I watched a lot of cartoons and movies. I draw incessantly and carry a sketchbook everywhere. I work in animation and self-publish my books. There are monsters in the streets, don't wear red. Mad bulls and monsters hate that color. I still watch cartoons.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

AAAARGH!


(Illustration done on Oekaki board)




What now?! I know it's old. An iMac Special edition, over four years old. But what did I do to deserve this? Now, I am locked out of all the email I have to answer. So, folks if you've sent me stuff and I've not replied, it ain't my fault. It's sitting in my hard drive and the utilities repair says, "...found serious errors." And I've got collected correspondence I was going to use to write a book on Story and storyboarding. Arrgh, again!

This means that I'm up the creek with a large hunk of metal and plastic that does nothing. If any of you would like to resend me your questions or emails, I'll gladly try to get to them--thank goodness I have a Powerbook. Otherwise, I'm afraid that it may all seem like a big snub. I try to answer all my mail and I think I've very diligent about it.

So, let that be a lesson to all of ya!...Back up your files!

(Why is there a girl in the foreground blissfully going about her routine while I'm in the background about to have a seizure? Nothin' wrong with that, is there?)

5 Comments:

Blogger Ronnie said...

For such a pervasive experience I'm sure there must be support groups for people like us. Computers are given names and has a good chunk of your day interacting with it, of course there's mourning, anger, denial, et al.

I managed to run to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store and had this gentleman not only diagnose the problem but found a way to rescue my data inside the near comatose hard drive. Genius! In effect, he did a brain/personality-ectomy of my ailing iMac. Then he proceded to instruct me on how to "zero out" the drive--an undertaking that is painfully slow. You should have seen my basement office. I never felt more like Dr. Frankenstein with all the cables and clutter of my workspace.

All is well with the patient but her "brain" is still in an external hard drive now. I am going to attempt to load all of it in there sometime next week--OS 8.6 is not compatible with Yahoo DSL (I used to have it but is now lost). I am asking around for anyone to help me upgrade to OS 9.1 or later and it seems that there is help on the way.

All this is taking me away from the serious work of prepping for San Diego. Two weeks away!

2:19 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I had a pretty girl dance around when my computer crashed and died a couple of years ago too. She made a snide remark about my floppy disk but I think she was talking about something else.

Sorry to hear about your computer troubles, I hope everything works out.

Looking forward to San Diego!

John Hoffman

9:03 AM

 
Blogger Ronnie said...

Thanks, guys, for commiserating and those anecdotes takes the sting off of these random die-ins computers seem to have a knack for. See? It happens to everyone.

I just had a time locating serial numbers to let me in to programs and finding out that the world has moved on to OS X and applications are free only on the OS of the moment.

Ain't that just like life? Anyone remember Grunge Rock?

12:54 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

From Justin aka baldpenguin

Yep, I had a firewire hard drive die on me, which had 3 days worth of sound editing work I was doing for my 2-d animated film story reel (timed out and everything.. and ready to be tweeked if need be according to the animation, basically it was the ground work of my 2 minute short) along with other important life investments, which I was never able to recover. Only thing that kind of saved me was a quicktime render I had of the reel on a DVD-RAM disc to at least know what I had and possibly use some of the sounds from , but I'm still going to have to redo most of that sound work all over again, when the film's fully animated.

So as was recommended...Back it up, then back it up, then back it up again. As the computer guru who runs our computers at school says..all mechanical devices will probably eventually fail..so burn all those important files on a CD or DVD, that firewire hard drive I had was only good for 6 months unfortunately, a failed "mechanical" device.

Sounds like you were able to recover somethings though which is good. I really hope to be able see that book of your correspondence and advice for sale someday.

The new oekakis are awesome btw, love seeing those.

11:55 AM

 
Blogger Ronnie said...

Thanks, Justin. I was able to rescue the files, but having it dumped on an OS X hard drive means that I have a circuitous path of having to firewire it back to the old OS 9 since those two can't read each other. I have emails I can't seem to get at right now. I don't know if I'll ever. I'm happy with what I can get--seeing that I almost lost all of it.

And as for the book on story. Well, I'm sure you'll recognize passages from it if I lift questions verbatim. My approach to the book is going down the conceptual path of storytelling. One part will be the journey as narrated by a character. The other part will be letters and emails and discussions.

I hope to have it ready by next year.

Must find a publisher once a draft is done.

It's on the list. Along with the formula for cold-fusion and a actual sample of Dark Matter to be sold with every copy of Paper Biscuit #3.

Thanks for posting.

Ronnie

2:16 PM

 

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