The GHAWG Diaries, Part 3

What's happening behind the scenes to bring new GHAWG content? The GHAWG Diaries is my recap of what I've been doing.

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^{Base image came in another form from PublicDomainPictures.Net. Edits made using MS Paint.}

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Introduction

There's more to #GHAWG than just daily zapfic entries and the spreadsheet I use to track them. There's research. There's review. There's also thought and inspiration. Then there are the tools involved in doing any of those tasks.

Just to keep things from getting scrambled in my head, and also to document for myself what I've been considering, I began keeping a diary of my activities as they concern #GHAWG. With posts in the GHAWG, Uninterrupted series on hold at Act 5 while Act 6 remains in progress, I decided to share these diary entries with everyone on Hive blockchain.

On Mondays which don't feature a GHAWG, Uninterrupted post-- GHAWG-U-- I'll post diary entries from the previous 7 days or between GHAWG-U posts if the time between them is short. For Part 2, there are 14 days' worth of diary entries. The first entry starts on 2023-October-2.

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Before anyone scratches their heads at a few terms, here are 3 I began using since the previous post:

Term	Meaning
Rat Bike	Code name for #GHAWG (the first and current zapfic serial)
Blue Lion	Code name for the middle zapfic serial in the GHAWG Universe
The Bronze	Code name for the final zapfic serial in the GHAWG Universe

Monday, 2023-October-16

📓 When I wasn't dealing with offline matters, I was dealing with a faulty front-end. It wasn't handling Markdown properly for tables, and some of those tables had extra Markdown and HTML in them. So I spent much of my time reformatting the tables for HTML; this worked much better. As it was, I was still able to publish The GHAWG Diaries, Part 2 with 1 hour to spare in my day. 📓 Although I'm not sure who new characters will be for Blue Lion and The Bronze, I have a name for one of them. This character will be named Miranda Bermudo. The name is subject to change if I find a better one between now and when it's time for her to appear, but so far I'm liking this name. She enters The GHAWG Universe after Peak GHAWG. So far, that's all I have regarding her character. 📓 Why did I come up with the code names mentioned at the top of this post? Rat Bike-- since GHAWG is in progress-- is a call back to early in the zapfic serial when David Guardia worked as a motorcycle courier. His motorcycle was a beat up Honda which still functioned well enough for him to use it. Chipped paint, rust, some duct tape-- this bike was just awful to look at. Such motorcycles are known as rat bikes. Blue Lion is used because "Blue Harvest" was taken by Family Guy. The Bronze is Australian slang for Main Force Patrol as seen in Mad Max (1979), a special task force of the Australian Federal Police. MFP officers wore large badges made of bronze or colored bronze, so they were called "The Bronze" by outlaws and criminals riding through Australia's transcontinental roads. The MFP officer best known to viewers of the Mad Max movies is Max Rockatansky, the Road Warrior himself (first played by Mel Gibson, and in Mad Max: Fury Road {2015} by Tom Hardy). The final zapfic serial has that feel about it, especially with David Guardia being a wreck between his losses and prison time.

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Tuesday, 2023-October-17

📓 I was thinking of compressing the ride along Old Route 66 in GHAWG to a few zapfic entries, but I'm not ready to write about the ride after Our Heroes reach the eastern terminus in Chicago. As it is, I need to review the path Old Route 66 took between San Bernardino to the California-Arizona state lines. If anything, the characters should buy some GoPro cameras as they ride Old Route 66 east. I see calendars in their future (especially in Blue Lion).

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Wednesday, 2023-October-18

📓 No writing of zapfic entries, so the GHAWG queue remains at 2024-January-16. No work on song lyrics about David Guardia's ride to STURGIS, and it's just as well since other GHAWG-related work takes priority. However, I came up with a logo for David's business, Guardia Courier Services: The font "Wide Latin" was used for the letters, while the envelope glyph came from the Webdings font before I simplified it. HTML character entity ✠ was used to generate the Maltese Cross, which is a good approximation of a commonly seen version of the cross used by the Knights Templar. Since I used MS Paint to create this logo, it won't scale well at larger sizes. This means I will need to recreate it using SVG (Scaleble Vector Graphics). That's OK; the logo is simple enough that I can code the SVG file by hand. There are 2 alternate versions of the logo I will design later, but I think this first version may be the best. 📓 A logo to appear in Blue Lion will be for the holding company Rhonda Bella and David set up-- R&D Holdings-- as an umbrella for their respective businesses (Rhonda Bella Logistics and Guardia Courier Services). It also makes use of their alter egos: Rhonda is the Shieldmaiden, David is the Templar. It will include their personal color schemes, one font for Rhonda, one font for David, and glyphs representing their alter egos.

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Thursday, 2023-October-19

📓 For lunch today I walked to a small restaurant 1 mile from my neighborhood for a grilled salmon salad. during the walk to and from that restaurant I was listening to music I have on MP3 files. The last song I heard was "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" as performed by Depeche Mode. I heard that song for the entire walk back home. I need to keep the lyrics in mind to see if I can come up with something for The GHAWG Universe (and this includes original lyrics, if I can manage it). At worst, I get nothing for GHAWG but I learn the lyrics by osmosis (as I had for "Living in America" by James Brown). At best, The GHAWG Universe grows. 📓 For the next few days I will be scheduling Weekly Summary posts (and maybe even another Uninterrupted post; maybe). Because of the nature of these posts, The GHAWG Diaries will be published in real-time. 📓 To make it easier for people to navigate from post to post or even from entry to entry, I created a threadstorm over at LeoThreads. This threadstorm contains 3 replies, one for each series (Weekly Summaries, Uninterrupted, and now The GHAWG Diaries). Each reply contains all the replies needed to access all GHAWG content. That's the idea, anyway. Today I discovered that InLeo (the front-end for The Community Formerly Known as LeoFinance) isn't displaying threads made beyond the last 30 days. GHAWGnav, the navigation widget contained in that threadstorm, was created on 2023-September-04, which puts it over 30 days. Between this issue (which I reported today at LeoThreads) and article publishing woes, I will need to replce the GHAWGnav threadstorm at LeoThreads at InLeo with a long form post published from Ecency, the front-end I use for content to be published at Layer 1 of Hive blockchain. Ideally the GHAWGnav widget would be enough, but I need redundancy so that GHAWG content can be accessed by as many people as possible. So within a few days I'll publish a post whose purpose is to act as GHAWGnav. (UPDATE: I published this post on Sunday 2023-October-22.) This post shouldn't exist, but I need to make it. 📓 While I'm at it, I need to update the cover images I use for the various types of GHAWG posts. Where possible, the changes will reflect the rebranding of LeoFinance into InLeo. Rebranding or not, I need to clean up the graphics. Just as I had for the GCS logo I designed last night, I will need to recreate these cover images using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Although they'll end up getting converted into PNG graphic files, they will come out cleaner and crisper than if I had created them using MS Paint. 📓 Tonight I began designing the GCS logo using SVG. Letters, envelope glyph, and cross are in place. The glyph contains extra elements I don't want, so I'm using SVG to mask them using the font color. This is trial and error more than anything else, so this will take me a while to get done.

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Friday, 2023-October-20

📓 Success on the SVG front-- I designed the Guardia Courier Services logo using SVG before saving the screen capture as a PNG file. The envelope glyph from the Webdings font required too much work to clean up to make a simple envelope, so I simplified things by making my own envelope using a rectangle, 2 lines, and 1 polyline. The XML codes which form the SVG language were kept simple while formatting such as colors and sizing was offloaded into the SVG equivalent of CSS used in HTML pages. This is the GCS logo designed strictly with MS Paint: This is the GCS logo designed using SVG with light edits made using MS Paint: While I could have used some graphics program to generate the SVG file, it's possible to hand-code an SVG file if it's simple enough (which my logo is). An SVG file is just a collection of XML commands, and XML commands are just lines of text. Next logo to design is the RBL logo, for Rhonda Bella Logistics.

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Saturday, 2023-October-21

📓 I spent much of my computing time turning the LeoThreads-based GHAWGnav tool into a long form post pinned to my blog page. I'll still update-- using other means-- the LeoThreads-based threadstorm to reflect updates, but Option 1 is now the pinned post at my profile and Blog pages. When I know that the InLeo front-end is working as it should, I'll switch the domain to `inleo.io`. For now, this sticky post is best viewed using a Layer 1 front-end such as Ecency.

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Sunday, 2023-October-22

📓 Once my GHAWGnav post was published at the scheduled time, I pinned it to my blog page using Ecency. The Message Board page which had been pinned for 6 months fell back into its proper place in the published post queue, but I included a link to it on the GHAWGnav page even though it's not part of The GHAWG Universe. 📓 I spent the later part of the day writing a post explaining how I made the GCS logo using SVG. Most people use a graphics program to handle the dirty work of making and SVG image file. SVG files are simply text files containing a subset of XML used specifially for SVG. If you've ever seen these SVG files, they look like a hideous collection of numbers and punctuation. For what I wanted to design, using the graphics program would have been overkill. On top of that, I wouldn't have known where to make changes. So I'm teaching myself the SVG knowledge I need to make these logos and other graphics. Out of this effort comes a post I will publish on Tuesday 2023-October-24: "GHAWG Behind the Scenes: The GCS Logo".

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Navigation to Other GHAWG Diaries

● Part 1, 2023-September-16 through 2023-October-01
● Part 2,2023-October-02 through 2023-October-15

When (and Where) To Catch #GHAWG

When

This is the normal schedule for the posting of content for #GHAWG:
● Daily -- Each zapfic entry is posted shortly after midnight, from New York
● Weekends -- Weekly Summaries (with modified screen capture from LeoThreads as cover image) are usually on Saturday, sometimes Sunday
● Monday -- Either GHAWG, Uninterrupted if present, or The GHAWG Diaries

Where

● Daily zapfic entries drop at LeoThreads, usually posted shortly after midnight from New York (sometimes around noon)
● Both kinds of posts-- Weekly Summaries and GHAWG, Uninterrupted-- can be accessed using the #GHAWGnav thread or from my LeoFinance profile page

This week I hope to have more content published and recorded to Hive blockchain.

That's it for this edition of The GHAWG Diaries. Thanks for your time. Give the post an upvote or a reblog if you liked it. Feedback is welcome. Until next time!