Wow…. Halloween is coming. And I'm working that night. I better hope I don't have to deal with drunkards walking the streets going door to door and “Trick or Treating” for beer like they tried to last year (called the police on them that time)… -_-

so i'll be working on -2- costumes last minute this weekend, got a halloween parade to march in. i'm gonna need a lot of tea.

but it'll be worth it to see my brother wear a nyan cat costume

I had Friday off- woo! Public holiday; Queen's Birthday- Not that her Birthday was on that day, it's just a public holiday the state government can move around as it likes. This year it was because a commonwealth heads of government meeting in my city, where apparently some important pieces of British law were announced:
Now the eldest female in the royal line can become head of state and the monarch is allowed to marry a catholic.

…

Anyway, I missed out on the whole day because I had a nightmare migraine: vomiting, nausea, nightmare head-pain… It was horrible. So instead of having 3days off, I only have the normal two now :(

Heh… went and got my reservation for ME3 today. Especially after seeing gameplay video of the new moves you can pull off. Especially the OMNI-BLADE. Yeah. It's a blade made out of a hologram. And you can actually sneak up on your opponent, pull him out of cover and drive that blade into him. Um… among other things… er… see for yourself.

Mass Effect 3 Gameplay Mission- Part 1

Rokully wrote:
“but it'll be worth it to see my brother wear a nyan cat costume”

Wait… NYAN CAT?!? That evil virus is spreading! I have to find a way to halt its spread before…

*finds himself watching Nyan Cat again…*

Christmas in October???
So, it's snowing here in NY, the earliest snowfall I can remember. It's SO wierd watching AMC's horror fest while pretty snow's falling. Michael Meyers during a blizzard? Feels so out of whack!
Maybe they should've done a slasher movie in a cold-weather place…“Freddy's Nightmare In the Alps” or “Jason in Utah”…be just as wierd as it is today.
Swoobie
The True Masters Chronicles
http://bit.ly/oViqt5

Snow? weird, been sunny here again. shorts and T-shirt weather, which is odd for england at the end of october.

I think we swapped. GIVE ME MY SUN (T-SHIRT AND SHORT WEATHER) BACK MISTER!
Swoobie
The True Masters Chronicles
http://bit.ly/oViqt5

Genejoke wrote:
Snow? weird, been sunny here again. shorts and T-shirt weather, which is odd for england at the end of october.

Ugh… I wish I had your weather right now. I've had to cut vegetation around my house during the day in the rain. Grass grows really fast out here. O_O

So I went outside yesterday..had fun, spent money and was wearing a failed costume. I was a hipster in disguise (a striped hood and wearing a leather jacket over it) but it failes 'cause it was missing the pretentious glasses -.-

You lucky peeps. We don't traditionally do Halloween here. People have been starting to try and do stuff more and more over recent years, but it's still just a rather naff import, sort of like when you see them “celebrating” Christmas in China- a little embarrassing and slightly wrong.

It's only kids that can really do it here and even then it's pretty weak. :(

———–

It's that time of year again. I have to do my taxes. -_-
You know you're an adult when you have to do your fricken taxes!!!! I should've done them weeks ago… tomorrow is the very last day I can leave it to. Lucky I can do it all online these days.

I fricken HATE taxes!
-I don't mind actually paying them, because that's all pretty well done painlessly in sales and pay deductions, what I hate is doing the returns because it reminds me of filling in all those torturous forms and tests and exam sheets I had to do back in highschool and I really detested that stuff.

Got a new computer yesterday… and I have already managed to break it! I was trying to partition the hard drive, and to make a long story short I have a good 1TB of disk space I can't even access! I called an IT expert (i.e. my father) and he's completely stumped.
It made me kick a chair, and now my toe hurts…

Maybe you need to just reformat the partition? make sure it's in an nfts file structure.

Ugh… looks like I have to buy a new hard drive for this machine. The drive is already at its limit… most hard drives will only last for around 5 years. On the bright side, larger drives are cheaper now. Not that I need that much space…

1 bazillion exabytes is the only way to go Lonne! Srsly. >:|
Building my own speedy sooper machine will be my next project whenever I get around to getting a new laptop… I just love my current case so I want to gut it all out and start again, but if I do that I need a powerful replacement in the mean time…

———–
@ Gunwallace- LOVED that “THIS IS ENGLAND, NOT AMERICA” Fry and Laurie vid you liked to about Halloween :)
Perfection!

———–

Skoolmunkee is teh evil!

She never ever told me there was a new DLC for Mass Effect 2 available… That Arrival thing has been out since April or something and I never knew till last night. So instead of doing my taxes I had to jump in and do the mission! …I didn't complete it though, I realised at 1.30am that I was leaving my taxes a leeeeetle late. I ended up finishing on my taxes at 3.30 am. Not quite enough sleep after that I'm afraid. I am so fricken tired right now, early bed tonight!

Isn't Arrival (for Mass Effect 2) the DLC that links ME2 to ME3? I haven't decided on downloading it yet. I probably should do so along with every other DLC for Mass Effect 2 because every decision will probably be reflected in Mass Effect 3. I read the wiki for ME2 and find myself creeped out that a ton of fans requested that Tali and Garrus be love interests for the game. This seems to be parodied in Illium's Eternity (I think that's the name of the club/bar/lounge) with that Turian and Quarian talking. I'm beginning to find Samara interesting though…

Ugh… I feel sick at the moment. I was supposed to work on Magiversity and Magiversity Magical Campus Life, but instead I spent the last 5 hours in bed. Luckily my 2 days off this week will start tomorrow, so I'll have time to draw if I'm not feeling TOO sick. Still trying to decide on how to start the slice of life comic I'm attempting to try…

I'm so awfully tempted to make a parody video of Nyan Cat where Nyan Cat is suddenly grabbed from the stars (screaming “NYAAAAN!!! NYAAAAAANNNNN!! once off camera). The next scene isa guy holding the a strawberry Pop Tart with the hind legs and tail of Nyan Cat sticking out and his face covered in strawberry filling. He gulps down what's in his mouth, turns to the camera and says ”What?"…

Not that I could make a video anyway…

The talk of hard drives got me thinking, I only have six gig spare on my hard drive… that will go wuick, time to get a new one, 2TB I think, cheap enough and should be enough storage for my comic work…

I've built uplayers of portable hard drives and memory sticks so that I occasionally purge files onto back-up back-ups for long term storage and have the portables ready to go whereever I need to do my work.

I have gigs and gigs of space left over. Considering that the files for my last two comics are each over 15 GB got to keep moving files around as I create more stuff.

all of this PC talk – and I, too, was busy trying to update me ol machine for hours this weekend.

Finally have the OS up to snuff (screw windows 7, now tht I Finally have xp updated), but have realized that my CD/DVD burner is now only a CD burner, and needs to be replaced. I guess an external is the best way to go, since this PC is 6? years old.

anybody have some recommendations? or any stay-away-froms?

Ugh… this stinks. I've had to restart my computer a lot of times now because my secondary drive is failing rapidly and I'm trying to get as much data as I can off of it and onto my main drive. Too bad the drive becomes undetectable after being read from after a few minutes.
-_-

Took the wife to the doctor today (31 Oct) along with the wheelchair. Wouldn't you know the handicapped spot is taken by a car that a handicapped person shouldn't be driving? How can a HC person fit into a small red sportscar?

So I have to park in front and unload the wheelchair and the wife, park the car in a tight spot nearby and run back and open up the wheel chair and get her up the ramp. Once in I realized I forgot the papers so back out for the papers and the wife's handbag.

When leaving do you think a handicapped spot would have opened up for loading? No, a huge van is sticking out the opposite spot with no HC plates and there I am trying to back in to load everything. The doctor put the wife in air cats to sleep except the left ankle has incisions and the air cast irritated it and the wife was moaning in pain all night. Fortunately I went to bed around 1PM and slept through Halloween.

Slept like the dead. And I had a couple of whoop-ass dreams.

ayesinback wrote:
all of this PC talk – and I, too, was busy trying to update me ol machine for hours this weekend.

Finally have the OS up to snuff (screw windows 7, now tht I Finally have xp updated), but have realized that my CD/DVD burner is now only a CD burner, and needs to be replaced. I guess an external is the best way to go, since this PC is 6? years old.

anybody have some recommendations? or any stay-away-froms?

Any brand name USB connected drive should be ok, because they'll all have warranties and USB is the most universal connection… I got my mum an LG which is still working perfectly a year later, and I got my dad a Sony a year before that… I don't know how that's doing though since I haven't ever seen his computer setup and he's never told me how the burner is doing. -_-

everyone's without power still, but it sounds like it's starting to come back. found an applebees a few towns over to get an internet connection and a few mojitos then craw back in under the snow…friggin CT…but hell, it aint been so bad. kinda neat actually. ya see alot of people come together and spent more time with my department before i have to move away. i gotta say, i AM gonna miss it here.

Ugh… my hard drive wasn't failing at all. It was the motherboard!!! I removed the hard drive first, then started the computer up and… it didn't start. I started removing components one by one and here's what I find…

The IDE port (for the older IDE connected hard drives/CD/DVD drives is gone. The Video Slot (some special PCI slot) is also gone. And one of my memory slots (and the memory stick that it was connected to) is also busted. I have a SATA hard drive, but my computer won't boot with it now. ugh… I have no idea if my GeForce 8500GT is also damaged. I do know now that the drive I thought was damaged is still working as it's being used in my older computer.

The CPU is still functioning though. That's a good thing. Those chips can be pretty expensive.Thebustedmotherboard has its own built in video so I was able to verifythat. It's my video card I'm worried about. Sure the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) fan is running, but that's no way to determine if the card is still usable or not.T_T

Luckily I kept my previous machine in storage after I upgraded to the system that just broke. But now I"m running a far less the performance of the old one (half a core, 1000 ghz less CPU speed, and only a quarter of the memory of my old computer). Hopefully when I'm done setting everything up I can at least draw with this computer. -_-

Not a lot of games I can play with this machine. Athlon XP 2200+ (actual clockspeed at 1800), 655 mb RAM (not mathematically inclined, but I have 3 DDR with 256 MB each running in here), GeForce 6100 LE… The next few months are gonna be painful (that's how long it's gonna take me to gather the parts for an upgraded machine). Still, I just realized just how much I missed using my old case. Especially the two LED lit stripes on either side of the front and the LED lit fan (lit green, orange, red) on the cover with clear plastic, illuminating the innards of the machine. Hopefully once I've got my parts together I'll take the old power supply from the busted PC and use it in this case.

November 1st was the first day of Physical therapy for the wife and as suspected she was there two hours.

She said she'd be in and out in time for the cable guy to come to change our internet service. Nope. I was so wound up I took my anti-anxiety med before going to bed. Naturally I had one of my persecution dreams. I wasn't teased as a child, I was persecuted. And the nightmares always ramp it up. So I woke up thrashing around and kicking my wife in her injured leg. Ow. Hurt a lot for her and have you ever kicked one of those traction boots with your bare foot?

So we're changing our internet wireless server and it's supposed to be cheaper as Verizon was just increasing the rate and this one was cheaper and there's no contract. Except there are tons of little fees to pay in installation. They never tell you about these additional installation fees.

I hope that “cheap” service you're applying for has the same quality and speed as the more expensive service, Bravo. Makes me think of the time I heard that the more expensive optic cables performed better than cheaper ones… or something like that.

I'm finding out the hard way now… this old computer is having a hard time handling my drawing tablet. Sometimes it'll slow down more than I'd like. *sigh* yep… the next few months are gonna be painful. I'll probably get my upgrades in this order…

-the mainboard (one compatible with an AMD dual core 3800+ CPU). Preferrably with both IDE and SATA drive ports. Possibly some memory to go along with it since memory standards keep changing so fast and the memory I have now will probably be incompatible with it.

-A new video card if my PCI Express GeForce 8500 GT really is fried.

-More memory. Enough to bump up my system to 2 gigs or more.

-A larger SATA hard drive to use for data and installing games on.

I'd get Windows 7, but I'm going to wait ‘til a majority of apps that I use (especially games) no longer use Windows XP. Hopefully by then any bugs (known or otherwise) in Windows 7 will have been hammered out. Heh… in fact, the reason why I went from Windows 98 to Windows XP in the first place was because of the game Doom 3; that game can’t run on Windows 98…

I've played too much arkham city, the HUD is burnt on to my retina. During the day at work, I miss being able to deal with the irritating by dispatching a swift batarang to the chops.

Lonne, Windows 7 is worth it. It's way more stable than XP ever was. I think the “pro” version has compatability with most xp stuff…? Through emulation or something? But then you could always run XP on a virtual machine maybe and have your older programs on that?

…

OK, 1 news post done. Now on to the featured comic for tomorrow and then the Quackcast topic for the Saturday recording…

hmm… DD is a hell of a lotta work for us Admins, ‘specially when we’re doing all this for free… Hpefuly SKool has a good holiday and can recharge her batteries for when she gets back to DD again. :)

Haha, I actually have a “7 tips to get pregant” ad on my comic
One can only wonder why…

Oh and my external hard driwe is broken… fack!

Had a really awful nightmare last night. It was basically about Voldemort, which sounds a little silly, but it was definitely more graphic than anything that happened in the Harry Potter books. The worst part was that most of the dream was in my house, so when I first woke up(at 4am, nonetheless) it took longer to convince myself it wasn't real.