Irregular Webcomic! #446

Jane Goodall makes her first appearance since #359.

Looks like she might be in a spot of bother too.

This strip took forever to make. The background is pasted in from a photo I took in a tropical rainforest, but to put it there I first had to cut out the original background from the LEGO set photo - which consisted of a section of my wall. It's a tedious job cutting out around all those fiddly tree bits and Cthulhu's head and so on. And then after pasting the background I have to go around and retouch the borders to make them a bit blurry so it doesn't look like an obvious "blue-screen" with sharp edges around the foreground. For four panels. In fact, I think I've given myself a headache doing it...

2013-04-02 Rerun commentary: I would get faster and better at doing that sort of background substitution.

The "tropical rainforest" in question was on Lord Howe Island, a small island about 600 kilometres east of the east coast of Australia. It's part of the state of New South Wales (and in fact is part of the electoral district of of the central city of Sydney). It is distinguished however by having a time zone of UTC+10:30 during winter, and UTC+11:00 during daylight saving time, giving it the unusual daylight saving offset of just half an hour.

This time zone is so unusual, that I remember several years ago when Microsoft issued an update to Windows (98 it was at the time, I think) specifically to add support for the Lord Howe Island time zone, since it wasn't correctly supported up to then.

The population of Lord Howe Island is a bit over 300 people, and it would probably be fair to say that at the time Microsoft issued this update, there might possibly have been one or two PCs on the island.

It seems though that as of Windows 7, Microsoft have actually removed support for Lord Howe Island's time zone again.

Despite the issues with Windows time zone support, Lord Howe is a beautiful place to visit!