[080204]
Today’s update is another illustration and there should be one more coming this cycle if it ever gets done. But that isn’t looking too likely with the crap I gotta do this week. So it’ll probably be a comic next week, then the final illustration. Or that’s the plan. But we know how plans go… And again, for those of you with a DeviantART account and feel like generously leaving a comment or favorite (yeah right, again), here is a link.
This illustration succeeds C071120 as what I consider my best piece. Compared to C070211 full year ago, it’s definitely an improvement. It’s actually the first time I’ve done a (relatively) high contrast piece since the C060729. The current picture and the one last week are attempting to refine the application of reflected, or background colors onto surfaces of differing color; I guess it has met some mild success. Either way, both recent paintings turned out pretty good in the end.
I very much intend to one-up this week’s illustration with the next one, but I fear that won’t be the case. It’ll be a tough one and I already gave up on a hard one recently so things aren’t really boding well. The Yuki painting was actually supposed to be a step down with respect to lineart; it’s probably sheer dumb luck it turned out decently, unlike my last attempt. Usually pointed attempts at exceeding the quality of a previous work fail miserably. I had a case in point, but I deleted all traces of the lesser work from the internets. So case in point nonetheless. Anyways, the next one will involve water. That’s why it’ll either be made of much awesome or much fail.
I’m upgrading my process to use OpenCanvas 4.03. There isn’t too much of a point here, I’ll elaborate if I stick to it or after a certain comic comes up. Usually I’m very much not an active adopter of later technology: I didn’t move away from Windows 98 until the year this site went up (2004?) and I intend to skip Vista altogether (and hope very much that 7 is an improvement (read: doesn’t take up fuckin 15GB – although I haven’t tried to run a trimmed Vista installation w/h vLite)). Hell, I’d probably have stuck with my C400/CpT if my sister didn’t initially break the 500m. The leading edge of technology is an expensive and troublesome place to be. Albeit a place made of much win.
Speaking of which, I recently sold my Athlon XP 3200+ on ebay. It went for $125. In my opinion this is a simply amazing figure for a chip that was released almost five years ago. The Pentium M in my 500m – of roughly the same age – goes for nothing. I’m guessing that this is because the 3200+ cost $460 when it was released, with the Pentium M 1.4 was the second slowest standard voltage Pentium M ever. The 3200+ also holds the distinction for being the fastest Socket A processor ever made. But that doesn’t explain the reason why anyone would want this chip in this time and age. A Pentium Dual-Core and a cheap motherboard will combo at Frys (not even Newegg, Frys!) for about the same price and it will rape, and I mean 3-4 times faster rape, the 3200+. And it’s not like the 3200+ runs any cooler either. I’m either missing something or people are just dumb. Maybe there are CPU collectors?
Nonetheless, I wasn’t going to give up my server just so I could get a quick hundred bucks. So I trolled ebay for a bit and bought an Athlon XP 2500+ based on the same Barton core. At 1.83GHz (11×166), the 2500+ is about 0.30GHz slower than the 3200+ which translates into a negligible performance difference, especially in the case of a relatively lightly used general purpose server. And oh yeah, it cost $15. Now the interesting thing is that at 1.83GHz, the 2500+ actually undervolts better than the 3200+ at 2GHz (10×200); I can run the former chip stably at the lowest voltage my AN7 allows me to. It’s real nice cuz I turn the fan under 1000RPM (basically to the lowest the mainboard will allow) and still have the chip run ~43 degrees on full load. Why did I not try running the 3200+ at 1.83? I don’t know. Let’s not ask hard questions.
With the new case the whole rig is practically inaudible from my bed. That’s real nice when I sleep, though the sound of a few slow fans running is more soothing than pure silence. Not that the latter isn’t golden. Speaking of my bed, I finally put a surge protector on the west side of my room with my last reorganization which allows me to finally run a power cord up to my bed. Which allows to me bring a laptop into bed (and not have it run on battery cuz I hate running on battery if I don’t have to). And let me say this: a laptop in bed is totally not what it’s cracked up to be. Even with my 500m resting on a clipboard, the bed/me system starts becoming uncomfortably warm after about an hour. It’s great for a few episodes of anime before I sleep, but definitely not prolonged use.
What’s interesting though is that it’s actually the memory and wifi that heat up the most; the processor stays relatively cool. I was wondering why this was and my friend brought up the obvious answer that the wifi and the memory are what’s being used more. Cuz playing a lousy .avi isn’t even going to bump the relatively weak Pentium M out of it’s lowest speedstep state. I’ll try disabling the wifi next time. Too bad you can’t disable the memory…
My bed itself is actually dying on me; there’s a crack forming on a rather critical beam, and I think I’m going to have to do some DIY to prevent it from growing larger. But we’ll save that for another time. This is a fuckin long entry and I need to get up at 9.
