Fellow Comicker – needs your help!

I know with my current computer problems I should concentrate on only myself, but we comic people gotta stick together. We’re a very underpaid crowd providing a service that is in high demand. 🙂 (I mean, if our stuff was mandatory to read we could charge more. But we can’t.)

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-pam-get-a-new-laptop

From what I’ve gathered, her laptop went kablooey and her whole work life is more centralized than I do mine. (This is why I prefer external hard drives.) She’s an award winning author and is offering signed copies of her books for you in exchange for the reward of her being able to make more nifty things for you to read.

Pass the word around! See what you can do to help! Let’s help a webcomicker out.

Operation Charlie (crosspost from Deviantart)

His old motherboard gave up the ghost last night. Fortunately we knew it was coming and was able to get another one ordered! So we’ve spent the past 3 days trying to get the new incarnation of Charlie up and running again. For 3 days Charlie has rejected the new motherboard – a Windows 7 issue. In the end I had to lose out on client contacts and important work files and do a complete install. Why am I not surprised.

My experience with Windows gets more and more negative the more they make it “secure”. And I fail to see how programming the OS to wig out over the smallest change does anything to stop would be Windows 7 thieves. A Microsoft employee asked me once, “Don’t you want to feel secure?” I was like, “I can take care of myself, thank you.” You see, my brand-new machine with my first copy of Windows 7 was so secure I had to call them that day to get permission to use my own computer and install a program I had to use for the job I had at the time. And no, the guy couldn’t tell me how to give myself permission. I had to let him INTO my computer by a backdoor program and let him sniff around my files. Do I feel secure? Hell no. The more I use Windows, the less I feel that way. I feel kicked, used, stifled, treated like a criminal, and extorted.

But anyway, here I sit with a new incarnation of Charlie. He’s supposed to be a leaner, meaner 3d rendering machine now. I’m wondering how many threads in Luxrender I can go to now. 4 was my limit before. Dare I go to… 5? I mean, how do I know how many is too many? I have no way of knowing this. And inquiring minds wanna know.

I’m a day or two away from being completely set up again. I’m eager to get it done, get back to work

A definite bright side to this is when we called Adobe to get my licenses released (heaven forbid I just handle my own stuff) the guy was so rude to me and my husband, hubby hung up and contacted a rep online. They gave me free copies of more up to date programs. I’ve been using CS2 all this time. So, if what they gave me works: it’s a win!