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Archive for October 2004 http://www.geekt.org/gopconstrm.mov http://static.vidvote.com/movies/bushuncensored.mov After you've availed yourself of their bandwidth, you can go visit the two sites in case they're selling T-shirts or something. (I felt guilty just linking the videos.) Thanks a lot, Macromedia, for Flash Video. Because now I can be browsing a webpage, and suddenly I hear a goddamn two-minute-long commercial, with video, for a phone-sound-quality-enhancer plus caller ID, or a bust-enhancer bra pad, or whatever. Right in the banner. For the longest time I was afraid to try drawing some (more-) realistic looking heads. For about... I don't know, ever since I was able to draw anything? Six or eight or ten years old? I always drew the same round head that you see everywhere. I looked at a tutorial today and started drawing more defined heads. It wasn't hard! Granted they aren't as realistic as I'd like, but it's better than an oval.   I wouldn't change CxN or anything, but I want to be able to do a more serious story without feeling like the drawings aren't up to it. All right, I thought I had my machine up and running, but it's really, truly dead now. Also the new drive I bought is also dead, right out of the box for my goddamn convenience. I used to be big into building my own, like I was a pioneer or something, like I was really doing something other than assembling four or five parts that have no warranty as a whole. You don't save money doing it, at least not anymore. Once, perhaps. Today, if the machine costs $600 to build, there's a $600 machine just like it at Fry's or available online, and at least those guys offer to fix what's broken. Luckily, my machine waited until I have no income to collapse. When did I build it? I don't recall... I have built one per year for the last three years, so it might have been time to build a new one soon anyway. Instead, I will be buying it. All I ask is that the machine I own allows me to put in a new video card, or add memory, or add a drive, without having to leave it with the manufacturer or some official service location for two weeks. I have all my strips backed up on CD, and everything else can be reinstalled. What a giant waste of time. My favorite part was the little meta-stable moments, whole days where the work I did seemed to have paid off, since the machine was running fine. Then the next morning, suddenly it stops working. Another five hours of effort later, it's working again, and it's got to stay up this time! Nope. My computer-building days are over. I was up until 6:30 trying to get my machine to come back. It has been acting strangely for the last two days, and now it won't boot. I can't get into safe mode or any kind of command prompt. In the boot log, it always halts on "Mup.sys," and I found a lot of people with this problem, with the usual solutions being disabling BIOS protection (no good), taking out my USB card (can't, it's onboard, and disabling does no good), disabling mup (which seems not to be the real culprit anyway since the problem can occur well before it gets loaded) or flashing BIOS (scared to try). This problem seems to occur when the hardware config changes, but I haven't done that lately. It might bethat something on my motherboard just died, although some report that even a motherboard replacement AND a fresh XP install doesn't solve the problem. I can get into the XP recovery console, which does me little good since XP won't boot up no matter what I change. I disabled mup, and now it halts elsewhere, always at the start of going into graphics mode. I tried to have XP repair its install, but after the files are copied, it reboots to try to go into graphics mode to continue, and dies there as usual. Possible solution: new hard drive, clean XP install, use old drive as storage only. I hope my files are still there, otherwise CxN and everything else I've done doesn't exist anymore. And if it's the motherboard that went bad, well, I'll find out if the clean XP install dies on it too. I turned it off and went to bed for six hours. Upon turning it on, now it loaded the graphics mode. It seems like the longer I leave it off, the further I can get, which might be completely random behavior. But now I'm back to square one. It got about a minute into the forty minute repair install, then crashed again. Now on rebooting, it locks up where it always has, just before the loading bar appears. I can actually see the XP loading bar graphic, dim, because it crashes as it fades in from black. So God knows what half-installed state XP is now in on that drive. At least it failed only on copying files, and not redoing the filesystem or anything critical. I'm probably going to go buy a new hard drive and try that this afternoon. It looks like I will have to reinstall EVERYTHING though. I hope I can have this settled by the weekend or I'm not going anywhere. |
