Computer Nerd

Now for a break! I need to update things all up in this place, since I'm a few security patches behind and stuff. At some point today I'll get all that shit sorted out and we'll be (mostly) functional again.

In other news, Modest Mouse rocks, Puppies are cute, The Walking Dead is a fantastic show, and I'm sick of Chihuahuas. Also, tormenting your roommate is way more fun than it has any right to be.

The goblin up there is the logo for a nice commissioner at www.goblinmoon.co.uk

For some reason I seem to get people asking me to draw Goblins a lot. That's cool though, I like Goblins. Also, a lot of British people commission me for work. Is it because it seems like us Americans work for cheap now that the Euro has clobbered the dollar? I feel like exploited labor...

Oh, and speaking of labor exploitation, I'm totally open for more commissions :D

Holy crap do I hate my current web host.

To be fair, it's not just them specifically, but certain business practicies in general.

See, I wish that companies would put a lot of effort into making a decent service or product, rather than sinking all of their efforts into thwarting people from trying to leave. If you fucking pricks took the team who went out of their way to design a nearly inscrutable and buggy web registration transfer system and applied them to maybe setting up databases and services that didn't suck a camel's nutsack maybe I wouldn't be trying to get as far away from your craptastic company as possible.

Dickheads.

I mean, really, what the fuck can a person do with a 100 meg cap on an SQL database? I had to purge my entire indexing table so that I still have room on this stupid site for everything to keep functioning, and trust me, I don't get a whole hell of a lot of traffic here.

I've run into the same shit with some other crappy companies, like credit card companies, magazines, and pretty much anything that's subscription based. Once again, here's a hint: I feel I need to be redundant and repeat myself: Instead of making it difficult for people to bail on your bullshit and nearly useless service, work on making your stuff suck less.

I've been meaning to do a tremendous number of updates and build a new theme from scratch, but I've been holding off while I get this hosting issue resolved. Hopefully some of this aggravating drek will resolve itself next week, although my entire life thus far has geared me towards anticipating further disappointment and disatisfaction with pretty much any company I deal with.

Which is good, because it means I have the mental fortitude to handle a pretty large truckload of failure from people and businesses I have to deal with.

This daily does of cynicism has been brought to you courtesy of 1and1 internet host, Sirius/XM satellite radio, and Hartford Toyota. May you all rot in hell for sucking. Oh yeah, and IE7: you suck too. And Apple; you also suck. I like the iPhone 4 a lot, and I don't give a fuck that it can lose some signal if you poke the proverbial soft spot in its proverbial malformed infantile skull, but you're still raging assholes for scaming people with that fucked up signal algorithm all these years and trying to kill off flash and lying about the real motives behind it. Oh, and people who develope fully flash based websites: You're fucking clueless. Flash was never intended for such a fucktarded usage. Way to break browsing continuity, douchebags.

Who else can I rant about?

Ok, soft targets now. Democrats: go fuck yourselves. Republicans: go fuck yourselves, twice. Teapartiers: first go fuck yourselves, then kill yourselves. Glenn Beck: I hope you go blind, you pasty faced mutant. Mainstream Media: you suck, and you're spineless; Rolling Stone magazine owned your worthless asses. Fox News: you suck, you're completely fucking delusional, and like it or not you tools are mainstream media, you fucks just cater to the lowest common denominator of media consumers.

Hmm... who am I forgetting?

Well, lots of people and companies and such. I think that's good enough for now though.

ETA: Almost forgot, Andrew Breitbart is a true scumbag. I hope he gets raped in prison some day for his lies and scams. There are enough problems in this country without schmucks like him manufacturing fake racial tension.

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Oh yeah, the picture! I dunno, I was trying something new with perspective and mashing different cultural style elements together. I think it's actually a pretty shit pose now that I look at it a few weeks after drawing it, but the character has potential.

Lots of random bullshit to talk about this week. I'll start with the computer stuff: CS5 has been released, and I've been toying around with it quite a bit. I'm almost certainly going to get the entire design package, which will set me back a pretty penny, but I think it'll be a good investment.

However, it's not all rainbows and kittens and happy sunshine stuff. There are some issues, and things I'm not pleased with, but the overall result is positive.

Photoshop CS5 is the big dog out of the deisgn package I'll be using most of all, followed by Indesign and Flash, and hopefully Dreamweaver to make site updates smoother and less stressful. Pretty much everything on this site was built using Drupal and edited the hard way with notepad and tearful prayers to the pantheon of web computer gods known as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 that they'll all take a liking to my work and see fit to display it properly. 99.99% of the time one of these fickle asshole deities decides he's on the rag and scorns my pathetic mortal attempts to please all of them at once, and I curl up in the fetal position and wish for a quick death.

So, anyway, I'm hoping the fact that Dreamweaver integrates with common CMS's (like Drupal) will help.

Anyway, back on Photoshop CS5: It's good. It's got really slick features, severalof which I'll probably never use. Content aware fill is some sort of fickle black magic that looks to be awesome for photographers, but rarely useful for us digital painter types.

Puppet Warp is cool and I'm fairly certain that there will be good uses for it, I'm just not quite certain what yet... at least as far as my work goes.

The Blender Brush is my new Photoshop crush, as it were. I like it, although I recognize that it's got some peculiar behaviors and limitations. Even so, after playing around with it quite a bit (and using it on the girl in the pic above) I think it might be perfect for my personal workflow style. It behaves oddly with multiple layers, but I think as long as you're aware of it it'll be good. The old school blur and smudge tools were about as useless as tits on a bull, as the saying goes, so this is a good improvement. People coming from a Painter 11 or Paint Tool SAI background will probably dislike it (and my internet research seems to bear that out), but for those of us who got started in Photoshop it's a good addition to add to the arsenal.

The last bit is the Bristle Brushes. This is where my disappointment mainly lies. The Bristle Brushes map each brush bristle as a 3D object that dynamically moves and shifts based on pressure, tilt, rotation, and interaction with adjacent bristles. It's the best 'real' bristle simulator available; light-years ahead of other similar products from Painter. However, they're obscene CPU hogs. They lag terribly, even on a current higher end system like my desktop (Phenom 2 black Quad core). The only solution so far is to make the bristles short and stubby and work close so that you don't overtax the CPU and GPU on the redraw. I actually made the girl's hair above using one of the new bristle brushes. I like them, but I feel that they can't possibly be that processor intensive. I'm hoping Adobe will patch them or do something to tame these hungry bastards, because they're quite fun to use.

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Ok, enough tech talk stuff. My next topic is my garage: It's full of shit. Not literal shit, but donations for a charity tag sale that's going to be held on my front lawn. See, I work with local animal rescue groups, and our biggest fund raiser is tag sales that we run a couple times a year. Lots of people donate stuff left over from their own tag sales or that's just laying around in their garage and get a nice tax write off.

The problem is that some people have an over inflated sense of how much their cast off junk is worth. This is tough, because you don't really want to alienate people making a charitable donation of any type.

But, god damn, some of this stuff is incredible. I mean, really, I can't sell a dirty crushed plastic child's Easter egg basket. Also, no one wants your old skis. I don't care that you paid hundreds of dollars for them so you could tear up the slopes back in the day; they damn things do not sell. Also, keep your old printers. I've got boxes of printers that I'm going to wind up dumping off at an electronics recycling center. Seriously now.

I also don't need a broken golf putter, dismembered GI Joes, or a lone baby shoe with no match. Also, no one really wants a hundred pounds of worn out Spongebob Squarepants memorabilia or Teddy Ruxpin tapes.

And if you do feel compelled to drop this stuff off, please do a rough inventory ahead of time, rather than opening every box at our place and photographing and cataloging it while we wait around for your distracting sense of nostalgia to wear off.

Also, no, you can't have my riding mower or snow blower when tag sale time comes. They ain't for sale, which is why they're hidden inside the garage behind a closed door.

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Anyway, I notice that I tend to do these entries with three topics merged together. I have no idea why, I just sort of like combining three ridiculous and generally unrelated topics together. So there, take that.

No one who ever had to buy a toilet auger was happy about it. Yet another thing, along with Preparation H, Jock Itch cream, and home HIV tests that you rarely see people carrying to the checkout counter with a smile on their faces.

Anyway, this should give you a good idea of the sort of week I'm having and why I've been sort of inactive.

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In other news, however, I CAN'T WAIT FOR CS5! I think I'm going to go all out and get the design package this time. It's expensive as hell, but there's so much good and useful stuff in there that I think I can justify the expense. At least it's a tax write off for my business, so it's not a total sucker punch in the wallet, but I'm still looking at dropping over a grand on the entire thing. And that's after some upgrade discounts for already owning a current Adobe product. I need/want Indesign and Photoshop at a bare minumum, and that would set me back nine hundred alone since I don't own any version of Indesign yet, so I might as well spend a little more and get the whole shebang.

The new Dreamweaver actually supports CMS's like Drupal (what this site runs on) so I should be able to actually get the themes beaten into working order the way I want without having to resort to live testing anymore.

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The other thing I'm excited about is putting out an art book, thus the need for Indesign. I've used a trial version of older versions and loved the hell out of it, and current on-demand print companies actually manage to produce good quality stuff. I took a course from Schoolism on self publishing, and learned that I absolutely do not want to publish my own book through traditional channels. Yes, I could make more money, but I would have no time left for anything else. I've already got enough problems balancing my side projects and creative hobbies with a full time job as it is, so I can accept making a little less to do the on demand thing. It's the same reason why I went with Cafepress for shirts and swag instead of making, marketing, selling, and shipping all that shit myself.

I've had a few people say I should just pirate the software since it's so damn expensive, but I have to admit, ever since I started creating intellectual property, my opinions on digital piracy and I.P. have changed a bit. Hell, i don't even download music torrents anymore. I'd feel like a hypocritical douchebag if I bitched about people using my creations without permission and then doing the same unto others. Doesn't look too good for a registered business to pirate software either.

Yep, it's NEW COMPUTER TIEM!! YAY!!!

So, I do pretty much all of my artwork on my tablet now, and my desktop has been relegated to the purpose of gaming and web browsing, and maybe some other stuff now and then. Mostly, games.

Problem with this is that you can't play games if the computer is a piece of shit. Well, not new games anyway. So it was time for an upgrade; it's been about three years and change since my last update, and it was high time to get something that works and can do stuff again. My wife needed a new machine as well, since hers is a piece of crap even worse than what I've been using.

So I hopped on newegg and ordered up a whole truckload of parts to build our new computers, since doing it that way can save a person hundreds of dollars and ensure that you get the best parts available and that the manufacturers don't skimp and give you crappy memory or a junk motherboard.

This practice is fine, unless something comes in DOA.

Yep, sure enough, there was a dead motherboard in the batch.

For those of you who've never put your own computer together, it's hard to explain the unbelievable aggravation levels that can be created when something goes wrong. See, debugging failed computer parts can be a pretty mysterious process, and there are sharp pointy metal fins on every god damn thing you'll be working with. It's sort of like automotive maintenance, only it's nearly impossible to tell if something is damaged just by looking at it. And if something is obviously dead from looking at it you've probably had to disable your smoke alarm and open the windows to air out the evil purple smoke of electronic death from your living space.

I'm not a person who handles frustration well; at least not form machines. Like I've said before, I expect people to disappoint me horribly, but machines should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal. (HAHA superior! LOL!!). If you've never been so frustrated that you find yourself doubled over, feebly pounding on the case while tears stream down your face, begging it to 'Just work!! for fucks' sake WHY WON'T YOU WOOORRRRRK!!!!' then you've obviously not been doing this long.

Anyway, this time was just like the last time, and the time before that, and I wasted many hours debugging hardware and swapping parts in and out and leaving bits of valuable flesh all over the sharp jagged projections of the computer case. The motherboard is still en route, so hopefully the replacement will work.

The good news is that my wife let me use the working one to play games and putz around, since I don't think she could possibly tolerate me moping and grumbling for the next week or so as I wait for the replacement part to ship.

Initially I went into this whole windows thing with a hint of optimism that I fully expected to have crushed and ground to dust beneath Bill Gates' vicious dream-crushing boot heel.

However... I have to say... it pretty much went smoothly.

Now, I put this copy on my tablet, since that's what I do all my art on, and that's what really needed a bit of a boost to get running more smoothly. As mentioned before, I was really hoping for the performance boost from a 64 bit OS, which, quit frankly, has materialized more or less as promised.

So it's taken me about two and a half days to get up to 100% functionality again. And a huge portion of that time (nearly a day) was spent with me trying to track down exotic tablet drivers (I had to use Vista 64 drivers to get some tablet buttons to work).

Two days to get a fresh OS installed and port all of my important files and get all the hardware and software I need working has got to be a record for me, as far as microsoft products go. Not just a small improvement; I think it used to take me weeks to get everything cobbled back together in the past.

The performance gain is huge as well. Granted, a big part of that may simply be from going to 64 bit from 32 bit, and using almost all 64 bit software now. That also let me use my full 4 gigs of RAM (rather than 3.12), so I can't really say how this would stack up against Vista 64 performance wise.

I also finally got around to plopping that new hard drive I bought way back when in this thing, giving me an extra 140 gigs to fill up with garbage. The new drive runs sort of hot though, which causes me a little concern, but so far so good.

I do have a few complaints though, so it's not all puppydogs and rainbows.

1. I want my old "Show Desktop" button back, you bastards! They moved the god damn thing to the right side of the screen with a tiny icon now, rather than the old left side one we're all used to. Of course, someone already wrote a utility to insert a little .exe that does the exact same thing, so it's sort of resolved, even though I shouldn't have to go through hoops to get it.
2. Let me pin what I want, god damnit. Pinning is a weird new sort of concept that I do like; it's sort of a merging of the old taskbar with the quick launch bar, and it's actually done fairly well and is *gasp* almost intuitive. For some reason Microsoft has seen fit to only let you pin links to .exe's though; you can't pin a folder or link or anything. This is dumb, in my opinion, although there are convoluted tweaks/hacks to get it to pin anything. They should just put in an option to allow users to pin whatever the hell they want, although I can see how non-savvy users might get completely befuddled by it. If they change this, this would actually resolve issue one.
3. I can't think of anything else right now. I feel that I should have more than two gripes, this being a Microsoft product and all, but that's all I've come up with so far. I guess that's a testament to Microsoft's efforts to get past the well deserved drubbing they got over Vista.

On some level I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for something to go catastrophically wrong, because Microsoft has conditioned me to have that Pavlovian response when working with their products, but so far, so good.

I think I'll wind up making a post about optimizing Photoshop CS4 for Windows 7, especially from a tablet/notebook perspective.

The image there is an evil Horgle Slug, some sort of space vermin I made up and drew today. Rainy days are nice, because I don't get any glare on my tablet screen when I'm drawing during lunch while chillin' in my pickup. Saw the new Star Trek last night, which was pretty damn good, so I'm in a sci-fi mood, rather than wacky fantasy like normal.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

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In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

At the very core of my being, I think I'm more of an engineer than an artist. I love designing and building things. I tinker and assemble stuff, and I have a deep appreciation for science and all things technical. I possess an analytical mind that's allowed me to learn multiple programming languages more or less self taught, with the occasional tutorial from friends and a day class here and there paid for by work.

The one thing I really, really hate though, is debugging. Debugging makes me fucking crazy. Debugging makes me want to throw my keyboard at a wall, snap a DVD-ROM in half, and use the jagged edges to slash my jugular so I can bleed out into the hateful gaping chasm that is the open case of my dysfunctional PC.

...ok, that might be a little extreme, but you get the point.

I think part of the problem with being self taught is that I have these odd spotty gaps in my knowledge; in particular good debugging techniques. I'm a hell of a lot better now than I used to be, but that's only through hours and hours of painful swearing and tears.

As much as I love tinkering, I have a very short fuse when it comes to machines or programs that are misbehaving. See, I expect people to piss me off, so I have a pretty long fuse when it comes to dealing with other homo sapiens. Machines, however, should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

As far as actual updates go (rather than whining and ranting), I'm nearly done building the new Steamvolt website. I still need some new graphics and minor tweaking, but I did manage to build this massive PHP script that should ensure that the only thing I'll ever need to do when I add a new comic page is to add the page number and chapter number, and the code will build all the rest. The debugging sucked, as it usually does, but at the end of the day I got the sucker working.

Kind of makes me want to pick up a wrench, jump on top of it, and roar in victory like a frenzied howler monkey.

So I've got a few things going on now. Nothing major, but, well, you know, stuff.

First: I've added a captcha to my site, forcing all of these fucking mindless hard-on medicine bots to do math or piss off. This means all of you need to do basic math to post on this site. If you can't do basic math, I probably don't want to talk to you, so whatever.

Second: I like radial blur. I used it to get the wings on that creepy Butcher Faerie up there to look all...blurry... and it worked exactly the way I wanted it the first time I used it. That' pretty rare; usually this sort of stuff takes a lot of trial and error.

Blur is a tricky thing in photoshop. I've seen a LOT of artists who are just starting to get a handle on it overdo blur to the point of irritation. It's sort of like drinking; use in moderation or you'll get all fucked up. Personally, I go the other way, being a near teetotaller as far as the blur function goes. It doesn't integrate well with my style unless it's used very sparingly. But radial blur has some nice potential for motion in it, so I'm probably going to sit down and really hack at it a bit and see what it can do.

Another interesting thing about the wings on this dude; they're wasp wings. Usually I just make shit up as I go, but this is one rare case where I used a direct photographic reference to make something. There's a few spots where they're off from real wasp wings, and some of the lines are a bit over-emphasized, but anatomically those are exactly what wasp wings look like.

Also, I am eating cream of broccoli soup for lunch, and eet eez deelishis! :dance:

It's not all that often that a relatively small upgrade is worth the cash... but in the case of Photoshop CS3, I'll make an exception. The new interface and the general feel of the thing are soooo much smoother and more intuitive than in CS2. It's pretty awesome.

So to test it out, I sketched out some random pseudo-anime broad with red hair. Yeehaw.