[110709]

Well, a slightly different kind of fanart from me this time. I liked J’s idea of doing the character sketches, but I tried to put a spin on it. Kind of going off of what I said in d325, I’m trying something like balancing between my style, their style, and the character, but as with any of these sorts of experiments, the success or failure is debatable.

Anyway, this is Phryne from Fractale. I was going to try to be real pro and hash out a bunch of these real fast, but me being real slow coupled with an unexpected hardware failure (I suppose those are usually unexpected), has led to only this one being complete or even in progress. This is also the first non-full-page colored anything I’ve done for… well, a long time.

I last discussed equipment shuffling very recently in d313, but even the best plans of mice and men…

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[110619]

Well, I told J that I would match him a sketch for every sketch he does, so this is for day two.

This is a redesign of an old design. There were a couple ships I designed back in elementary school that had propellers for whatever silly reason, but it was all very spindly and out of scale. This is a rescaling and ironing out of those designs.

Yesterday I was talking about the wildcard in my hardware master plan: the last time I talked about my storage subsystem was in d243, almost two years ago. Little has changed since then; my “important” stuff is still triplicated across three desktop drives, with the remainder of the drives being filled with less important, non-duplicated stuff (lots and lots of anime).

The best set of rules I’ve come across for backing up data is a “1 2 3″ kind of rule: 3 copies, 2 media, 1 off-site location. So basically you want three copies of your stuff on two different kinds of media (ie HDD and CD or DVD) with one copy somewhere else (technically it’s like 3-2-2, but I digress). Now that I have a DVD sent taken to Hong Kong every year, in addition to the three HDD copies, I’d say I’m pretty decent on the backup front.

For the HDD subsystem, I’m currently using these hot-swap bays, which I’ve been using… since 2007, obviously. I wanted to be able to only buy bare drives, but I also didn’t want to have to handle them directly. I also didn’t want to buy standalone external drives because USB 2.0 is slow as crap relative to the size of even a 500GB hard drive, and you need a power brick. And I hate power bricks.

One issue I had considered was the need to keep buying new caddies every time I bought a new drive. It’s cost overhead (like $20 for a bay and caddy) and there’s the fear that they might stop selling this exact make and model of bay and caddy in the not-so-far future. And if I wanted to switch bay and caddy systems, it’s impossible to get rid of the old caddies and bays at anywhere near the original cost. I glossed over this issue by saying I’d only buy so many caddies and bays and just upgrade the size of the hard drive in each caddy as drives got bigger, but even for “less important” data, I’m becoming afraid of committing like a full 2TB of data onto a single drive. 500GB to 1TB seems to be fine.

Without the desktop I don’t have the bays connected to my “main” machine anymore (the T400), which renders my entire storage subsystem impractical. To access the drives, I’ll need to get USB/SATA adapters, and worst of all, power bricks. So something has to be done in this space, I’m just not sure what it is.

[110618]

This month on Nonsense Wars: J makes a post!

Anyway, I have to start grasping at straws now because I haven’t actually drawn anything substantial for the past half a year(!). Hopefully that’ll change soon, but when I read J’s “one post a day” comment, I lol’ed. I’ve been able to sit down and do some doodles recently, but just not much. At all. So at least for today’s post, no real new content. Since Pieces is finally completely posted, I’ve decided to compile and post my lovely Pieces storyboard.

The above picture is a (gasp) “thumbnail” that you can click. The actual thing is 50% of the real thing and still 1.5MB, so beware 56k’ers (if there are, God forbid, still any out there). The thumbnail is 33% of 50% and still 277K. There are 24 “pages” here; while the actual story is only 20 pages, the first two pages in each *.jnt file are notes for me to keep track of what the crap I was doing.

Looking back on this it seems that, for the most part, the actual pages more or less followed their storyboard counterparts to the dot… or were completely different. Not much in the middle. The worst pages (a46 ranks among the worst if you ask me) are apparently those that didn’t have anything concrete on the storyboard and just “this has to happen here” notes. Thus in general, the storyboard seems to have helped, but I suppose it’s more of a “knowing what the heck you’re going to do” helps.

That being said, I’m not sure what I’m doing next with regard to comic, but it’s not going to have a storyboard.

Changing gears a bit; yesterday I did a major cleanup and some equipment shuffling.

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[110413]

This is, I think, by far the longest we’ve gone without an update since high school (about a month since the last update). I’ve more or less given up on kicking J to update, and am just updating when he does. Obviously I’m just taking the blame off me. So we’re not really officially dead yet, just very much in limbo as these sorts of things generally turn out to be.

… and so here’s the second last page of Pieces. As expected, I still haven’t actually drawn anything significant since then, so in a way I’m glad we have this “break”. Those paintings I mentioned a month ago never happened either. I’m not too sure why I didn’t have the time over break (for all the past breaks I can remember I’ve always had the time and inspiration to do at least one) – I had the sketches and all ready – but it just didn’t happen.

Instead (well maybe not outright instead of painting), I replaced my trusty E6400 with a T400 in the same spontaneous way I replaced my TC4200 with my X200T.

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[110207]

And in today’s comic, Dogma class SHDs. The bridge is actually modeled after that of the Declaration class airships in the older Directorate storyline, though within the context of the story, the reverse is most likely the case. Only a couple more of Pieces to go and I have to think of something else clever…

This week I finally took some pics to supplant my long delayed post about power line networking.

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