Critter to the Rescue

I admit it. I've been neglecting the Little Black Critter (a.k.a. my laptop) lately. I have a ton of excuses, mostly centered around me slacking off on the writing I promised myself I wouldn't slack off on. I've updated it now and again by taking it to a nearby wifi hotspot, but otherwise it's been sitting in its laptop bag, forlorn and forgotten.

My most recent excuse has been Project Halloween Thing, wherein I got it into my head to make a thing for Halloween. After numerous sketches and a shamefully large pile of crumpled paper, I came up with a Thing: a design which, if all goes well, will become an iron-on transfer for a work shirt (denim) to wear on Halloween. Last year's Thing was a very small pocket-sized image swiped from Skyhaven (a chirolupe - bat/wolf cross), so this year I wanted to go upscale. That, and it's a bit chilly to work without a work shirt. This year's Thing - a Halloween gryph - will be somewhat larger and go on the the back of the work shirt, ideally to be surrounded by iron-on transfer autumn leaves (gathered around the neighborhood and from a local park, which I hope to have sufficiently flattened by this weekend to go on the scanner.)

So, anyway, I got it sketched, inked, and scanned in, and after some helpful input from one of the message boards I lurk at, I started shading. I do this in grayscale because I'm too big of a color coward to do it otherwise; I add the tint after I have everything looking decent in grayscale, saving me the terror of working with an open color palette. Anyway, I hoped to have it ready to color by Friday - giving me a solid week to print and iron and assemble - and it looked entirely doable. I was up to the last stage (adding the highlights) tonight when I booted up my computer after dinner. As usual, I decided to screw around with a game before committing to productivity. This let me not only gauge whether or not the cats would let me work - they're half the reason I'm still doing shading work instead of adding color already - but would let me waste time thinking about Project Halloween Thing before committing further action to it.

If you've ever driven an older car, you get used to the sounds it makes that it isn't supposed to make, yet which are "normal" for it. Any alteration in that noise raises a red flag that trouble is coming. In my computer's case, the abnormal normal noise is my graphics card fan. Some time ago, it started making a loud whirring noise on bootup, but it eased off once everything was up and running. I know it's the graphics card fan because I opened the case and - per recommendations read online - used a pencil eraser to stop the various fans and see which one killed the noise. So I've known that the fan on the graphics card has had "issues" for a while, but, like the older car, I grew used to the noise once it became clear that it had an established pattern and didn't seem to effect performance. I also knew, when I booted up this time, the fan ran different; it gave an extra rev-up after it should've leveled off to a background whir, and stayed louder longer that usual. I didn't think much more of it, though, until my game started flickering.

I hoped it was just the game; I'd just downloaded it as a demo, after all, so maybe it was weird. I logged off, but no luck. My Windows screen was fluctuating too. This not only made game play annoying, but made it impossible to do graphics work. Now, I know that my sister has a spare, lightly-used graphics card due to an upgrade not long after she got her computer, but I didn't know where that was. Besides, I like to do such things in daylight, when I have a few hours to allow for problems. But I couldn't lose a night of work, because it would put me impossibly behind schedule, Halloween being only a week away and me still needing to scan in leaves and print stuff out and assemble everything on the actual shirt.

This may seem like a minor failure to some, but I'd committed myself to this. Following through on Project Halloween Thing would prove to myself I could finish something vaguely creative. Furthermore, if I gave up, I would've completely wasted the last two weeks of my life devoted to working on the project, which means I would be even more of a loser for not doing the things I put off to work on it.

When you're the kind of loser I am, these distinctions matter, probably a lot more than they ought to.

I worried. I fretted. I procrastinated while worrying and fretting. Then I remembered: the Little Black Critter was billed as an Entertainment laptop, designed to watch DVDs on. This meant - hopefully - that it could handle Paint Shop Pro X and a Wacom. And it was right there, all alone, awaiting the fulfilment of promises made when it left Hewlett-Packard's factory and began its journey to my home, promises to be used and loved and cherished. Well, what did I have to lose? If it didn't work, I wouldn't be any further behind, and if it did I could at least get a little work done on the project, whereas I wouldn't have gotten any done at all with my dying graphics card. I loaded up a flash drive with my tablet driver (already on my desktop, as I had to reinstall it not so long ago) and my files, grabbed my PSP X disk, unplugged my Wacom, and decided to give the Critter a chance.

Well, the Little Black Critter came through with flying colors. I installed PSP X without a hitch. I uploaded my files. And I found a nifty surprise when I installed my graphics tablet driver. Apparently, Vista has onboard handwriting recognition software... and - impossibly, amazingly - it even recognizes my handwriting! Not just the block printing, either. I mean my cursive, which is so bad that one high school teacher demanded I do all work on computer to spare her having to pick through it. I found this much cooler than I ought to, I suppose. In any event, aside from a slight lag on the pen (which I think I could fix if I wanted to fiddle with settings), the Critter performed beautifully in my hour of need. So well did it perform, in fact, that I'm strongly tempted to leave my Wacom with the Critter and buy myself a second tablet for the tower, so I could work on future art projects away from the cats if need be. (It didn't hurt that I found the stylus and the wireless mouse more natural to navigate with than the laptop touchpad.)

In any event, thanks to the Little Black Critter, my evening wasn't a total waste. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to swap out graphics card and get my tower up to snuff again. And now, I suppose, I ought to head off before the graphics tablet gets snarky again. (And, yes, I'll post pictures of Project Halloween Thing when it's done.)