As noted previously, I’m switching my net from Comcast to Centurylink. Today, I stuck the old modem into the box along with the giant new modem/router they sent me, and took a bus up to the Comcast office in Bitter Lake, then visited Best Buy to attempt to buy a Centurylink router that didn’t do wireless.
On the way, things got interesting – about halfway along my trip on the second bus I had to take to get up to Comcast, someone tried to do a right turn from the lane to the bus’ left, and would have gotten run over if the bus driver hadn’t slammed on the brakes. Passengers went tumbling, and the car clipped the bike rack on the front of the bus, knocking off one of the wheel clips and probably fucking up the wheel of the bike sitting on the rack. Nobody was hurt beyond some bruises, as far as I could tell – the bus was empty enough that everyone had a seat.

The bus driver and the driver of the car were clearly gonna be there for a while, so I got out and walked the remaining four or five blocks. Along a busy road with no sidewalks, because this is the fucking suburbs and nobody ever walks there. Blah. I was kinda tempted to just walk right down a lane in protest. I did not; I reached the Comcast offices without further incident, and gave them back their modems, then walked about a half hour to the Best Buy in Northgate.

They only had one router, which also did wireless, so I sighed and got it.
Upon getting home, I got it plugged in and running, then made the mistake of trying to let it be the master wireless router, and have my two Airports extend the network. This did not work very well at all; I don’t recommend you try this. I wasted at least an hour and a half trying to make this work before turning the wireless off at the modem, and using the Airport that was formerly sitting in the living room repeating the other Airport’s net as the master router. Now everything seems to be mostly working.

I guess now I’ll either slack off for a while, or work on the RF take-home commission I did a good sketch for on the bus…

Okay! I think I’m ready to go run some errands now. I’m dressed casually, right?

God I miss being able to just pull on jeans and a Tshirt sometimes.

I decided to take a couple extra days of vacation after APE. This will more than eat any profit I may have made from the con, but after three cons in as many weekends, I need a vacation.
So here I am in a motel. All my tweets say I’m in the “Cow Hollow” neighborhood – between Filmore and Van Ness, on Lombard. I have absolutely no plans for things to do, and while “finding a nice place in Golden Gate Park to sit around and quietly draw” feels like a pretty good agenda, I’d like to have a few other ideas.
What would you do if you were in SF with a couple days to kill, and no car?

Memo to self: Make pretty signs for prints and tarot prices. Also maybe “take a business card!” ones. Also add some backing to the Rita signs so they don’t flop all over.

I can’t help but feel like living in a world where people do things like this means I’m in the good future.
(Starts boring but give it until about 45 seconds in. And don’t fast forward to that either.)

Things I need to do today:

• Laundry
• Refresh merch in my con bag
• Pick clothes to put in my con bag
• Call the California tax board for my tax number

Things I want to do today:

• Sleep
• Maybe go to the park or something
• Slack off a lot

Things I need to do soon:

• Three take-home commissions from RF
• A couple of lingering commissions from elsewhere
• Draw in this massive tome RF keeps for Art By Guests Of Honor
• Finish a couple of short comics for places that would be Important To My Career
• Finish shipping Rita 2 kickstarter stuff, and backed-up orders from my store

Things I want to do soon:

• Finish Rita

I really wish there was more overlap between the ‘need to do’ and the ‘want to do’ lists. Why did I set myself up for three cons in a row. Fuck you, Past Peggy. I need to not do this to Future Peggy ever again.

I went to the eye doctor again today, for what is hopefully the last tweak on my contact lens prescription. We started with some that were definitely a little farsighted, and have been bringing them down in small jumps.
Spending a week being farsighted has me thinking about How Vision Works, and, more importantly, how Superman’s super vision could work.
I’ve arrived at a few theories:

1. Higher resolution retina. According to Wikipedia, humans can make out things as small as .3 arc-minutes; if Superman has smaller sensor cells, then he could see much greater detail, at both distance and up close.
2. Wider range of focus. If we assume super-strong eye muscles, and super-durable eyes, we can easily imagine Superman flexing his  cornea much more than a human can, and spreading a smaller area of inerest out across his retina.
3. Nicitating membranes that alter focus. He just looks mostly human.

These are not mutually-exclusive theories, of course! Any or all of these could be part of the reason his Kryptonian eyes are better than ours. We can also posit two solutions to the x-ray vision – either a set of receptors in super-eyes that are responsive to that portion of the spectrum, or another nicitating membrane that shifts the wavelength of incoming light down a fair ways, into whatever his visible spectrum is.

Anyway. I’ve been enjoying walking along with a relaxed focus distance that is actually useful; I can focus close to see nearby things, and am slowly learning how to focus out at a distance. It’s not something I’ve ever really done due to having an uncorrected maximum detailed distance of about one foot. Hopefully I will manage to get a decent amount of strength in, and control over, the muscles that alter the focus of my eyes soon!

For the past couple weeks, Comcast has been badgering me to sign up for a new modem, which will supposedly give me faster speed. I finally did that, and it’s been sitting around the apartment in the shipping box for a week or so.
Well. I opened it up today. It turned out to be this huge 8x9x2” box that provides wireless. Which is not a feature I need, given that I have a perfectly good pair of AirPorts sitting around the house. Especially given that I believe this modem is intended to broadcast a second network for anyone else who’s a Comcast subscriber to use. The spectrum is cluttered enough in this apartment, I don’t need to introduce two new networks I won’t use into the mix.
And I could have sent the thing back, or tried to find out how to disable its wireless capacities, or whatever. But I’d also been noticing my Comcast bill creeping higher and higher; lately, it’s been $90-150 per month, and I keep getting these CenturyLink fliers offering me $20/mo if I bundle phone with it, and… you know, if I’m going to hassle with swapping modems, why not just say goodbye to Comcast.
The best offer Comcast could give me was going down to $40/mo for 20mbps (probably actually more like 15 given what I get now), which just wasn’t worth it. So I said goodbye. I was braced for it to be a very long and painful process, but it only took about ten minutes from entering the hold dungeon to having my service turned off this weekend.
Goodbye, $100 per month for mediocre internet. I won’t miss you. (I mean really, Comcast has a 105mbps “extreme” net for that price. Geeze.)
And now I’m signed up for 12mbps at $30/mo from Centurylink. Which may be a little slower but it’s also not, you know, a hundred fucking dollars a month, geeze, fuck you Comcast. This frog’s done being boiled for a while.
I fucking hate the state of internet services in this country.