes out. AVG did it too. That brand new copy of AVG 2011 I paid $60 for a two year license was already set to expire at the end of 2011.

I wasn't going to yell at a phone jockey over this, he was just reading and doing what was written down for him by the guys that did the fucking in the first place. I kept my voice low and language clean and said simply that this was inexcusable and that I am no longer a customer of AVG and switched to a competitor.

In other news: I found an old webcomic. Stay tuned.

Cheap Flash.

Being in the right place at the right time has allowed me to purchase three copies of Flash for the price of one.

Way back when in 2004 I was perusing my favoritest computer store when I saw a used copy of Flash MX on the shelf for about $200. A lesson I learned a long time is you don't wait for next time to buy something like that. You buy it now. Many a time is that I decide I don't want that right now, I want it next week. Next week it is no longer on the shelf.

Not much later I noted that everybody had switched to Flash 8. I figure I should look into it as well. Discovered I could use Flash MX to upgrade for only $200. So I did. Flash 8 worked fine on XP and was a little hectic on Vista. So I saw no real reason to change. Until Win 7. It was just that Flash Eight was old tech. Not to sure if it would even work with Win 7. Didn't even try. Checked in with Adobe and found that my copy of Flash MX was still valid for the upgrade to Flash CS5.

I know that Flash's days are numbered. Adobe is moving in the direction of HTML5. I have a feeling that someday that Flash MX will be scrubbed as an upgrade tool so that Adobe can force people to buy the $700 full version that is no different than the upgrade.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 48.

Click Here.

Looks like only a few weeks left. Going end officially middle of December. I do have plans to fill out the last two weeks. Be picking up again in January.


By the way, Any Video Converter is mostly excellent addition to your video editing portfolio. It can convert just about anything to the most common formats. I have some Real Media formatted videos, and the codec packs for Windows wouldn't play them in Windows Media Player. The converter I was using before did a really crappy job on Real Media formatted files. I did a Google search and found Any Video Converter.  Tried it out and it worked fine. The free version will do what you need it to do. Even with GVI.

Addendum to Ya See It, Save It.

I had originally meant to tell this story a while ago but forgot. I could always go back into the article and add to it, but hey, I can probably stretch it out to a multi-paragraph, rambling, rabbit trailing off into unrelated nothingness of a multi-paragraph, rambling, rabbit trailing off into unrelated nothingness.

Around November of 2003, me and a bunch of guys were granted passes to go to Kuwait for about a few days of R&R. Not everybody could take leave during our little vacation in Iraq. So a drawing was held. People wrote their names on a piece of paper and put it in the platoon sergeant's hat. I didn't put my name in because I thought that the married soldiers should get the opportunity to go home. I was used to such long deployments. A few years earlier I had spent a couple of years in Korea and never took leave. Of course Korea and Iraq have a few differences, mostly in the amount of drinky-girls available to give you a lap dance.

So the drawing is held, and by total coincidence, happenstance, by shear luck itself, divine providence from God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Belldandy, the first name drawn was the platoon sergeant's, by the platoon sergeant. Wow, didn't see that coming.

So I get to go to the port-a-potty capitol of Operation Iraqi Liberation.

It was really nice. No weapon, got to leave that back with HQ. I had the SAW. Nice not to worry about that for a few days. A well stocked PX. Restocked on babywipes. I was down to those wet naps from the MREs. Trust me, babywipes are your friend. A real shower from a real shower. Hot water, with privacy. No PT. Sleep in, go to bed late as you want. On a real bed.

An internet cafe in which you can hook up your own laptop. Important note because remember at this time thumb drives had yet to become really available. All I had on me was a broken zip drive and my laptop. I paid my fee, plugged in and went to everybody's favorite place: Bob and George.

I had saved and read, re-read, read again, and read some more all of our favorites. It was time to update. Taco, Umiliphus, Oddball, Jailhouse Blues, and Warped Reality to name a few.

HOLD IT! Something is not right, here. Where's Warped Reality? It's not there at all? What happened? I want to know if all the other evil scientists ever managed to catch Dr. Evil.

My first instinct was to do an internet search. (I won't say a Google search because I quite frankly can't remember if I was using Google at this time.) I searched for Warped Reality and found a site called thosebeyondtime.com (don't bother it doesn't exist anymore.) Apparently Deccus decided to strike out on his own. I guess so he could do what he wanted to do without having to follow the rules set out by someone else.

That's one of the sad stories of cartooning. If you have someone else publish your work, you have a dozen other people telling you what to do. And sometimes making changes without any say so on your part.

Months and months later I'm home and go and try to find this site. All I find is a banner saying “Under Construction.” Once a month, once every two months, six, and so forth I check in until I get that “Server not found” messages. Another great web cartoonist captured by reality.

Fortunately I was smart. And saved all those new comics Deccus did. Oh, I forgot to mention in addition to Warped Reality there was another comic that Deccus had started. Ironically named “Those Beyond Time.” All about the Wily-bots adventures in time travel to put things wrong that once went right. I saved about seven of them.

That's what taught me the lesson to always save what you see. You never know if a comic, news article, Youtube video, or blog gets scrubbed out of existence.