Category: Personal

…but we got up again. Over the weekend, the tedmills.com domain got suspended because I hadn’t supposedly paid my renewal fee from old providers onestop.net, who apparently still own the domain registration. Unlike my new hosts, www.ipower.web, onestop doesn’t open on the weekends, so I had to wait a few days and then call Monday morning. Even that took a long time: three hours of being told things were being sorted out, then finally, after I called back the third time, I was told I would now have to wait a minimum of 16 hours for service to be switched back on. Why, nobody could tell me. But back we are. There should be some new photo essays coming soon, so please look for them, as I had a great trip to SF to tell you about and Jessica went to Shanghai, land of public spitting.

Long-time friend Phil Gyfordgot himself profiled in the Guardian today, as “one of the few people in this industry who produces much more than he promises; the complete opposite of the loud new media bullshitter.” That is: he plans things and gets them done. (I should study him!) Anyway, he’s a standup chap and has always been a help to me when I’m stuck on coding my sites. Cheers!

Can you frickin’ believe this? I was cleaning my glasses yesterday and the frames broke at the nose! I’ve had these glasses since 1997–they’re almost a part of my body. (Plus they were the only Armani I owned…) Now I’ve got to go through the expense of new frames, new lenses, and a trip to the eye doctor (the last one, fortunately, is insured…)
Again: F**K!!!!

At last! Another page has been added, and another link to the left comes alive in all its blue-unvisited, purple-visited glory! I’ve uploaded a selection of my comic art, with more to come. Compare these nib-pen and ink “masterpieces” with the economy-class editorial cartoons and you can see what having a little time on my side does for me.

I came across a cool little Javascript photo gallery thingy over at CodeLifter.com, which I have modified and tweaked to bring you a gallery of recent shots from my weekend foray into L.A. to visit Jon. Now I’ve figured and configured this system (including batch processing of images and such), I will be bringing you more photo fun in the future…

I borrowed a scanner the other day and scanned whatever I had handy at the time, which was a file of some of my old illustrations for the Santa Barbara Independent. I’ve made a page of them, with a few more to come…

So hot during the daytime, lovely and cool at night. And these blossoms are right outside our door. They smell lovely. I’m not so good with plants, so I don’t know what they are!

Or rather, her perfume does. Jessica and I were out doing some late night shopping and stopped in Longs Drugs to get some contact lens cleaner. We had spent the day in and out of a few department stores and Body Shop-type places, so I was no stranger to sampling aromas. Jessica had a short spritz of this new perfume from the Screeching Queen of Chest Pounding herself, Celine Dion, and it took one second to realize that this is ONE OF THE WORST PERFUMES I’VE EVER CLAPPED NOSTRILS ON. Seriously. It’s up there with patchouli, a monkey house, and a truck-stop bathroom, as my least favorite pongs. Cloying, sweet, more like an air-freshener from a 99 Cent store than perfume. We couldn’t believe it. Worse,we couldn’t get it off Jessica’s wrist and we drove home in pure suffering. When we got to San Andreas Street, there was the unmistakable smell of a skunk, and you know what? It was better than the smell in the car. When we got home Jessica scrubbed her arm like she was going in to operate on someone, and, because she had wiped some of her arm off on me in the initial panic, I had to throw my shirt in the wash and jump in the shower. Brutal.
However, I did come up with a slogan for the perfume. Celine Dion: “My Fart Will Go On.”
If you think I’m exaggerating, go to your local drugstore and try it.

Hi gang,
Long time no post. However, I’ve just updated all the pages to feature RSS feeds.
The reason why is that my friend Phil was here last week, spending a little time with me before the big EtCon conference in San Diego. He turned me on to a whole bunch of web sites, primarily being BlogLines, which I now use exclusively. Turns out that Blogger now has RSS available for free, so I updated. Now you’ll never have to come here…unless you really need to.
Cool, eh?

Hey folks, apparently somebody chatted to actor Bob Lesser, who starred in the commercial I shot with Jon Crow for the MoveOn.org “Bush in 30 Seconds” commercial before Thanksgiving. My friend Maury called me this morning to tell me I was in the News-Press. “I’m always in the News-Press,” I told him, “I write for ’em!” No, he said, I was in “The Dish” section:

“EQUAL TIME: Robert Lesser, Ensemble Theatre Company star and journalist Annie Bardach’s hubby, just completed a commercial for MoveOn.org, the Web site committed to unseating George W. Bush. Ted Mills (free-lance writer for the News-Press) directed the commercial, shot at the Pepper Tree Inn, in which Robert plays a dysfunctional CEO. The 30-second spot competes against hundreds of others — the winner will air around Bush’s January State of the Union address. … “

Apart from failing to mention the other director who is not a local boy, we’re chuffed to see the publicity. More info on the commercial when we know.