Upgrade complete!

Well, it took the removal of at least 35 screws and most of the bottom half of my (already out-of-warranty) iBook Dread Pirate Roberts, but we replaced the original 40GB drive with a 120, and boy is she sweet. I’d already bumped her to 1.12 GB of RAM a few months ago, so she was cooking in the RAM department already. The only thing holding her back has been a distinct lack of space to use as a scratch disk — complicated and compounded by the fact that both Photoshop and Mac OS X will happily use the entire freaking drive as extra RAM for pageouts if they need to.

But now? Wow, my images actually open quickly, which means I can do things like finish the Nuclear weather rock print. It’s sweeeeet.

When you don’t have the right tools, drawing can be a really painful experience. But once you do, the inspiration flows like water.

Another Quick Update

Ideaphile Jamie sent me fan art inspired by the last news post to get us through the weekend. A huge thank you to Jamie!

Dread Pirate Roberts (my iBook laptop) is in many pieces on the diningroom table right now (call it drydock if you wish) but I’m out the screwdriver necessary to remove 3 screws, so until I find one, well, we’re stuck. It’s not easy being sans computer either, let me tell you. I just paid off my house again in Animal Crossing: Wild World and I’m up to two rooms on the 1st floor and one on the second floor.

Hoping either Lowe’s or Radio Shack has the screwdriver I need or we’re dead in the water. We’ll see….

A quick update

  • The new hard drive is here, sitting next to my laptop, but I probably won’t get a chance to install it until Saturday.
  • I’m probably working some overtime today/tonight to free up some hours because have a viewing to go to on Friday for my next-door neighbor, so time’s kind of tight.
  • I’ve got a spare comic I might throw into the queue… I’m not happy with the writing for it but it’s better than running nothing at all… if I convince photoshop to play nicely and let me finish the comic I’m working on for the “at the restaurant” quasi-storyline I might not have to. We’ll see. Or, y’know, someone could send some fanart to kirabug at kirabug dot com… no really, anything will do… send your pictures to dear old captain kirabug, send today, send right away….

Drive-ing me crazy

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.

random babblings of someone who has too many words to write.

11/26/05 random babblings of someone who has too many words to write. (Cut and pasted from a TextEdit file I was making notes in while writing…)

10:28: was going to update my word count and go to bed, but now I’ve lost Internet access. Makes me pissy. Now I’m going to have to concentrate on the novel and not start playing Chuzzle like I’d planned.

10:45: still no internet access. up to at least 3167 words. (there seems to be some debate between my word count and NaNoWriMo’s count, but theirs is in my favor, so I don’t mind the discrepancy.) Want desperately to be distracted so I don’t have to listen to these characters fight in my head anymore, but I’m out of luck.

11:03: Still no ‘net access. If I was really at a breaking point I’d go reboot the router to make sure the problem’s not us, but suddenly I’m on a roll. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the literary figure I want to use as a metaphor. Goddamn it, I want my google back!

11:05: It was Casanova. My husband is snoring so loudly upstairs that I can hear him, and I’m on the sofa in the livingroom on the first floor.

11:15: I just had a character go off on a cursing spree. It’s in character for him, but I’m feeling a little guilty for using the word “shit” six times in succession – it gives the impression that I’m buffering my word count.

11:33: the dog’s now been whining at me for a solid fifteen minutes. But I’ve added another thousand words or so in the last 45 minutes. At this rate it will take me approximately 22 hours of full-on work to hit deadline. I have roughly 72 hours. Maybe this is doable after all.

It’d help if I didn’t start at fuckall late at night each night though.

This dog’s like an oven. But at least when she’s lying next to me on the sofa she’s quiet.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure it’s the router that’s causing the problem, because I can’t connect to it. I’ll investigate that shortly. I need to go to bed by midnight because I have to be up at 9 to go to lunch with a friend at 11.This has been a very social weekend.

12:02: Rebooting the router seems to have done the trick. I’m going to upload this, update my word count, and then go to bed.

(ps: 35,106 words! Whoo! Less than 4 days! Hell!)

Quick notes

A few quick notes before I crash:

  1. I have a sinus headache migraine that would kill small animals. It’s been going on for about 4 hours now. Sleep will most likely elude me. Yay.
  2. I was able to find two swimsuits in size 16 that I’m relatively sure will keep people from mistaking me for a beached whale and trying to push me back into the water.
  3. I have both a new scanner and more RAM on order, whoo!
  4. We bought new wireless phones for the livingroom.
  5. The battery in the Neon is dead, carpooling continues.
  6. I’ve started repairing some of the comics in the archvie, making sure they have their copyright notices and that they’re optimized for web viewing. I’ve already trimmed around 300-400k from the file sizes and I’ve only gotten like the first 10 comics cleaned up. Those who are on dial-up should find the place is a little less painful in the near future.
  7. I think my teeth are trying to burrow through my gums to strangle my sinuses. They don’t appear to appreciate the headache either.

Hey, by the time you read this it’ll be August. (In fact, it’s August now!) Please vote on Top Web Comics! Oh, and happy August!

Happy happy!

Today is a special day for four reasons:

  • I got my new graphics software in the mail.
  • Today’s the first day of my 10-day vacation from work.
  • Today is JessieDog’s x+4 birthday – four years ago today we adopted her from the Chester County SPCA, where she had no tags, no collar, no owner, a bladder infection, and a cold. She’s feeling much better now. :)
  • Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day that Nighthawk and I were married.

The last one is the most beautiful. Five years ago I thought that I could never be as happy as I was that day, but every year that we’ve been together has compounded that happiness into something stronger than it was the year before. I love being Nathaniel Gibson’s wife, and I love him more than I could possibly express in words, let alone in words typed out on a blog.