Media Download

5/19/08

Hi, Dave! Happy Birthday! 52 years: there, I got it right this time. Heh.

As I mentioned to you a week or so ago, Jeff T. gave me instructions for sending and receiving faxes via e-mail. This will make it much easier and won’t “impose” on K. [Ed: K. was my girlfriend at the time. She would send and receive the faxes for me at her office.]

You’re my first test subject, so I hope this goes through. You should know that the free fax sending is limited to twice-a-day, three pages each, and will always have an ad on the cover page.

By the way, your note to K. at the top of the last fax was well-received. I joked to her that she may very well be the only female in a very long time to whom you have written “feel free to tell me to knock it off.” Got a good laugh.

Be well and, again, happy birthday. [Ed: Well, I got his age right, but not the date. Meh.]

Jeff

Jeff--

Came through just fine… Just finishing up my page-a-day for glamourpuss No. 3. Say hi to K.

Dave

20 May 08

Hi Jeff -

Jeff T. was supposed to be setting up the eBay auction for the ad space on the back cover of glamourpuss No. 2 (as described on the back cover of glamourpuss No. 1).

This is kind of short notice so if you have to extend the auction from the[sic] May 24 to May 31 to fit your own schedule, feel free. I’ll need the ad by the third week of June at the latest, but anytime before that is fine.

Thanks,

Dave

[Ed: Well, talk about your non sequiturs…]

5/20/08

Hi, Dave---I received your fax from earlier in the day and, man, am I confused.

Are you asking me to make an ad for glamourpuss #2? Are you asking me to set up the ebay auction that Jeff T. was supposed to be setting up? Or something completely different?

Nothing you wrote rang a bell with me. Sorry.

I’ll look for your answer soon.

Jeff Seiler

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Jeff--

The ad space on the back cover of glamourpuss No. 2 is for sale to the highest bidder. Hopefully, an advertiser will bit $500 or more to put their ad on the back of No. 2. I was announced on the back cover of No. 1 -- eBay auction starting May 24 and ending May 31...starting bid $500.

Dave

==================

Hi, Dave--This information is interesting, but I’m still confused as to why you faxed it to me. Your statement, “I’ll need the ad by the third week of June at the latest, but any time before that is fine” seems like some sort of imperative directed at me.

Are you asking me to pass on all of this information to Jeff T.?

????????????????????????

Jeff

==================

Jeff

1. I need someone to post an auction on eBay.

2. What I am auctioning is the back cover ad space on glamourpuss No. 2, starting bid $500.

3. Whoever wins the auction, I will need their ad by the third week of June.

4. Jeff T. was originally going to do this. Now I need someone instead of Jeff T. to do it.

5. I can ask someone else if you would rather [not do it].

Dave

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5/21/08

Hi, Dave--Okay, sorry to be so obtuse. Sometimes, I’m just in a concrete frame of mind. What I will do is go to eBay here in a few minutes and see if I, being just a microscopic bit more advanced than you when it comes to computer skills, can figure how to put the auction up. [Ed: Yes, Jeff, the great proofreader, does occasionally split infinitives.] If I can, I will. If I can’t, I will let you know and you can see if Lenny will do it. Or, Sandeep. Whatever.

[Dave’s inserted response: Not a problem. I’ll get Matthew or Sandeep to do it.]

Margaret is working on a letter to you that may or may not affect whether you want her to repost the petition. She has, in the meantime, let me know that I can put it up if I go to a certain site and can decipher the “WYSIWYG” instructions. She doesn’t mind if Rick or I do it, so I said that I would run it by you. Do you want me to try, in her stead, even with things between us two pending?

[Dave’s inserted response: I think the petition is fine right now, but I would like the new names posted. Rick S. said Margaret has to do that, for some reason.]

Rick S. and I both posted the [Chester] Brown/Sim faxes two days ago--he at his blog and I at the Yahoo group, under Files. I am strongly leaning to posting your faxes, with quotes and obvious references to Jeff T. deleted, since Jeff T. has said very clearly that he doesn’t want his faxes posted. I do think, though, that such deletions might be extensive and, thus, render your faxes confusing. I’ll reread them and check. More on that later.

[Dave’s inserted response: I think if you just post the arguments, that would be fine. Jeff T. has no say over my words and his arguments can be paraphrased or alluded to. {Ed: IIRC, I ultimately chose not to post the arguments between Dave and Jeff T., out of my immense respect for both of them.}

David C. has been reassigned [Ed: By the military] and no longer has the “block” on communications with you or the Yahoos. He and I have spoken and I am going to fax you his email [that he sent to me], as I think you might want to see it. I’m pretty sure he has signed the petition. Regardless, he told me to tell you he wishes you well.

[Dave’s inserted response: Is he willing to identify the commanding female officer publicly? {...pause…}]

[Ed: Here, Dave refers to the fact that David C.’s commanding female officer somehow found out about David C. being a fan and supporter of Cerebus and Dave Sim. She, essentially, told David C. to cease and desist all communication with Dave Sim or any of his supporters.]

[Continuing Dave’s inserted response: We can’t just keep ignoring these strategic blunders on the feminists’ part, as if they never happened.]

Jeff T., just so you know, isn’t pouting or saying anything bad about you. He’s currently in studio, recording 30 (!) new songs [Ed: With his band, Jazz Bastards.] Very busy.

[Dave’s inserted response: So. That’s very funny.]

I have not heard that Judenhass came out today, so I guess next week. I talked to one history teacher at a middle school who wants to order a classroom set of 25, or so. Chris at SuperGeeks will give him a 20% discount: I checked. I think you’re going to see word of mouth really bloom. I’ve been talking it up everywhere, including to a principal just today.

Okay, that’s your update for now. Take care.

Jeff

[Dave’s inserted response: I don’t think you understand exactly how extensive the shunning is, although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong (as always). In the meantime, I’ll just continue administering my therapy to those in need of it--which turns out to be pretty much everyone.]

Dave asked me a while back to document the long, strange trip that has been the proofreading of READS. What he actually said on the voicemail was, "Hi, Jeff! Hope you’re having fun on your vacation in Florida. I was going to suggest that you get your friend to take a photo of you at the computer while youre proofreading READS. And, then, you could post it at A Moment Of Cerebus, along with a write-up explaining all of the complications that youve encountered and how youve fixed them so that, hopefully, we wont encounter those again, as we move forward." Or, something to that effect.

As I am ever the diligent servant, here we go:

The project started back in late 2015, when Dave asked me to proofread the book. He first said that he thought I could get a cheap copy of it online, because he presumed that I would mark up the pages in the book with red ink, as I did with the first 66 pages of the COLLECTED LETTERS VOLUME 1, was back in the stone age. No, no, I told him, Im going to need to write this out by hand.

Thus, I did. On a yellow legal pad. I made four columns: Page, paragraph, line number, and correction. I wrote it all out with the suggested corrections and with appropriate notes, when necessary. And then, after some couple of weeks of doing that, I sent the entirety of it to Dave by FedEx.

A few days later, I received a voicemail from Dave saying that he and Sandeep Atwal (who was to make the corrections in the original text) had decided that they needed a typewritten version of the corrections. So, I did a spreadsheet, in the same format, and sent it directly to Sandeep.

A while after that, I received word that we still had not hit the mark. So, Sandeep found a Microsoft Word program that he could use to scan the entire text of READS, presumably from the printed copy, and then email it to me, so that I could open the file and edit the file, in text.

Now, here’s where it got complicated. Last year, because the $250 price tag was too nice to pass up, I bought a Google ChromeBook laptop computer. I like it for a good, long while, until I found that it would not let me edit in the file that Sandeep had sent to me. I could view the file all day long but, whenever I tried to edit, I was told by Google that the file was “not supported for editing”.

I tried everything I could think of to get it to work (here is probably where I should tell you that I am not exactly computer literate), but I couldn’t get it to work. I mean, I spent time just sitting in my chair, thinking about what I could do, and I had "ah-hah!" moments, all to no avail.

But, I was just a week away from my scheduled trip to Florida, so I emailed my friend, Nate, and asked if he had Word on his computer. Sure do!

So, problem fixed. Fly to Florida, making sure I have a copy of READS with me. Sandeep had already sent me photo files of my handwritten corrections...oh, yeah, that was another thing. Dave and Sandeep had decided that sending me my corrections back...wait, let’s back up a bit. When I sent the corrections, I was already (laughs to self) behind on my schedule and I went to the FedEx store and asked how much did it cost to make copies. Twenty cents per page. I was looking a very large number of pages of corrections, so I said, eh, no.

So, when Dave and Sandeep decided that I needed to enter the corrections directly into the text file, they also decided that the $35 or $40CAN FedEx cost could be saved by having Sandeep scan my corrections and email them to me. Easy-peasy. But...

When I got the scanned files and tried to print them out (they were scanned two pages to a scan, side-by-side), the printout of my email would only print the left side of the photo. Meaning, I could look at page 1, page 3, page 5, etc. in a printout, but not the even-numbered pages.

I kid you not. But, have I mentioned that I am less computer-literate than is Dave?

At that point, I decided that I was just going to have to proofread the whole thing again, in text, which made sense, since I had been instructed to... um... proofread in text.

But, then, my friend’s computer would not let me edit in text. If you’re not familiar with how that works (if you are, skip down), you get a file sent to you and you open it and click on Edit (at the top of the first page of the file, not in the bar at the top of the screen), and you’re supposed to be able to insert corrections into the file. But, I couldnt. Long story short (yeah, I see you IT guys rolling your eyes), I finally found the one clicky thingy that would let me get into the file and edit. "Override." To me, anyway, it was not easily found.

And, away we went. Smooth sailing. Cruising along... until I got about halfway in. It was then, and only then, that I noticed that the formatting of the file was different from the formatting of the original phonebook.

READS, as it is constituted, has no paragraph indentations. Also, there are double spaces between paragraphs, whether or not there is a little curly-cue between the paragraphs (which I could not replicate, nor did Sandeeps Word scanning program).

The scanned file had five-space indentations at the beginning of every paragraph and no double spaces between paragraphs. So, having just woken up to that fact about halfway in, I spent the better part of three or four hours going back and backspacing and double-spacing all of the work I had previously done, in text. And, when I looked closely at the difference between a line or paragraph that I had reformatted and a line or paragraph, as it was scanned in, I noticed that the scanned versions was just slightly off, where the indentation of a paragraph ended. If the corrected version was at X spot, then the scanned version was about half a letter to the right of that.

So, I had to backspace and, when I did so, it didnt backspace space-by-space, five spaces. No, one click and it was back at the left margin. So, I had to backspace each paragraph right back to the end of the previous paragraph and then hit RETURN and double-space to start the new paragraph in the correct format.

On April 13th, I had just seven pages to go, having stopped the night before because I was so tired. I woke up on April 14th and my friend’s computer was frozen. I could not even open up Word. He was at work and, so, I just sat and watched baseball all day. Yay, MLB Network! He came home and found a way to get it going but, then, we had dinner plans.

So, on the 15th, I finished the last seven pages and then prepared to email the finished file to Sandeep. I sent an email addressed to Dave and Sandeep and then attached the file to the email. As is my wont, I cc-ed myself and then opened up the attachment, to check it...

Take your right hand, open up your palm, and apply it liberally to your forehead. Repeatedly.

I had clicked on the "Reads Text" file and sent it to Sandeep, only to find that it was the original file that he had sent to me.

The uncorrected file.

So, I tried again, but in a draft email. Same thing. And, then I found that it wasnt exactly the same file, uncorrected, that Sandeep had sent to me, but the file, as it was as of April 13th. With seven uncorrected pages at the end.

SO.

I went back into the file that I had corrected and checked that it was the COMPLETELY corrected file. And then, I rename it, went to my email, clicked on ATTACH, and added it to the email to Dave and Sandeep (via Sandeeps email address since, you know, Dave doesnt {ahem} do email) and cc-ed myself. And, then, I looked myself up and clicked on the attachment and...

BOBS YER UNCLE!!!

But, then, I still had to send the corrected file to Sean Michael Robinson, and I did, only to be told by him that it didn’t look corrected. I looked at what I had sent to him, and it looked corrected to me. I mentioned to Sean that I did not correct Daves original Canadian spelling in many spots (but did so in others) and that that may have been what had thrown Sean off.

But, I went back and checked what I had sent to Sean and, sure enough, that last section of the book was not (this is where I started using the term) corrected correctly. So, there was another two days of correcting the corrected corrections. By this time, I was up to around April 22nd or so and then I had a weekend event to attend that would eat up of my time, all weekend.

On Monday, since I had already found out that I wouldnt fly home until Friday, the 29th, I worked on correcting the corrected corrections. As expected, that took two days of my on-vacation time allotted for working. Sent the final file off to Sean, who, in the interim had faxed Dave about what was going on. Dave had faxed a reply, which Sean had forwarded to me, that basically said that corrected files not staying corrected was a common thing and that it was just going to have to take a little while longer.

Also, in the interim, I wrote this. And then, having sent the corrected file that actually "stuck" (cross your fingers), I headed home. Today, Saturday the 30th, my birthday, I went to FedEx, printed out a hard copy of the 143-page file for Dave (and one for me) and stuffed it in an envelope and sent it off, to arrive at Daves door on Tuesday, May 2nd.

All of you out there who are reading this and thinking, "What the heck?!?", or some variation thereof, just keep in mind that I am less computer-literate than is Dave Sim. Thats saying something.

But, please bear in mind that I am a consummate proofreader. Just ask my friend, Nate, with whom I shared a nice vacation in Florida. One evening, he asked me, very politely, not to correct his syntax anymore.

Oh, and, Dave? Its "farther" for distance and "further" for everything else, including concepts.

There you go, folks. Next time, less glitches, God willing.