Monthly Archive for December, 2008

My desktop is named “oasis” — my laptop, “nomad”. Get it?

So the 8800 GTS arrived today just as I was running out of hope that it would do so, and I happily slotted it into the silver tower, switched it on, and after fiddling with video options for a few minutes started up SL.

A few minutes in, my computer spontaneously reboots. Uh oh. I give SL another try. A few minutes pass, and it happens again.

I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. After conferring with a friend (Lomgren) via IM, I decided to steal my brother’s new and disused power supply and swap it out, since I had never really questioned what I had under the hood.

Apparently my old horse was limping along on a 320 Watt dinosaur. Ouch. The new 500W supply is black and silent, like a wraith. I bought this supply for him for a measly $40 at Frys some time ago. I will have to get another to restore his computer to working order I suppose.

The PSU swapped, I haven’t had any issues since. The 8800 GTS runs SL like a dream. I’ve got the graphics set to “Ultra”, which entails among other things robust water reflections and gorgeous atmospheric effects. Best damn thing I ever paid $80 for. I am utterly ecstatic and can’t wait to get back to drawing the strip.

Unfortunately since it arrived at 7:30 and I had some issues with getting it working, I was not able to get on a new strip today. Lame. And since tomorrow night is going to be crammed with festivities, I’ve got no promises on Wednesday either. Thursday, though, I’ve got the whole day off. Maybe I can draw up two or three strips and post them over the next few days afterward! That would be cool.

Next week is my last week at Countrywide. For now, anyway. I’m going to try to come back during the summer for the BAC internship, but only if I can work in MCCA again. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it remains my condition.

By the way, if you’re shopping for computer parts, I cannot recommend Newegg enough. It is the single best shopping experience on the planet. You can find exactly what you’re looking for in an instant and have it on your doorstep a day or two later without ever going to a store, standing in a line, or being told that something is out of stock after you’ve already done both of those other horrible things.

Similar comments for UPS. It doesn’t hurt that brown is my second favorite color (mostly because of Ubuntu’s delightful color scheme).

I haven’t been able to work on the comic because my desktop suffered a major hardware failure and now displays nothing on the screen. It seems to boot just fine – no error beeps, keyboard lights indicate successful POST, and change in behavior of the power switch indicates reaching grub.

The worrisome part is that I got put through a manual fsck the last time it did boot.

I can’t really test beyond that without video – and the mainboard has no onboard video.

Here’s the timeline of events:

Key: Behavior observed — action taken.

1. X hangs while quitting Second Life — Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.
2. Screen blanks but does not come back — cut power to the computer by holding power switch, reboot.
3. Automatic fsck fails — walk through manual fsck, deleting a bunch of broken inodes in SL’s cache, reboot.
4. At this point, the computer seems to start normally except the graphics no longer work.

The graphics card went through severe overheating in the past, so my bet is that I finally managed to kill it. I ordered a replacement on Newegg – it should be here by Friday at the latest.

I really didn’t want to spend money on a computer part with my wallet looking the way it is, but I didn’t have much choice. Anyway, assuming the card shows up before the week is out, I promise I’ll update the comic. I’ve been itching to continue the story.

If, that is, the card fixes the problem. If not, I may have to replace some other component.

*sigh*

Today I pretty much just studied for my last final – data structures in C++. Joy.

I think I may have bombed this class, thanks primarily to work. I hope not, but I have so much other crap to do that retaking it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I just installed Google Gears, and that is making WordPress load a lot faster. Nifty. I wonder why I never found a use for Gears before? I guess I didn’t really know what it was. Now I do: it’s awesome!

I download a few fonts from BlamBot, among which are Ashcan and Digital Strip. I’m going to be using fonts to letter the strip from now on, because my writing is just completely illegible.

My next headache regarding the comic will be promoting it, I think. Once I get to a few dozen strips, I’d like to start collecting a readership. At that point, I think I’ll have an active enough site to start running a few ads to offset the hosting costs, which scale directly with traffic thanks to NearlyFreeRpeech.net, my web host.

Now then, I need to apply for grants for next semester so I can um… afford to eat! <<;

And I should probably do some more studying.

‘Til next time!