Jaco’s Random Writings

Oof, I’m kind of pushing it with this update as far as timing goes. Anyways, before I drop the sketch, a little news first (it will explain the lateness).

A while ago, my DVD drive kind of stopped reading disks. It would take it, spin it, and then spit it back out in a rather unceremonious manner. Last week, I finally ordered a new one since I intended to do a little clean-up by re-installing Mac OS X. I also ordered a 250 GB replacement harddrive, seeing as I’m going to have my laptop open, I might as well replace that as well (80 GB isn’t what it used to be). So I pulled out the instructions, opened the case, and replaced everything without incident. It all worked. So I installed Mac OS X on the new drive, migrated the data from my external, and started installing all the apps I usually use. Well, as the day dragged on, it seemed like all good news… until the system froze on me. Not once, but repeatedly. At first I thought I broke something during the installation of the DVD drive and the harddrive. But I had a nagging suspicion that it was the RAM. I pulled out my second stick of RAM and left one in the bottom slot. Lo and behold, when I turned on the system, the screen stayed black, the indicator LED blinked three times, and the system beeped angrily at me before returning to its slumber. I switched the RAM to the top slot, and restarted the system. No problems. In fact, I continued to install more programs (OpenOffice.org this time). Well, I shut down the computer again and tried running the RAM from the bottom slot again. It started up with no problems. It continued running for about 2 or 3 minutes. Then it froze again. At this point, I’m cursing under my breath and thinking of creative ways of beating the person who designed this board. Why am I so angry at the designer of the Powerbook G4 boards? Well, this isn’t the first time the bottom RAM slot died on me. In fact, it happened within a year of me buying this laptop. I had to get the whole logic board replaced. Thankfully, that was under warrantee then. However, it’s been well over a year since that warrantee expired. So that is how my lappy went from having 2 GB RAM to only having 1 GB RAM again. On the plus side, I now have 3.5 hours of battery life instead of 2.5 hours… For whatever that’s worth…

Anyway, that’s probably why tonight’s sketch turned out to be rather dark and disturbing. Would look cool as a tattoo… on someone rocking out at Ozzfest or someplace like that.

A nasty little skullbug.

It started off as just a skull, but then I thought that it would look really cool if it had these thorn-like teeth and a long prehensile tongue coming out. Then I added some really slimy-looking drool on the tongue. I was king of torn between making it an insect or an octopus-type thing with tentacles. I went with the insect legs. I think it was the right choice.

I’m busy putting aside $200 a month for a new computer. If I’m going to build a $1500 computer, I’ll have enough money by… oh, I’d say April. Well, let’s hope my lappy lasts until April. I will be all sorts of pissed off if it crapped out on me before then. I’ll try and have a happier sketch up tomorrow night.