I've been having some Serious Problems with Photoshop on my G4 Digital Audio. The major issue is that the machine's a complete slug running 5.5 in Classic on OS X, though this week that age-old gripe has taken a backseat to the fact that Photoshop CS is crashing like a crackwhore trying to deliver a blowjob in the midst of withdrawal. This started last night as a repeated load-then-crash on a document I was working on, which I worked around by loading the app first, then loading the file. I was able to work on it easily for some time, until it came time to convert the document from Greyscale to RGB color. CS crashed. Then it crashed again. Then it locked the machine. Reboot, retry, lock. Reboot. Do the conversion and flat colors in Photoshop 5.5 running in Classic - the RGB convert occured instantly - and save off. No problems.

Try the file in CS again this morning and the machine hard-locks again. Good thing the G4DA has a really convenient reset button - none of this "hold down power until the machine feels like Stopping" crap. This is exceedingly Odd behaviour for CS, which has functioned fairly well whenever I've needed it, which isn't often. I'm assuming this has something to do with the processor upgrade I administered in January, but I can't imagine what, as everything else is fine. The last time everything went crash-happy (halo, wolfenstein, photoshop, Classic, everything-but-the-OS), I straightened things out by flipping the dip switches down to 1.33 ghz from the Factory Default of 1.4. Still better than 733, especially for Photoshop.... though I had to remove the Altivec Core for Photoshop 5.5 to prevent it from Disappearing from memory whenever I ran anything that had been G4-accellerated. Gayness.

This recent crash-happiness has me thinking about doing a full ground-up reinstall and rebuild of Minerva. It also had me thinking about buying a Mac Mini, despite the fact it's a single-head machine and the same speed as Minerva, as I'd rather have an equivalent box that fucking works than a beefed out piece of kit that doesn't, and the Mini is the only thing in my price range. I don't have - and couldn't possibly aquire - the two grand I'd need for a G5 (more like six grand if I'm going to do it right, which would be a g5, at least 2g of ram, scanner, monitor, tablet, and a PC to plug into the other KVM slot for 3d purposes).

Right on cue, Apple Intels the Mini, which drops it right out of the running as an option. I need Classic. As annoying as this is, certain quirks in Photoshop CS handling - currently the fact that it kicks Minerva in the balls every time I try to do something with it - have me pretty irked about the future direction of the Mac platform.

DJ? Acucrack : Mako vs. Geist : If you like DJ? Acucrack, you'll like this. Not much room for argument. Decent pseudo-industrial jungle-esque techno-thing. Money well spent in that I can throw it on and it doesn't jam itself up my nose and scream like most "techno" does. I'm not big on Acumen Nation but DJ? Acucrack is pretty satisfying. Grade : A-* Going into rotation.

Pig : Pigmata : Remastered WATTS. It may be pretty good in five or six years. I say this because everything Watts does as PIG he does seven or eight fucking times with minor or major variations. Pigmata is a straight-up sludgy, guitar-heavy rehash of all previous PIG and doesn't really add anything to the pot. If you like Watts, you won't mind... but after this, I'm starting to reheat the thought that En Esch and Gunter Schultz are the best thing that's run down KMFDM's leg. "Reject" is decent, "Junky" is reason enough to bring this disc to a show on the off chance you'll get the chance to shove it up Watt's ass and snap it off. Tracks range from old PIG lyrics on top of other old PIG tracks to complete shit that wouldn't look out of place on a Skold-or-later KMFDM B-side. Grade : D- I doubt I'll give this a second listen.... despite the fact that it whips the shit out of the last three KMFDM albums. King grumps when people say The Stand is his best work... ya gotta wonder how Watts feels about having peaked with Juke Joint Jezebelle.

Final : 3 : Broadrick sez Final isn't "Ambient." Technically, he's correct. Ambient doesn't have the occasional razors-on-chalkboard Autechre-takes-on-the-Federally-Mandated-Trance-Techno-Treble-Break. This does. All I can say about it after most of one initial listen is either I didn't notice (it accentuated the instance nicely) or it irritated the shit out of me (the sporadic adherence to aforementioned Federally Mandated Treble Laws). The former is good, the latter isn't just bad, it's thank the gods I got this out of the used bin four days after its release. Final seems to have the one thing lacking from every other JKB project under the sun - treble - and it's got just enough to make up for the lack of it elsehwhere. Really not sure how I feel about this. Grade : Inconclusive.**

* This ain't High Art. But it's not Complete Shit, either.
** It's JKB. I need a second listen under better operating conditions.

12:50 <@ecronin> defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true
12:50 <@ecronin> been trying to find that string for months
12:53 <@bda> Heh.
12:55 <@ecronin> now my greedy leaching friends won't bitch when I reboot mojo and they can't get to their precious video and music
12:56 <@solios> ecronin: ??
12:56 <@solios> does that just paste into the CLI?
12:56 <@ecronin> yeah*
12:56 <@ecronin> makes firewire** drives mount at boot, not login
12:56 <@solios> because I've got a mini here with a few firewire drives that don't mount unless I'm logged in.
12:56 <@solios> OH THANK GID.
12:56 <@solios> I love you man!
12:57 <@ecronin> yeah, its annoying as crap
12:58 <@javaman> why is that not a control panel option.
12:58 <@ecronin> because steve's mom is stupid

* As root or using sudo.
** Any non-OS, non-fixed disk; Firewire or USB.

Producer : Steve Albini Genre : Rock. Metal-Industrial in the Fall Of Because / Godflesh / later-era Ministry sense, but this album sounds "industrial*" in much the same way Bob Ross paintings are Cubist. Special Features : Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Jesu, Ice, Techno Animal, Curse Of The Golden Vampire, Fall Of Because, etc, etc.) on drums. Sounds Like : Bastard child of Fall Of Because and Van Halen, Fear Factory's daddy. It's worth noting that this album sounds like it's mixed in reverse - drums over bass over guitar over vocals - and it works, beautifully. Bought it for : Dog Day Sunrise, Justin Broadrick, Steve Albini (in that order). Runtime : 48.4 minutes for 15 tracks

01. [***xx] Tequila (reminds me of the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks)
02. [*****] El Supremo (instrumental)
03. [*****] Dog Day Sunrise (drums what go WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!, faithfully covered by Fear Factory on Demanufacture)
04. [****x] Bugged
05. [*****] Great White Heat (Van Halen-ish instrumental)
06. [*****] Cult Of Coats (Goofiness in the extreme)
07. [*****] Ditchwater
08. [-----] 108
09. [-----] Roadkill
10. [****x] Snake Domain
11. [-----] Grand Rift Faultline
12. [****x] Adrenecide
13. [*xxxx] Pierced All Over (Godflesh does the gloom thing far better)
14. [***xx] Skin Drill
15. [****x] Ink Vine (People double in size, but the brain remains the same)

This album rocks. It's more of a low-fi crunchy, thuddy, bass-heavy rock album than it is the proto-grind of Fall Of Because or the polished electro-thud assault of the original Godflesh EP, which wasn't what I expected at all. Chronologically, Justin's stint in Head Of David overlaps FoB and falls right at the end of his time in Napalm Death, so I was expecting something in a similar vein. Instead, this - just as heavy, but with a funky rock-and-roll feel to it that has to be heard to be believed. Vocal styling is an extremely obvious influence on Demanufacture/Obsolete-era Fear Factory- far more than Godflesh, though earlier Godflesh vocals have a similar feel to FoB/HoD, so I think it's safe to say that Burton's just a big ol' Justin fanboy.

Like most Broadrick material, I'm glad I bought it and consider it well worth the price.

* When I think "industrial" I think of toasters assraping alarm clocks (Whitehouse), Robocop samples and guitar loops (Front Line Assembly before Delerium started making money), or some combination of the two.

22:12 < mdxi> hah
22:12 < mdxi> 10.4.5 corrupts any firewire drives connected during the update
22:12 < solios> mdxi: !
22:12 < solios> mdxi: I USE THOSE.
22:12 < solios> a lot.
22:12 < solios> like, all of ATC is on one.
22:12 < solios> *all*
22:12 < solios> :|
22:13 < mdxi> then ferchrissake, don't leave it plugged in while upgrading macos
22:13 < mdxi> well, one person says no trouble. many others say "OMG FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK"

And I am the sun
I rise above the world
And when the light goes out
I kill another child
And I am insane
I crawl into your mouth
I grow like a flower
I grow a suicide
And I am the sun
And I am the light
And I am the sun
Yeah I am the light
And I am the dog
I cut out my eyes
Yeah I will nullify
My true love creation
And I am the sun
I love everyone
I live inside your chest
I grow like a cancer
And I am the sun
And I am the light
Yeah I am the sun
Yeah I am the light
I love everyone
I love everyone

Swans - I Am The Sun

16:16 <@bda> Freakin' solios. Just called to let me know that while waiting at the bus stop a cop car drove by...which is the exact same model car he's been rendering for ATC. "Now I know how to detail the bumpers!"
16:18 <@maarken> solios: freak
16:18 <@maarken> it's good thing, I think he fucked up the two front pusher things
16:22 <@waltman> i know there's special cop suspension, but i didn't know there were special cop bumpers
16:22 <@ecronin> now he knows how to detail the bumpers? he saw a car with a wangbumper?
16:23 <@bda> Give it time.
16:23 <@bda> When he started doing 3D work, I was really afraid.
16:23 <@bda> But so far I haven't seen anything .. y'know.
16:23 * bda waves a hand.
16:23 <@bda> Cow-related.
16:24 <@maarken> ha
16:25 <@maarken> it's mostly because he sucks at 3D. the udders would never come out right.
16:26 <@bda> Yay. :P
16:26 <@maarken> yar. small favors.

File photo : Where I usually sleep:

Where I'm sacking out tonight:

I've Power Napped in that slot a few times, so it's not like it's new or anything.... but it does make me wonder what the fuck I need a house for when all the house does is get in my way. Work at least pays me for the occasional inconvenience.

It helps to think of them as "during" images. Taking these in an "after" context is... disheartening.

  

The house is still loaded with shitstink. The major difference is that the downstairs toilet has been moved into the downstairs shower, the plumber is coming back tomorrow (sometime after eleven), my roommate is home, and my roommate refuses to turn off the heat. A house he lived in previously had a habit of blowing pipes every time the temperature dropped below forty - I'm assuming his disinterest in logic and my presentation of previously posted information is a response ingrained by experience rather than ignorance.

Regardless, Ben is immune to shitfumes. I am not. Especially when said shitfumes are coming out of the vents in my room.

Given the choice between sleeping under my desk at work, sleeping in a house full of shitfumes, or trying to make arrangements with anyone willing to sling me some couchspace at 0130 on a weekend, I've chosen work. I can't say I'm all that happy about it, but after a night of slinging screwdrivers* until I felt like Bob Villa I'm decidedly less drunk than I would have been on my usual poison. So I might actually be able to make something of this.

The consolation prize : Most of the shit that's mine is stuff I've been meaning to toss anyway. Ben's stuff will wash off. Brooke got the brunt of the damage - serves her right for using the place as a free storage cube and forgetting about her junk (until she checks her email on Monday, I presume).

* This ordeal has induced illness. It sucks, but it's nothing major and I'm not pissing out my ass or puking my guts out. Yet. I'd love to call off on Monday, but given the choice between Work and spending the day cleaning up a mess in The House That Ben Lives In And I Sleep In is.... uh. Yeah. No. Just thinking about it makes me want to puke.

Turns out the only person in the rolodex who's awake at 4am is my landlord. While that's pretty convenient in and of itself, the house still reeks of bleached shit, and the basement looks like this:

  

Since my left boot has a split clean through the sole, there's no way I can wade into this (literal) shit to examine the damage further or attempt to rescue anything. The landlord says he'll send a plumber out in the morning - in the meantime I've left a message on the machine of somebody who knows my ex roommate, as she left a ton of shit in the damage radius and her number is conveniently disconnected. I have no way in hell to get ahold of my current roommate, who apparently decided to bug out rather than find the cause of the problem.

So it's four AM, and the only way I'll be able to get any sleep without drowning in shitfumes is to turn the heat off in the middle of winter.

Awesome.

Update, 30 minutes, a short walk, giving some dude directions to the minimart and turning the heat off (complete with OMFG DO NOT TOUCH PLZ I WILL DIE note) later, I've decided I'm going to Hoth it the fuck out in the batcave and deal with the devestation first thing in the "morning."

Not looking forward to it.

Update, 11.5 hours later, from the GLORIOUSLY CLEAN AIR* of work. I Hothed it the fuck out last night, managed to eat (no small task, given the air quality) and shower. The plumber knocked as I was enthermalling for Outside. He moved around a bunch of stuff in the basement and was setting up for ops when Scott (the non-Steve landlord) showed up, asked if the plumber was there, and left. The plumber cut loose and was continuing to work when I left a note for my roommate and split - I'm still nauseated by the shitfunk and somehow managed to get some of it on me. I gave the plumber the run of the place and told him to lock up after - he's done a lot of work for the houseowners (incl. a Lava Lounge ladies room rework), so I trust him at least that far. That and all of my shit is safe in my room.

The walls may be thin, but the insulation seems reasonably effective - the thermostat in the front froom of the house (worst place to put it, a straight line from the front door!) had fallen from 68 to 59 over the course of the night. A long way from 40, which is as low as the thing goes (aside from Off, which is where it's set at the moment).

* No sarcasm. I've been here for about forty minutes and not only is my headache gone, the air doesn't smell at all. Asbestos is truly superior to feces.

Wake up to the worst hangover I've had in awhile and my roommate puttering around in the bathroom. Hit the Fight Club toilet in the basement only to find that its last user - the guy occupying the real shitter upstairs - righteously clogged the hell out of it and never bothered to clean up after himself.*

A long story short, I should have pissed in the sink.

A longer story short, the house now smells like bleached shit. The source is in the basement and the heating system grabs it and blasts it into the rest of the house. It's suffocating.

Oh, and there was a dude pissing on my house when I cracked the door to ventilate.

A huge laundry list of additional shittiness today, but lungs full of the stuff is more than enough to make the news.

Addendum : My fucking basement is flooded. Huzzah.

* This is a Thing Ben has. He absolutely will not get anywhere near a backed up toilet. If he's responsible for the mess he'll simply close the lid and put an Out Of Order sign on the fucking thing, I shit you not.

A very nice lady at the doctor's office stuck a needle in me for a few minutes Monday morning. All was good for about an hour and a half, after which a Death Star shockwave bruisething began to erupt in Mark 13 : Hardware slow-motion.

Apparently I bruise easily. That or something went exactly wrong. Whatever the case, it doesn't seem to involve nerves - the skin is slightly more sensitive than the surrounding flesh and reports normally on the internal diagnostics.

Not the best picture but I dare YOU to try and capture a not quite Requiem For A Dream grade needlebruise using a prosumer-grade CCD in your off hand under shite light. :P

My sister Jen turns 25 today. I hope she's less hung over than I will be!

I'm using an NEC 16x DVD+/-R burner, at home and at work, model 3520A.

The drive works beatifully with Memorex 16x DVD-R media of model series CMDR476-CTMWM01-033.

The drive/OS/Toast fails to recognize Memorex 16x DVD-R media of model series DRSF60-00352.

The model "series" numbers are on the platter side of the disc. The CMDR476-CTMWM01-033 is plainly readable, while the DRSF60-00352 reads like the eye-defying kill-your-brain lightbendiness of a Windows install CD. Toast screams about an unstable connection, Disk Utility chokes and spouts a useless error message, and you won't find either CMDR476-CTMWM01-033 or DRSF60-00352 on Google as of this writing. Nor will you find these numbers on the Memorex packaging, nor can you check the media for these numbers without opening a spindle. Disc labels (the logo/DVD-R/specs/write-on area) are identical between runs.

Naturally, NEC doesn't offer firmware for MacOS X.

Update : Here's the Toast error:

My coworker Lorraine went and did her research/troubleshooting/bullshit digging thing on this, as she has the same model drive and five dots in troubleshooting to my four - it turns out that on the list of "supported media" for these drives, Memorex is conspiciously absent.

Either that list is extremely up to date, or we've just been "lucky" until now - we're shifting to TDK 16x media for testing purposes and will be dropping Memorex from the reserves.

All I can say is that Memorex media has worked beautifully until this halfassed DRSF60-00352 media came along.

The strip has been Squelching since November. At the time, I was modelling the bits that were to be used in Priorities, the second scene of Chapter Four of The Dualist.

Since then, I've produced Scene Two, then gone on to model almost all of the necessary components for Scene Three. Once that was taken care of, I started on Scene Three proper, and have been more-or-less hauling ass on it. It's not a short scene, and it's going to take at least another six weeks or so to chunk out.

I still need to get Chapter Five in order. While the script is still in a primordial state, I have a short list of high-detail models that I need to produce. This time around, I intend to take my time with them, and try to balance modelling and DCR production.

To cut a long story short, the idea is to finish Chapter Four, then finish the current DCR sub-story, then in all likelihood start work on the next one. Story-wise, that will put me in a good position this spring, and hopefully I'll be able to balance DCR and ATC production throughout the summer, so that both comics update on a fairly regular basis.

That's the plan, anyway.

The shit things about visiting the doctor : An empty stomach and Barry Manilow. Barry Manilow on The Ellen DeGeneres show. With paperwork I couldn't focus on.

That aside, Doctor Sestric is Ten Ninjas.

Ear probes, blood pressure cuffs and needles are a hell of a lot less terrifying when you're an adult. We spent most of the visit talking about blood sugar and mental health (shock.), and finished up with blood drawing (three ampules - blood sugar, cholesterol and something else) and appointment scheduling (call next week for blood results and show up in eight for another checkup).

Brain's still getting itself together after a very late breakfast.

A "!dead city radio*" strip - assuming there's another one- features DCR characters and situations as applied to modern day events. Since the story happens in 1997-98, !dead city radio strips are totally non-Canonical. They're also whatever aspect ratio happens to work with the subject, and they're filed here, to make things less confusing to the reader.

Quality's a bit lower than usual, but I have an ATC page to work on today, and the idea of exerting more than the most minimal effort to tackle the fearsome testosterone-belching fountain of ignorance that is Pittsburgh Sports is pretty unappetizing.

Panel one was swiped from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (go go google image search for Pittsburgh Fireworks). I doubt there'll be a display regardless of the outcome of today's game - it's winter and fireworks were very much a "Pirates Won / Pirates Lost / There's No Pirates Game This Weekend" thing in the late 90s, so it's in keeping with the "feel" of DCR more than it is with the current state of city affairs.

* The bang in !dead city radio plays on the technological angle. I could just as easily have made it "Not Dead City Radio," but that would invite comparisons to Ninja High School. And DCR:NHS::Crash:Project A-Ko. One of the many things I won't be referencing in the strip - unless I do a bit about the amazing disaster that was every other student in my Cartooning And Dynamic Anatomy class. I turned in eight pages of ATC while one guy did a bad NHS parody (!) and another freely copied "anatomy" out of a spiral-bound wad of Wildcats back issues.... and those are the good parts.

Christopher™ (during a discussion in which he brought up the Batcave) pointed me at Pete Scathe's "A History Of Goth."

Very much to the point, and it very much (thankfully) leaves out synthpop.

As usual, just about everything non-shitty comes from England.

Referencing this troll from Back In The Day, and not in the HAH HAH ROFFEL sense, either.

The culprit : 29,700 jpegs totalling 2.97 gigs. 29,700 files I don't need right now and can't really throw away, so they're getting Archived. The real number is closer to a million of the little bastards, but there were 29k on the first disk- the one I had to figure out the hard way.

Toast will take the files, verify them, and then promptly SPODs between verification and burning. No coasters, fortunately - but it just sits there shitting its pants. This is kind of forgiveable given the volume of data, but it's annoying because Toast workflow is a convenient, time-saving Drag -> Burn -> Verify, which is why we have several licenses of it at work.

With Toast being useless, the other "option" is Apple's Disk Utilitiy. Disk Utility doesn't do Drag -> Burn -> Verify for some reason (because it's for disk images, fucker - not 29,700 jpegs). The workflow is, instead, Create Image (sit and wait) -> Copy Files To Image (sit and wait), Sit There Until The User Tells It To Burn An Image -> Burn "session" of Image -> Verify.

For three gigs of "normal" (read : a few or a few thousand files, as opposed to a stupid amount of time lapse photography) data, Toast will squirt out a 16x DVD in a couple of minutes. Disk Utility obviously takes considerably longer.... and is considerably more of a pain in the ass when the goal here is to free up disk space, not take up more of it- I've got three gigs of free space on the video drive, and a few dozen on root; Toast makes the cleanup easier while Disk Utility only adds to the mess.... Toast would have done five of these in the time it's taken Disk Utility to do two.

Bollocks.

Good thing I'm on the clock. :P