Oy!

Recently I purchased a new video card on eBay - sort of. Sort of, in that way that I paid for it over two weeks ago and HAVE YET to receive it. Payment via Paypal went through on Monday; shipping label gets printed on Friday; item doesn't even end up in the mail until two fucking days ago!

Now I'm sitting here on a quiet Memorial Day weekend sans a video card.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that I paid for Priority Mail?! What a douche bag. Priority to whom? Not him apparently. Paying $11 in shipping and not receiving your item for two weeks = bad fucking rating from me, asshole.

/rant

But on the brighter side, I've been drawing a lot more since I purchased my tablet. Ahem.



and ...

New toy updateroo

Man... wtf. Everything's been bad ass, but I've gotta rant a little bit about Pioneer. It seems that the new burner I have, the DVR-109, has had a few firmware upgrades. It also appears that this very same drive may replace the current generation of Superdrives in the coming G4s and G5s.

So someone explain to me why Pioneer hasn't posted Mac-compatible firmware upgrades as of this writing. Come on. The drive is even native under Tiger now, so there isn't any excuse for Pioneer not to simultaneously post both Windows and Mac versions.

Oh, and I refuse to go through the efforts of pulling this drive out of my machine and hooking it up to a PC just to upgrade the firmware. That's the lame solution many sites are proposing, and that's assuming one also owns or has access to a Windows PC in the first place.

Normally I wouldn't even care that much either, but the 1.40 firmware update seems to provide some pretty drastic performance and compatibility improvements. With that being said...

Hurry the fuck up, Pioneer. We're waiting.

New toys, new toys!

Having had a remarkably shitty day yesterday, I decided to spend money I didn't really have in hopes of amending some of the damage. A walk through Best Buy was what the doctor ordered. Before long, I was approaching a register with a new 16X dual-layer DVD burner and a Wacom Drawing Tablet.

I couldn't wait to get home. After I walked in the door, I was eager to get started; so I started with the burner.

Firstly: Oi. Without getting into the nitty gritty of it, the drive was in place and running two hours later. Most of the problems stemmed from getting the old drive out since the space it was wedged in barely allowed room for air.

Secondly, I'm a PowerMac user. I hadn't ever done any real tweaking to its insides so didn't realize I needed to remove the new drive's faceplate for it to clear the opening. When I went to open the drive for the first time, I heard it try to open. Nothing. Frustration took the guise of sweat on my brow as I again endeavored to get the piece of shit working.

Finally, I managed to get everything squared away. The tablet's installation was a breeze, and right away I labored to put it to good use. Here's the first sketch ...



Being a huge fan of James O'Barr's series, The Crow, I decided to whip up a little homage.

Anyhoo. Time to burn and learn s'more, kiddies.

Getting sick is lame

I'm sick right now. It sucks. Feels like a porcupine nestled its way into my throat while I slept and did some breakdancing. But besides all that, life sucks.

Actually, things have been pretty average - neither good nor bad being any better than the other - aside from some pointless female pseudo-drama.

Girls + random subject matter = fang-bearing conniption? So it would seem. And dear god I can only hope it won't always be the case.

This update is gonna be reaaaal short seeing as how I feel like giving up the ghost. A hot decanter of premium sake awaits.