Hello and how are ya? It’s time for me to do that blog thing! So let’s blog it up!
So anybody who visits the site on a regular basis will note that there were no updates on Wednesday through Friday. That’s because when I woke up on Wednesday morning my computer was unresponsive. I tried rebooting and my screen just said it wasn’t getting a signal. I wasn’t sure if the problem was the monitor, the RGB cable or the computer itself. By plugging my laptop (more on that later) into the monitor I was able to see that both it and the cable were functional. That meant there was something wrong with my computer. After work, I checked into things further and it looks like the fan on my integrated mother board/graphics card stopped working and the thing overheated and burned out. There was no coming back from this one. Joy.
On Wednesday evening, I set things up with Fab to go computer shopping over the weekend. On Thursday I went back to work and when I got home I had to experience life without a computer for the first time in years. Let me tell you, it wasn’t fun. I realized then how dependent I am on my computer for my entertainment.
On Thursday, I figured that I would just plays games and watch Youtube videos on my smart phone. Good plan. Only without a computer for my router to be plugged into, I wasn’t using my wi-fi, I was unwittingly using my phone data plan. Half of one episode of Tabletop on Youtube later I got a warning that I’d gone through 90% of my monthly limit. The limit which had reset that very day. So 31 days without being able to access the interwebz on my phone. Joy again.
On Friday, I had a flash…my laptop! Maybe if I plugged the router into it, I’d be able to get my wi-fi up and running, or at the very least, just compute on the laptop. Well wouldn’t you know that the laptop which had worked the previous morning no longer recognized that it had a hard drive. That was two dead computers in 24 hours. Did I say joy?
Years ago (2002 or so), when I was still into editing anime music videos, I bought an iMac because I thought it would be better for working on those videos. In one of life’s ironies, I ended up dropping the hobby shortly thereafter so my iMac has been mostly inactive for the past 10+ years. But these were desperate times. I plugged the router into it, turned it on and hoped for the best. And it worked! Huzzah! Only my iMac still runs on MacOS 9, which isn’t at at all optimized for internet use. I fiddled around a bit with it, but decided it wasn’t worth it. However, the good news was that with a computer for the router plugged in, I had my Wi-Fi back!
So I played a lot of HearthStone on my phone until Saturday when Fab I and I went to Best Buy to shop for a new computer. First things first, I bought a USB hard-drive enclosure for the hard drive from my dead desktop so I’d be able to recover all my personal files (and fulfill my need for an external hard drive) I then found a new desktop within my price range that was decent for my needs and brought it home, fully ready to set everything up and get back to a computerized life…Yeah there was another hurdle.
In a cost-cutting measure for the model I bought, Acer disabled the RGB port. That meant I had a computer and a monitor but no way to connect the two together. No problem! I just needed to run out and get an HDMI cable. So I biked out to Giant Tiger and purchased said cable…only to realize that my monitor didn’t support HDMI, only RGB and DVI (I really should have checked that before leaving). So back out I went. I knew from my previous visit that Giant Tiger didn’t have any DVI cables, so I went to my usual port-in-a-storm, Dépanneur Martel. They’ve got everything there: Food, gardening supplies, hardware supplies, and a variety of other things, including cables and adapters. I was able to find an HDMI to DVI cable and finally I was able to hook my computer up to my monitor. Success!
What came next was the tedious work of downloading and installing all the software I had on my old computer. I worked at that off and on from Saturday to today when I finally got Manga Studio Ex 4 and Photoshop Elements 8 up and running. I’m now back to how I was set up last Tuesday only on a stronger computer that doesn’t overheat when I watch Youtube videos and play computer games. All in all, I’m ahead except monetarily.
I’ve decided that rather than post everything that was supposed to go up last Wednesday through Friday, I’m going to treat things as though I took a one week vacation even though I managed to get all my usual drawing done. I will resume posting new material where I left off on Wednesday. In doing this, I’ll create a fourth buffer week of material. It’s the reward I’m giving myself for getting through this ordeal.
The forecast for tomorrow isn’t looking good. That means the Weird Al concert is in jeopardy. Neither Fab nor I are interested in making a trek to Montreal to have the concert rained out. We’ll be making our final decision tomorrow afternoon. We’ll see how that goes.
So that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.