Nin nin~

…and old man is ooooooold.

That finishes my side of the network. As far as mother’s side goes, only Jin (ink and paint) and Tsunami (paint) are left. Unless the rest of Yggdrasil’s parts arrive today (I’m sure to at least get his mobo), I’m going to see about plodding through the last two Avatars so that I can distro to wallpapers. Individuals, two teams of 3, and one with all six.

First, an update to the Yggdrasil situation.

I tweeted this earlier but didn’t get a chance to elaborate further.
Thanks to some… unexpected assistance from mother (who cannot fathom the thought of leaving a system incomplete until January), Yggdrasil will be brought online next week. Yeah, she actually wants Iggy finished faster than I do. WTF, right?

I am surely overthinking this and should be squeeing my pants off over getting the coins needed to get the needed replacement parts sooner rather than later. I guess I’m just too used to these things being giant traps. Which, of course, this PROBABLY IS, but mother insists, so…

Bonus awesome: I had enough Wells Fargo rewards points piled up to generate a $25 Amazon eCert. Awesome because I could use it immediately. I was literally seconds from submitting the Amazon order when at the last moment I raided my rewards status to see if there was anything I could do to slash the grand total further. That eCert dropped the total from $206 to $181, w00t!

So, if all goes well, I’ll have a Yggdrasil on the network sometime next week. :D

—

And now, time for some more Avatar WIPs!

Onyx is colored! Again, a full-size version will be released when all six are done.

Dinah gets inked. I have to move the layers to get all of her because of her high ponytail.

Tsunami got inked too. Ah, this makes me miss archery class…

Technically done, but I’ma hold off until everyone’s inked and colored before I post bigger versions.

Onyx, however, is hawt. He also looks kinda evil.

—-

Unrelated note:

Dear Disney–
I like Jim Carrey as much as the next guy (Bruce Almighty, hell yeah). But in my 80′s nerd mind, there can ONLY be one rendition of the Christmas Carol that I will ever like, and that’s the one with Scrooge McDuck as ol’ Ebenezer.
Just saying. >_>;
I’ll leave the other nostalgic doods to nerd rage and strangle your overlords for not doing a badly-needed remaster/Blu-Ray release of Mickey’s Christmas Carol…

Much ♥, Yoshi

And on that note, I conk out for the night.

Literally minutes after I posted that WIP, mother came by to ask about Iggy (she thought he was working even though I told her I’d inherited bad parts and couldn’t fix it until January). Seems I’ll be getting coins to fund parts replacement– namely, the difference between it and the deposit from my VPI checks. o.O

Trap fodder? Oh yes. But she insists– seriously, I told mother I didn’t mind waiting until January to get Iggy’s mobo and she’s all “What? No :( That’s too long to wait!” So I guess that’s decided. Better go price out the parts I need to get the final coin count…

I’m getting her at least some Starbucks for this, if not an IHOP raid (I still need to burn up this Visa gift card before December hits and non-usage fees kick in…). >_>

On a mildly-spooky other front… uh, Dinah? You’d better not be going Squirtle on me. Ever since I slapped 7 on her, sometimes Dinah will auto-hibernate after standing idle in screensaver mode for awhile. Her fans are running high, yes, but she doesn’t get THAT hot. (SpeedFan says Dinah tops out around 145F most of the time, and she’s run WAY hotter than that before.) Hm. Well, at least it’s auto-hibernate rather than SUDDEN SHUTDOWN. It could also be a hidden power-saving setting I’ve overlooked. I’ll have to poke around in there.

Aaah… cold room is cold. Already piling on the cloaks here… Blastoise’s weather widget says it’s 45F!

Yggdrasil Verdict: Based on my back-and-forth with Duxx and other evidence… looks like I gotta chase down a new mobo/CPU. Seeing as those two RAM sticks were in there at the time that the 7600GT blew out, I’d consider those suspect, too. Oh well… may as well use the opportunity to boost to 4gb.

UNFORTUNATELY, unless a mess of coins fall on me via Gourmet Ramen or something else (like the job market for repair techs decides to magically stop sucking hardcore), I will probably have to wait until January. >_>; I’ve already priced out a replacement mobo/CPU pairing that’s under $200 but I would still be cutting it close on my ability to cover the next two month’s worth of pet insurance. I’m even considering dialing back on my weekly pizza summoning as a safeguard. Welp, them’s the pits, I guess. I can always plug Dinah into the HDTV if I must have high-definition computing RIGHT NOW.

Moving on!

Fun With Windows 7: Though I hit a gigantic snag in regards to Yggdrasil, I must remember that I DID transfer my other two machines without them exploding! Yay! Having run on 7 for a few days, I can now give a much more, er, coherent report on it.

If you ran Vista before, visually 7 doesn’t look all that much different. Aurally, 7 even uses the same sounds!

If you’re still a holdout from XP because of speed and (perceived) stability issues… you can come out now. I know, in many ways XP was faster than Vista. Fortunately, 7 seems to return to XP-level of general punchiness.

I would, of course, suggest doing a Clean Install over an Upgrade. While it can be said that Upgrade installs have come a long way since Windows 98, you cannot deny the cleansing aspect of wiping clean (well, sort of– Windows DOES shove AppData/User/Program Files/Windows folders into a Windows.old folder in case you forgot anything during backup) and starting fresh. Installation is thankfully not as scary as, oh, XP where it was in that awful BSOD-looking interface. Pretty much it’s a “Hello, am I doing Upgrade or Custom installation? Where should I put it? Mmmkay, come back in about an hour, I might reboot once or twice. :D” thing.

You will thankfully not need to do much driver-chasing in the process of setting up shop, however, as pretty much whatever 7 can’t install during initial setup it will most likely find during Windows Update. On Blastoise, I only had to manually chase down drivers for my sound card (Creative SB X-Fi Gamer) and the specialized drivers for the tablet (Wacom Intuos3), the latter so I could fix the pen to the primary monitor. That said, be sure to loot the specialized video drivers for your graphics cards as soon as possible for maximum oomph!

I can’t speak in terms of hard numbers or benchmarks, but more of an intangible “feel” of things. Blastoise seems to run his games much more smoothly (WoW and CoH, both at maximum graphical settings but running windowed because of dual monitors). He also boots a little faster than before, which is always a good thing. However, Dinah benefit the most! She began life as an XP laptop, then took a moderate-but-tolerable speed hit when she went Vista. Making the jump to 7, even though I decided to stay at 32-bit, has been nothing but awesome for her– she got her ninja speed back, and how! Most notably, Slingbox no longer lags to crap on her (YAAAAAAY). Though I will no longer be using her for gaming as her ATI chip is rather tiny, she probably could handle low-level stuff without breaking a sweat if I were so inclined. :P

If the whole HomeGroups thing seems really lame, you can easily ignore it and continue tapping into network shares via normal LAN mode. The only real additions that HomeGroup brings to the table are the ability to further lock down your shared media (which could be bothersome if you’re running a mixed LAN since HomeGroup content is for 7-based machines ONLY) and the ability to “push” media around the LAN to make it stream to another 7 unit. In the context of Altima Network, HomeGroups is not really useful to me because we run a mixed LAN here AND Hamachi on top of that (for House Ayarane internal messaging, and also as a special warp pipe for Neo and Bren).

My beef with the login screen (I do NOT care for that kind of blue) aside, I really can’t find anything off-putting about 7 at all. So, just… get it! Don’t be put off much by the system requirements: even if you have an XP box, 7 will run just fine. Hell, you don’t even need to have an optical drive– if you have a USB drive on hand, you can easily make it bootable and install 7 from that (and I hear that’s faster than using the DVDs, shaves off about 10 minutes). $30 for the student discount version, else either grab the OEM editions (especially if you’re installing on a virgin drive) or the Family Upgrade ($150, contains 3 “charges” of Home Premium).