A quick and dirty note this week, as I’m still traveling in the DC area and am worn out from driving. There will also not be the customary Linux News reprint today (I’ll try to do it ASAP, it takes a fair amount of manual labor.)

This week’s in-joke is the reference to Laurel. Laurel (Ruma) has been one of the faithful production folks who makes sure that all the ONLamp (and other O’Reilly Network) articles end up looking perfect every week. I say was because she is moving on to bigger and better in an editorial capacity at O’Reilly, something that all of us who know Laurel are very happy about!.

The original version of this strip had a very different looking Laurel (with a much darker skin color!) That’’s because in the script I sent to Randy, Gwen was talking to people off-camera. He thought it would be more effective to have them in the forefront. All to the good, except that I hadn’t sent him any reference photos of Laurel, so he just used his imagination. He was a very good sport about redoing that panel once I sent him a photo of Laurel.

We have multiple Mikes at O’Reilly, so you are free to decide for yourself which Mike the male in the first panel doesn’t look like the most.