Things have been quite hectic to say the least! I got a new position at work and it has no slack time – there is always something to do. As such, no time to write things here.

I have found an app for my iPod Touch that will directly interface with this site, so there may be more content yet!

The online customer Printer I use for my artwork has decided to stop offering short-run print services. They have now instated a 25 copy minimum for any print run. I thought maybe I was missing something on their website, but I called their customer service department and they confirmed it.

What’s frustrating is they are still very affordable even with the minimum requirements. I need to make a choice whether to use them at all even when I have a need to print 25 or more of anything. The other frustrating bit is I have been framing my art in software at 11″x17″, the size their printers output. Granted, I have always worked within 11″x14″ because that is a standard Wal-Mart sized frame. If I find another affordable vendor, I don’t want to lose image quality because of it.

This is a very valuable lesson though: Don’t trust a vendor to offering the same product or service indefinitely. I could have learned that from just about anywhere in the last 25 years of my life by looking around and simply watching, but I have never personally been burned by this phenomenon.

I’ve been drawing an awful lot lately. Just like my other phases, it comes and goes, but I do love doodling on some paper or sketching in Photoshop; it’s very soothing and meditative to draw for extended periods of time.

I can see why some people engage in addictive behavior though. It is so enjoyable for me, that other things slide like chores and even remembering to bathe and feed myself.  I’m surprised my stress-rash hasn’t popped up lately. Maybe the drawing is a healthy outlet for dealing with the ’shit happens’ in my life? Except for the basic human needs and hygiene thing…

With the volume of output I’ve got going on lately, I really should collect the complete and mostly complete work I’ve got, package it up, advertise and sell it on an online store here. Doing that would legitimize my absent-minded fasting. Of course I need to polish the mostly complete stuff, but feh, that’s “trivial.”

After I get that done, I could dig into the file of sketches I’ve got going or scans of work languishing in archive for more material, and I could go even further back and look into my filing cabinet or any of my dozens of notebooks for doodles. There is a limit to this madness of course. If I go too far back, the quality of artsmanship goes way down and I don’t really care to share that stuff. Also, I say “trivial” as I have to make the decision to stick with the particular style a work started off as or scrap it and make it Modern Steve.

This isn’t a bad plan though, I might be able to get some extra coin from this by selling prints. Fortunately I’ve had the foresight to work at a ridiculously high resolution for a long time now so printing will be trivial. See? No quotes that time!

$1950 to rebuild my 1984 Ford F-150’s transmission.

We are officially a one-vehicle household until I can get another vehicle. Ame and I have a plan, and the slightly less unbearable portion of it is due to her not starting school until late August.

There were other things wrong that could have been addressed, but why bother? I already spent a couple hundred on getting the air conditioner fixed. When the total repairs are up at about $2500 for a 25 year old car, you have to step back and reevaluate.

Ame’s computer is done and I have my own machine back to myself again!

From Saturday Morning, Schmatterday Morning, I discovered the northbridge (is that even the right name for it?) heatsink/fan combo had fallen off the board and had been dangling for who knows how long and the chip now has a nice little scorch mark. Zap. Fried. This was a part I had replaced myself before because the original assembly had developed this annoying grinding noise and a thorn in my paw for that board for a long time.  Come to think of it, the part probably came off from our recent move – unfortunately, there was no performance degradation until the thing simply wouldn’t power up anymore.

The board was dead. A replacement is the most logical step, right? Too bad it was an Intel Socket 478 board and the only one that was readily available anywhere didn’t support AGP for the old nVidia 6800 currently in the machine. Ugh. So that means you have to replace the board, the card, and of course the CPU. At this point, we could just salvage what we could like, well… it turns out nothing, but I’ll get to that.

Ame was keen to learn how to build a computer from parts, so I supervised. There was some excitement with the motherboard installation and the silver thermal paste, but it was mostly a smooth install with no malfunctions. I’ve never gone AMD before, but it was pretty painless and things work great so far.

Some gripes:

1. The motherboard is short for an ATX board. I’m used to installing out to the edge of the range of the mounting screws, using about 8. This one is shorter and doesn’t extend that far. The problem comes in when you want to plug the 24-pin power supply connector. You have to make sure that connection is solid, but doing so has the potential to bend the board! Do not want!
2. Another problem with the motherboard; there’s only one IDE connector. That sure was a surprise when we tried to hook up her existing hard drives and the optical drive. Ame ended up ordering a SATA drive as a workaround.
3. The Windows Vista install disc is a DVD! The optical drive she had before was a CDRW drive. We used a salvaged DVDROM drive from another unused computer to pull this duty.
4. Steam needs SP2 to work and Vista’s auto-updater didn’t detect SP2 as an installable update so I had to get it manually.

Other things were a breeze though, like the front-panel audio connection. I love my Antec case, but the front-panel-audio squid is horribly labelled and I have no earthly clue how to plug it in. Ame’s case has a dumb-proof connector that looks like an internal USB plug and it just hooks in. Sigh. Jealously really. Otherwise my own case is supar teh-awesome.