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October 31 2001 |
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October 31 2001
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Please be safe. Besides the usual stuff about no candy apples or unwrapped candy, just please be extra careful when taking your gouls and ghosts out hunting for goodies. Besides, don't we still teach our kiddies not to talk to strangers?
Ah, lovely Painter. How I love/hate thee. A few months ago, I aquired a version of painter that impressed me so, I decided to purchase it (that and the fact that my copy kept crashing). Foolishly, I thought that a real CD version of this software would cure my crashing woes (well, that and I also wanted to support the poor folks who made this product. You see, Painter used to be owned by a company called Meta Creations who decided to sell off all its programs in the late 90's and concentrate on streaming 3D applications for the web. Never heard of them? Now you know why they sold off all their stuff).
Well, I got my nifty paint can with the CD inside. I installed the happy mamma jamma onto my machine, opened up a new piece, started to paint, and BOOM!!! Crashville USA here I come! Well, when you install a new program and it crashes within minutes, you kinda scratch your head. I decided that panic was not yet called for so I went to the Corel site to see if they had an update or any fixes. Lo and behold, there was an update patch for version 6.1 for the macinsmash.
Me download patch. Me install patch. Me restart me machine. Me open up Painter. Me start painting. BOOOOOOMM! Yup, that's right. Crash Kahuna visits my machine like a vengeful Tiki god. Frustration sets in and the need to harm inatimate objects grows. I decide that perhaps it's my tablet drivers that are not playing well with the program. After all, I'm using an ancient Wacom tablet.
It was about this time when I moved my machine from my parent's house to my appartment. A move like this should not change anything in terms of my machine. OH NO! Nothing can be that simple. I get my machine home. I hook up all the cables and things. I plug in the power for both of my monitors and my cpu and turn the whole monstrous setup on. Everything sounds fine except for the fact that my main monitor will not recognize that it's plugged into my computer. The small monitor laughs at me as it jumps to life. The big one stares at me with its black pool of nothingness. This sucks. This sucks a lot. It takes me a half hour of cursing and hitting and wiggling to finally get both monitors working. And they finally do. And then I open up Painter and it crashes and I remember that I have an antiquated tablet. It must be a problem with the drivers.
I go to the Wacom to find that indeed, there are new drivers. I download and isntall the drivers. I restart. I get the happy mac screen. Five minutes later, I still have happy mac. Twenty minutes later, the happy mac stares at me like some cold hearted evil smiling clown. I do the three finger salute to manually restart my machine and the evil smiling pixie returns to mock me. Things were not going well. The need to hurl verbal profanities at inatimate objects overcame me and an onslaught of curse words made my fiance run for cover (sorry Sue).
I restart my machine in with the extensions off, the Mac equivolent of safe mode, and I dial up to find some tablet help. It turns out I have to throw away a preference folder for some reason. Out goes the folder. I restart the machine. And everything is fine. I start up Painter again. Five seconds into my rendering, you guessed it, my machine freezes. I find that in times of extreme angst, pounding the keyboard does very little to solve the problem. The saga continues.
I decide that the tablet must be the problem. Not the drivers, the physical tablet. It's an old 6x8 tablet that is no longer made. The drivers do support the older models, but just barely. I figure it's time to upgrade to a bigger and better tablet. Mind you, at this time, I was still a freelance artist which is a fancy way of saying unemployed. But I have some money from something and it is an investment that will aid me in getting work, so I bite the bullet and go to the Wacom site once again, this time to spend a sh!t-load of money.
Just my luck, they are having a sale on tablets. I zero in on a beautiful 12x9 Millenium Edition Intuos on remainder. Not sure why it was on remainder because it looked gorgeous when I got it. But it was significantly cheaper that the regular price and the price I found for the same model on Outpost. They sly "buy now" button looked at me with a knowing grin and a bunch of money went flying out of my bank account.
The new beastly thing arrived and I had to chuckle a bit. It's got that smokey grey plastic that you'd find on a G4 these days. I guess that's why they called it a Millenium Edition. I huredly rush to get it out of the box and hook it up to my machine. I should also mention here that I work with an old Power Mac 8600/300 tan tower which has no usb port. The new Intuos tablets are all USB. Fortunately, my dad happened to have a spare USB card for this thing (if you need a piece of Apple related equipment, chances are my dad will have it). I hooked it all up, updated the drivers, customized my settings, and opened Painter. And yes, it crashed. My soul crushed, I fell to the floor and curled into a fetal ball. Yes, my machine had defeated me.
I'm sure none of you give a royal sh!t about any of that. But I just wanted to let you know how happy I am that I was able to do this strip in Painter without it crashing on me. It seems that it likes me now. Or maybe it's the file size. See, before, I wanted to use Painter with my bigger files. I'm talking about 100MB or more for images at 300dpi or so. But for ¥ellow Peril, it's only 72dpi and very small in size. I think my problem this whole time was file size and dpi which really makes me sad. I wanted to do full size pieces with Painter so that I could send prints to people.
So there you have. That's the significance behind today's strip. I will attempt to use Painter for ¥ellow Peril as long as I can. Thanks for watching.
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