And a last-minute bailout by ideaphile Plantnerd saves us from overall comic lateness, huzzah! I received this awesome goat painting (I think for a shirt?) a few moments after posting today’s Help, my hard drive is full! missive, which is good because the comic I was working on is still less than 1/3 complete.
We will get back to the Get Outta My Head plot in progress as soon as I can. Thanks!
Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually, but I was really trying to put it off a little longer than this.
I’ve maxed my hard drive.
See, this comic is brought to you by the power of a 2 year old iBook G4 with a 40 gig drive. When it was purchased, I thought this was the lap of luxury — it was an upgrade from a 2000-model Pismo (Powerbook G3) with a 20 gig drive. Forty gigabytes! That’s huge! My first Mac had a 512 megabyte drive! I could hold THE WORLD with 40 gigs!
Except that the world has suddenly become 7.5 GB of applications, 10 GB of music, and, shockingly, almost 10 GB of files in the Pictures directory. And of those 10 GB in the Pictures directly almost 7 GB is, well, the comic. There’s another 6+ gig of every other thing I need to survive (everything from finances to old poetry to, oh yeah, the backups of this website) and that leaves me at about 33 to 34 GB filled.
Since the drive only formats at 37 and a smidge, well, things have been tight.
So tight that every single time I try to draw a comic at this point, I’m maxing the hard drive. How maxed? Well, let’s just say I’m very very familiar with the error that says that the comic can’t be saved because we’re out of disk space.
So here’s where we sit. (The livingroom.) (Sorry. I couldn’t help it.) Nighthawk just spec’d out and ordered me a new 120GB laptop drive and an external enclosure for the old drive. But once it arrives (next week?) I’ll have to back up everthing to the server, then install the new drive, and then rebuild the laptop with the new drive.
But until then, well, the buffer is empty because it’s been so damn hard to draw comics with no hard drive space, and we’re really scroungy. Consider this an active solicitation for fan art. You send fanart, I post it. (Obviously within reason, I get to choose, blahblahblah.) Where to send it? How ’bout we go with fanart at kirabug dot com
As for tonight’s comic, I’m trying to throw something small together to get us through the night, but it’s after 11 now and we’ll see what happens. Whatever does show up will probably be late. I do have some standards.
Thanks for your patience and your support.
Note of explanation for the uninitiated (which is pretty much everybody): Cole has Cystic Fibrosis. Without the enzymes, he can eat all he wants but he won’t actually digest of it… and you can be sure that’s not a pleasant experience.
Maybe this one should be labeled “It was funny at the time”.
Yesterday, I was fine. We went to Penn Raceway with my folks and my brother and played the horse rases. It was awesome, and definitely something I’d be willing to do again. Somehow there’s something just much more interesting about it than playing the slots down in Atlantic City.
After that, we went back to my parents’ house and ate sandwiches and pizza and the like, hung out for a little while and came home. No problems there.
Went to bed at a decent hour (well, relatively decent) but I couldn’t sleep – I’d sleep for 15 or 20 minutes then wake up. And I was hot and I was cold and I was hot again and I was pretty nauseous and it was a pain in the tail because I was supposed to go in early this morning because we’re so far behind in our work.
And when I woke up this morning I discovered that overnight my body had converted to a snot factory. I’m stuffed up and my head is just throbbing and my eyes are watering and my throat’s sore. I’m betting it’s a summer cold (since I haven’t had mine this year). I just wish I’d’ve seen it coming. I’d’ve done something about it yesterday.
So it’s almost 10:30 and I got some more spotty sleep between 7 and now and I’m drinking water and probably going back to sleep.
JPGs do awful things to my art, especially when I insist on keeping the graphics under 100k. Here is a larger (300+k, dial-up-painful) version.
This image was so big when I was working on it that I couldn’t save it because I ran out of room on my scratch disk. I’ve got a print-quality version – might make a print out of it just so I can hang it up somewhere. Drop me a note if you’re interested in one as well.
For you, for Independence day, fireworks! And since it’s a long holiday weekend, I even made you a desktop background! It’s 1280×1024.
Hope you have an excellent holiday!
Astronomy Picture of the Day posts some amazing pictures, but today’s picture of a Tornado and Rainbow Over Kansas has to be one of the most impressive ones I’ve seen yet. Almost enough to wonder about that Oz place.
