Once, on a Sunday, January 28, 2007, I thought...
10 years of silly quests
my long long quest is finally over!!
I finally have all 10 years of Calvin and Hobbes. Taken strip by strip from www.calvinandhobbes.com, one strip saved everyday. Not much of a quest really, yes. But good fun.
the very first image putup by ucomics.com when they started it over
It all started when Bill Watterson stopped creating new strips for Calvin and Hobbes.
After that, the the then comics site, ucomics.com started to publish them online, starting from the very first strip! They even bought calvinandhobbes.com domain. Ever since I've been slowly collecting each .gif file everyday. Subscribed to the mycomics email list, so even if I missed a day, it would be mailed. Even set all my browser's homepage to calvinandhobbes.com!
However, there was a huge loss once. My OS (the then Win98SE) had crashed on me. But using Getright (my the then download manager) and some daily scripts (which the then Getright supported) was able to get 2 years worth of strips all at once! That too on a dial-up connection (my the then internet connection).
Now I have from ch851118.gif to ch951231.gif a total of 3545 files in 11 folder (a whopping 91.6mb, which doesn't sting that much on a dial-up if u collect a 16kb file everyday - for 10 years! ;) )
And at the end, ucomics, went web2.0 what with changing its domain from www.ucomics.com to www.gocomics.com. Also tried to deter people like me from saving .gif files by changing their viewer to Macromedia Flash. But that subscription for list@mycomics paid off, providing .gif files as usual. But now they are repeating it over again. I just did a file compare with Beyond Compare 2 and the original ch851118.gif matches with ch070101.gif - byte to byte!
In the meanwhile, my college changed, my PC changed, even my frikkin residence changed!
I guess there are just some die-hard fans for Calvin and Hobbes :)
