shadesofmauve | Entries tagged with computers

I have almost everything ready for gifts tomorrow -- I'm missing one order, and that package is out for delivery, so it should arrive in time. I'm even wrapping things. I usually hate wrapping and I'm a big fan of brown paper bags, but I decided to use up the last of the paper so I don't have to store it anymore.

E and I went downtown to the toy store today and got the last gifts we needed for littles -- his god-children and my twin cousins. I don't usually get cousins anything, but they're five and they'll be joining us for Christmas dinner. (I thought they'd be at my grandparents, which is why I didn't have anything yet).

The sun is shining, my living room is clean, and I have a functioning computer again. Yay!

Even better? Lyns took my hard drives home yesterday and fired 'em up. She says it looks like only the boot sector is bad, and she should be able to save all the data. There may be some missing audio files as well, but I'm not too worried -- the ones that are AWOL are all ripped from CDs I own. Replacing them will be tedious (they were part of my exhaustive tagging project), but doable.

It's a holiday mackerel!

I don't have drives-and-data back yet, but the weight's off my mind. Now, to put on music and finish wrapping things, and call E's mum (which I've never done before, funnily). Then it'll either be art or video games until we head to my folks' house for dinner.

We'll be back over at my parents' for packages and stockings Christmas morning. It should be extra fun this year, because my friend Kiyoko is joining us. I don't remember if I've mentioned her much here -- Kiyo and I were room-mates for about five months in college, and met my family then. She came back to visit a handful of times, and I've been to Japan and visited her once. She finally worked out a way to do more English study this year, and she's been in the states since April. She lived with my parents up until september, when she moved to auburn to go to community college there, and she's back for the holidays! :)

I would have happily had her live with me -- she was a wonderful room-mate -- but I have to charge rent on my extra rooms to make my mortgage payment, and my parents just offered her the chance to be an extra kid. :)

I still don't know how much if anything I lost from the harddrive that went kaput. My dear

emony42 advised against trying it with another drive as boot until she, her recovery software, and her computer named Gandalf were in town (which is tomorrow).

So I gave Gonzales a lobotomy.

Oh, lower brain-stem functions were still there, but with both his hard-drives sitting on the desk he wasn't doing much thinking.

Today I tracked down a new 500 gb drive. This was harder than expected. Because of the flooding in Thailand, drives are hard to get and way more expensive than they were six months ago (which is why I bought a 7200 rpm and not 1000 -- that would have set me back over $200). The local computer store didn't have any internal hard-drives in stock, period.

The plan (again, with the advice of my dear Lyns. Some people don't have a Lyns*. I don't know how they get by) is to use the new one as the system drive and set up two matched drives in RAID for data... once the prices drop a bit. This should be an excellent work around for my "Skellington is too scatterbrained to back things up or remember to set-up a program to do so" problem.

So, I've just convinced Microsoft I didn't steal windows 7, and downloaded Firefox so IE can sit down and shut up. I think I'll save all those updates for tomorrow.

*When I mentioned this to my housemate

madalchemist, he said "But did you ever work out the joint property agreement with her husband?"
Skellington: "Yes, the last time it came up R said he always knew she was just on long-term lease from me."
MadAlchemist: "Huh... y'know, 'long term lease' is a healthier view of marriage than some I've heard..."

M, L, and I have been friends since we were 7 or 8. What's a few years of marriage compared to that? :P

It is very possible that I just lost everything I've worked on for the last year in a massive hard-drive failure.

I am not panicking.

Have perhaps attained zen.

Luckily, the total boot failure happened about fifteen minutes after I uploaded a jpg of the MESS art and sent myself the text file.

For whatever reason, my opinion of my own visual art skills varies far more wildly than my opinion of my music or writing skills. It's like the "You are an awful judge of your own work" taken up to 11. I usually manage to go back and forth between "YOU CANNOT ART. STOP. GIVE UP!" and ~~"I am an ART GOD"~~ "Hey, I may actually be getting somewhere!" within the space of half an hour. Repeatedly.

Er, that's not really apropos of anything, just a general warning/disclaimer.

EXCITING:
I just received payment for a lil' graphic design job I did for Amy Zilk, Piano Technician, a good friend of mine and my first branding client when I was straight outta school. On the same day, I received the downpayment on a Sheep ~~In Space~~ commission (THAT one'll be a trick -- first time I've ever painted sheep ON THE GROUND!).

Upshot?

I can has graphics tablet! For home! For me! YAY!

I'll probably get a wacom Intuos4 unless I hear something convincing otherwise. The medium is the same size as the 3 I use at work, which may be good in terms of hand-eye training (not having to jump sizes). It's also aprox. the same working area as most of my sketchbooks. :P

It's very exciting, as it means I can work on improving my direct-to-digital skills in large windows at home instead of fifteen minute chunks at work.

Speaking of which, things I did in fifteen minute chunks at work. I had this plan of carefully testing out different coloring methods and timing them and comparing the results. It lasted about five minutes before it turned into SCRIBBLE ALL THE THINGS.

And then later...

My monitor at work is pretty much crap, so I was hesitant to adjust color and darkness there, but now I think the skintones are all over-saturated and the darks'll have to go darker. She's too gold. As usual, I moved the lightsource once and went back and forth on what color it is. One day, I will learn to make up my damn mind.

(I say this all the time).

(hint: it never happens).

EDIT: Grrr, I know what I want to do to fix it and I can't 'cause it's at work. :P

Occasionally someone asks me about age-difference relationships, and I say that I've found the important thing is that both parties can take a joke about it.

Usually, this comes in the form of me giving Erik a whole lot of shit (or occasionally my parents giving us both shit, as in the infamous Fucking Ancient Incident). It was my turn this evening, and it was so beautiful and geeky that I thought y'all needed to hear it.

For some reason we were discussing 80s arcade games (which, naturally, E played in an 80s arcade, presumably while I was riding my tricycle or something). Maybe it was the existence of pong fanfiction, or that I'd found artist Steve Thomas and his video-game propaganda; somehow, he started telling me about the vast excitement of playing Frogger with his cousins on a commodore 64. He was trying to remember how old he was, and googled the '64, leading to the following exchange:

E: It was 1982! We got the commodore 64 when it first came out.
S: Oh. It came out a year before I did.
E: That's why you have a better operating system... *pause* ...and slightly more memory.

Current Mood: silly

Last night I hit a real low -- my shop-vac wasn't working despite being taken apart and put back together, my PC wasn't working, the PC not working resulted in a game not working, cleaning and organizing definitely wasn't working, and there was evidence that my brain wasn't working, either, in that I finally realized that I double-booked myself in early October. I'm supposed to play a gig in Olympia during the same time I'm supposed to be in southern Oregon visiting my grandparents. Uh. Oops?

Anyway!

Shop-vac: IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE! I was a total dork about the shop-vac, and the one thing I hadn't checked was the hose, which is just after "plug it in" on the trouble shooting guide. SO! Shop-vac is fixed, using the high-tech technique of shoving a 1x2 down the hose to dislodge the clog.

PC: IT'S ALIVE! I'd *correctly* guessed that the video card was fried, and was able to confirm that by scavenging the video card from

madalchemist's unused box, which is currently purring away in Gonzales now. It was about time to upgrade my machine anyway, so a brand-spanking new video card is on it's way from newegg, along with 4 more gigs of ram. Gonzales shall live up to his namesake once again!

Game: the PC crash corrupted files for ME2, but I was able to put 'em back where they belong. Energy Drain shall be mine, darn it!

Cleanliness: Because I didn't have the lure of a PC this morning, I cleaned my room. With dusting and vacuuming and organizing of three months of mostly non-important mail and everything.

Still Unresolved...

The fact that I was a total flake who doesn't know how to read a calendar is still icky, but I talked to Erik and we worked out some options. Namely, he'll try to switch his vacation days so we can spend the earlier weekend in Oregon and then do our gigs (Oh, did I mention he didn't realize he had a gig that day either? And these are two separate gigs, not one we're doing together). Plan B is that we ditch the gigs and run away where no angry co-musicians can find us. Plan B is not a good plan, but they're both really short, non-paying gigs, and for me it's one where another fiddler can fill in (if they want. There are three fiddlers, so they don't need another).

So. I may not be bound for total misery and squalor after all.

On Friday I fucked up my website. Like "Okay, now you have a blank-slate hosting account and you have two weeks to move stuff and transfer the name before the old one goes kaput."

It was just a little update of the CMS. A quickie, if you will. Maybe

madalchemist was right and I shoulda used lube. Or bought it dinner first, at least. But we've been together so long, y'know? That IP and I, we've been tight since 2005. Maybe 2004.

What's that?

No, baby! OF COURSE I remember our anniversary! Promise! I was joking!

I'm tryin' my best to get in the right mood, so we can repair this relationship without counseling.

Mmmhmm. I know all about your CMS, doll. Show me that nice little back-end. Give it a little MySQL action, hun...oh yeah, that's it.

Oh, baby baby.

Someone on

designrants linked to a straightforward essay on why designers are still needed.

I flipped back through a few of the blog's previous posts, and found a rant about tools and the replacement cost thereof.

I'm pretty sure it makes me a geezer only one step away from telling kids to get off my lawn*, but little fishies, how I feel this rant.

The current** fiscal situation of Skellinton Art is, er, negative, due to last year's planned purchase of Adobe CS3 and totally unplanned emergency purchase of Gonzales. I freelance for extra cash to buy my design and art toys, mostly, so that's to be expected, but still, it's amazing how much we all spend on things that we expect to replace within five years.

Vis a vis computers, this is in large part because of the speed of technological innovation, and the speed of technological innovation is honestly pretty cool. When it comes to my cell phone, I'd rather I hadn't had to replace it after two years, considering that the new one does basically the same shit as the old one, and that shit is all I need (to be fair, the call quality is marginally better, and it's, er, lime green, which is a plus). Once you get into the average purchasing habits of cars, you get into the truly ridiculous.

Just things I've been thinkin' about.

EDIT: Forgot that though I'm using Open Office now, I'm considering shelling out for MS Office. I don't love it, but everyone uses it, and it's getting awkward. Damn.

*I'll get tips on proper lawn-clearing technique from

duffy61.

**I originally spelled this 'currant', an understandable slip-up considering my last few posts.

Gonzales and I are poised to take over the internet!

At procesing speeds that would make LuTze pale and Erik's laptop faint dead away, with the extra zip provided by a real honest-to-goodness ethernet cable that doubles the speed I got on wifi, and whole pastures full of ram, I'm ready to fill Gonzales' massive hard-drives with the ENTIRE INTERNET.

I have to make sure the internet doesn't take us over first, so if anyone has used any of the 64 bit firewalls and either liked or hated them, please let me know. I'm downloading a trial of Lavasoft's firewall and avast anti-virus as we speak.

ARRIBA! ARRIBA! ANDALE!

added: Booo lavasoft. You kill the internet. Gonzales shall look elsewhere for his software condom.

Current Mood: triumphant

My creation, it lives! It purrs! It's going to take all morning to configure it's hard drives because they are the SIZE OF THE INTERNET.

While it configures hard drives the SIZE OF THE INTERNET, I need to decide what to call it other than it. My favorite name, Heironymous, I'm saving for my next small fuzzy animal. I considered Lucien (the librarian from Sandman) but I'm leaning towards Gonzales, named after Speedy. Arriba, Arriba! I bet politically correct kids channels today don't air Speedy Gonzales. Do they? Is it culturally insensitive to name a 3.16 Ghz Dual processor computer with 4 gigs of ram after a small cartoon mouse with a caricature of a Mexican accent? Do I care?