Computer Nerd

Yep, it's NEW COMPUTER TIEM!! YAY!!!

So, I do pretty much all of my artwork on my tablet now, and my desktop has been relegated to the purpose of gaming and web browsing, and maybe some other stuff now and then. Mostly, games.

Problem with this is that you can't play games if the computer is a piece of shit. Well, not new games anyway. So it was time for an upgrade; it's been about three years and change since my last update, and it was high time to get something that works and can do stuff again. My wife needed a new machine as well, since hers is a piece of crap even worse than what I've been using.

So I hopped on newegg and ordered up a whole truckload of parts to build our new computers, since doing it that way can save a person hundreds of dollars and ensure that you get the best parts available and that the manufacturers don't skimp and give you crappy memory or a junk motherboard.

This practice is fine, unless something comes in DOA.

Yep, sure enough, there was a dead motherboard in the batch.

For those of you who've never put your own computer together, it's hard to explain the unbelievable aggravation levels that can be created when something goes wrong. See, debugging failed computer parts can be a pretty mysterious process, and there are sharp pointy metal fins on every god damn thing you'll be working with. It's sort of like automotive maintenance, only it's nearly impossible to tell if something is damaged just by looking at it. And if something is obviously dead from looking at it you've probably had to disable your smoke alarm and open the windows to air out the evil purple smoke of electronic death from your living space.

I'm not a person who handles frustration well; at least not form machines. Like I've said before, I expect people to disappoint me horribly, but machines should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal. (HAHA superior! LOL!!). If you've never been so frustrated that you find yourself doubled over, feebly pounding on the case while tears stream down your face, begging it to 'Just work!! for fucks' sake WHY WON'T YOU WOOORRRRRK!!!!' then you've obviously not been doing this long.

Anyway, this time was just like the last time, and the time before that, and I wasted many hours debugging hardware and swapping parts in and out and leaving bits of valuable flesh all over the sharp jagged projections of the computer case. The motherboard is still en route, so hopefully the replacement will work.

The good news is that my wife let me use the working one to play games and putz around, since I don't think she could possibly tolerate me moping and grumbling for the next week or so as I wait for the replacement part to ship.

Initially I went into this whole windows thing with a hint of optimism that I fully expected to have crushed and ground to dust beneath Bill Gates' vicious dream-crushing boot heel.

However... I have to say... it pretty much went smoothly.

Now, I put this copy on my tablet, since that's what I do all my art on, and that's what really needed a bit of a boost to get running more smoothly. As mentioned before, I was really hoping for the performance boost from a 64 bit OS, which, quit frankly, has materialized more or less as promised.

So it's taken me about two and a half days to get up to 100% functionality again. And a huge portion of that time (nearly a day) was spent with me trying to track down exotic tablet drivers (I had to use Vista 64 drivers to get some tablet buttons to work).

Two days to get a fresh OS installed and port all of my important files and get all the hardware and software I need working has got to be a record for me, as far as microsoft products go. Not just a small improvement; I think it used to take me weeks to get everything cobbled back together in the past.

The performance gain is huge as well. Granted, a big part of that may simply be from going to 64 bit from 32 bit, and using almost all 64 bit software now. That also let me use my full 4 gigs of RAM (rather than 3.12), so I can't really say how this would stack up against Vista 64 performance wise.

I also finally got around to plopping that new hard drive I bought way back when in this thing, giving me an extra 140 gigs to fill up with garbage. The new drive runs sort of hot though, which causes me a little concern, but so far so good.

I do have a few complaints though, so it's not all puppydogs and rainbows.

1. I want my old "Show Desktop" button back, you bastards! They moved the god damn thing to the right side of the screen with a tiny icon now, rather than the old left side one we're all used to. Of course, someone already wrote a utility to insert a little .exe that does the exact same thing, so it's sort of resolved, even though I shouldn't have to go through hoops to get it.
2. Let me pin what I want, god damnit. Pinning is a weird new sort of concept that I do like; it's sort of a merging of the old taskbar with the quick launch bar, and it's actually done fairly well and is *gasp* almost intuitive. For some reason Microsoft has seen fit to only let you pin links to .exe's though; you can't pin a folder or link or anything. This is dumb, in my opinion, although there are convoluted tweaks/hacks to get it to pin anything. They should just put in an option to allow users to pin whatever the hell they want, although I can see how non-savvy users might get completely befuddled by it. If they change this, this would actually resolve issue one.
3. I can't think of anything else right now. I feel that I should have more than two gripes, this being a Microsoft product and all, but that's all I've come up with so far. I guess that's a testament to Microsoft's efforts to get past the well deserved drubbing they got over Vista.

On some level I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for something to go catastrophically wrong, because Microsoft has conditioned me to have that Pavlovian response when working with their products, but so far, so good.

I think I'll wind up making a post about optimizing Photoshop CS4 for Windows 7, especially from a tablet/notebook perspective.

The image there is an evil Horgle Slug, some sort of space vermin I made up and drew today. Rainy days are nice, because I don't get any glare on my tablet screen when I'm drawing during lunch while chillin' in my pickup. Saw the new Star Trek last night, which was pretty damn good, so I'm in a sci-fi mood, rather than wacky fantasy like normal.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

---

In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

At the very core of my being, I think I'm more of an engineer than an artist. I love designing and building things. I tinker and assemble stuff, and I have a deep appreciation for science and all things technical. I possess an analytical mind that's allowed me to learn multiple programming languages more or less self taught, with the occasional tutorial from friends and a day class here and there paid for by work.

The one thing I really, really hate though, is debugging. Debugging makes me fucking crazy. Debugging makes me want to throw my keyboard at a wall, snap a DVD-ROM in half, and use the jagged edges to slash my jugular so I can bleed out into the hateful gaping chasm that is the open case of my dysfunctional PC.

...ok, that might be a little extreme, but you get the point.

I think part of the problem with being self taught is that I have these odd spotty gaps in my knowledge; in particular good debugging techniques. I'm a hell of a lot better now than I used to be, but that's only through hours and hours of painful swearing and tears.

As much as I love tinkering, I have a very short fuse when it comes to machines or programs that are misbehaving. See, I expect people to piss me off, so I have a pretty long fuse when it comes to dealing with other homo sapiens. Machines, however, should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

As far as actual updates go (rather than whining and ranting), I'm nearly done building the new Steamvolt website. I still need some new graphics and minor tweaking, but I did manage to build this massive PHP script that should ensure that the only thing I'll ever need to do when I add a new comic page is to add the page number and chapter number, and the code will build all the rest. The debugging sucked, as it usually does, but at the end of the day I got the sucker working.

Kind of makes me want to pick up a wrench, jump on top of it, and roar in victory like a frenzied howler monkey.

So I've got a few things going on now. Nothing major, but, well, you know, stuff.

First: I've added a captcha to my site, forcing all of these fucking mindless hard-on medicine bots to do math or piss off. This means all of you need to do basic math to post on this site. If you can't do basic math, I probably don't want to talk to you, so whatever.

Second: I like radial blur. I used it to get the wings on that creepy Butcher Faerie up there to look all...blurry... and it worked exactly the way I wanted it the first time I used it. That' pretty rare; usually this sort of stuff takes a lot of trial and error.

Blur is a tricky thing in photoshop. I've seen a LOT of artists who are just starting to get a handle on it overdo blur to the point of irritation. It's sort of like drinking; use in moderation or you'll get all fucked up. Personally, I go the other way, being a near teetotaller as far as the blur function goes. It doesn't integrate well with my style unless it's used very sparingly. But radial blur has some nice potential for motion in it, so I'm probably going to sit down and really hack at it a bit and see what it can do.

Another interesting thing about the wings on this dude; they're wasp wings. Usually I just make shit up as I go, but this is one rare case where I used a direct photographic reference to make something. There's a few spots where they're off from real wasp wings, and some of the lines are a bit over-emphasized, but anatomically those are exactly what wasp wings look like.

Also, I am eating cream of broccoli soup for lunch, and eet eez deelishis! :dance:

It's not all that often that a relatively small upgrade is worth the cash... but in the case of Photoshop CS3, I'll make an exception. The new interface and the general feel of the thing are soooo much smoother and more intuitive than in CS2. It's pretty awesome.

So to test it out, I sketched out some random pseudo-anime broad with red hair. Yeehaw.

Well, I've let this site lie fallow for a while now, because I have very little desire to grind through my database and tweak several thousand tables so that they're compliant with the new drupal. That's HOURS of work I have to look forward to.

Currently missing are half of my links and all of my galleries and every forum entry, and probably other stuff I just haven't come across yet.

Finally got Drupal 6.2 and MySQL 5.whatever installed, so now I can get down to the business of making a new non-retarded theme. VICTORY!!

I've had a cold for a week and a half now. Nothing horrible, just a general veneer of misery and rotting raw-hamburger sinuses to make life more annoying.

But those things pale in comparison to how fucking sick of cough drops I am. They work...sort of...a little I guess.

So I've had some horrible luck trying to get Gallery2 to play nice with Drupal, and finally gave up on it. Of course, want I've long wanted to do with the gallery won't work in either Drupal or gallery 2, so to hell with it, I've been hacking away at the image modules for drupal to make them do what I want.

This explains why you'll see hundreds of newly added images below this post.