The Midwest Teen Sex Show. A comic and informative view of safe sex and sex education in a time when half the school districts in America are teaching "Abstinence Only". It's happy, it's healthy, and it's funny as hell. Got a kid between ten and fourteen? Park them in front of the computer with this link and then get the hell out of the room.
Oh, and incidentally? Not even remotely safe for work. But holy shit, this -- this is the reason the internets were invented. Go. See. Now. Er, after work.
So the new iMac arrived today, and I have to say I'm pretty smitten.
Setup was surprisingly painless, and the brain transplant from my old machine went pretty well, once I prized the old hard drives out of the chassis and got them into the external housing. Well, that's not entirely true. Munin, my Applications and boot disk, survived the process and gave up its data like a champ, but Hugin, my older creative drive, appears to have given up the ghost -- or at least is not allowing my current machine to talk to it. I'm sure there's a way to get in; I may not be seating it correctly or I may need to fiddle with the jumper-thingies, but it says that all four pins empty makes it a slave, and all four pins are empty, so who knows. Anyway, I'm not panicking because I'd just done a recent backup, and was able to get everything off the big house drive. Let's hear it for anal retentive backup processes! Woo!
Upgrading the RAM was also easier than I expected, and I kept one hippie-bare foot on my metal filing cabinet the entire time I installed it, whee. Right now I've got as many programs running as my ADD can stand, and the processor isn't even sweating, so that means it should keep me happy for quite a while to come. I;m really digging the giant screen, too -- I finally have enough room for all my palettes and stuff. And the hard drive! Ooo la la! 300 gigs means I don't have to worry for a while at least, and when I need more space, well, I already have this handy external housing I bought, so I'll just go pop for a nice big internal drive and use that for my backup.
So yeah. Currently working on a few overdue tweaks for the Seekrit Project site, which will likely keep me busy for the next full week. See you on April Fool's Day!
So I'd been maxing out my computer these last couple of weeks, working on the Seekrit Project. I had been gonna buy a new computer as soon as the new printings paid all the way out (they still haven't), and so I decided it'd be a better idea to buy some new RAM and see if I could get my system to limp along for another couple years. It'd started flaking on me; photoshop had to be re-installed, and I was starting to worry about drive failure as well, things being almost seven years old and all.
So I bought the ram from Ebay, and it arrived this evening. I put it in.
And I promptly fried my motherboard.
Oh yes, I've tried everything. She won't power up, not in the slightest. I even stumped Tier 2 support at Apple, to the point where the nice lady was telling me to try googling for the answers. My only other option is to drive it to the Ann Arbor Apple Store and spend 4 hours and $50 in fuel, and another $100 in Genius Bar fees to find out the same information. Yes, I've well and truly done it, and with only a single week to go before the new series is set to launch.
Fuck.
So, I think I'm going to order a new iMac tonight. While I *possess* the money to buy a tower, everything I've read or been told (including Paul's firsthand experience at the Design Center) tells me that I can get by, handily, with just an iMac. This is quite good news, because it saves me between $700 and $1000 depending on the system I buy.
Here's hoping the data's still intact on my internal drives so that I can just hork it down onto the new model.
Blearrrrgh. the rest of the week's going to be mighty interesting.
So it's Sunday, and I'm finally vertical again.
Friday and Saturday were taken up with this year's St. Patrick's Day marathon, where I played the role of Emergency Backup Bodhranista with local band Whiskey Before Breakfast, and I'm still in the process of recovering.
Friday at 5pm, we opened at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, where we noshed on bread and wine and played to a enthusiastic crowd. As soon as that was over we were packed up and headed out to Fiddler's Hearth, where we closed the place out, and discovered that South Bend has the happiest, nicest, most conscientious drunks an Irish band could hope to have for an audience. Ironically, the Fiddler's Hearth audience also had just about the best sense of rhythm and tempo I've ever seen at a performance, drunk or sober. They must've all been Notre Dame music students or something, and clapped along a deafening accompaniment to our sets and songs. It was rowdy as all get-out, but entirely in a positive, audience participation way, where we had about a dozen guys madly jigging away and shouting for more tunes when we finally knocked off.
We rolled back into town at around 3am, fell asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillow, then were up and running the next morning at 11am to play at O'Duffy's Pub after the Kalamazoo Irish Parade. That was a great gig, too -- especially for me, because a trio of bekilted Scottish drummers liked my bodhranning enough to buy me a drink (Relax, mom. It was before noon, so I had a Virgin Mary). No sooner had we played our last tune than we were out the door, headed for Papa Pete's and a private party. Things were going so well that we didn't stop for a break and played a straight two-hour set, after which we tore down and immediately headed out for our third and final gig at Ari's London Grill Downtown, where we played a full four sets. Ari's was also a really nice gig, and for some reason, the pub wasn't a zoo. It was busy, but not the kind of full-contact crush one expects on the Saturday night before Pat's Day. This actually made it our best performance of the weekend; we could all see and hear each other really well, and the crowd noise was at a normal enough volume that we could really get some finesse (and even high speed, once Cara and I had downed a pot of tea apiece) into our sets.
For those of you keeping score at home, that was essentially twelve nonstop hours of playing, setting up and tearing down, not counting the five hours on Friday. We had a few breaks, and were well fed and drunk, but holy cow, am I tired.
Good stuff, though, and we only had to play Danny Boy a hundred and seventy-five times.
Okay, it was only five times. But it felt like more.
The radio silence will likely continue until April 1st, when I launch the Seekrit Project. Because honestly, you guys wouldn't really choose a bunch of lame-ass blogposts over a steadily-running webcomic, launched on time, would you?
Till then, enjoy these little nuggets of internet braincandy goodness, via Boingboing:
And now, back to the grindstone. Tee minus 23 days and counting.