Comic for Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Posted: 8:48 am,Wednesday, January 10th

Oh, boy, am I a sad frog today. If you saw my evening-time note from last night, I think I suffered a hard drive crash last night and will be string-and-spitting this thing together for the next few days. Thankfully, because I'm a packrat, I actually do still have my ancient laptop from 2000 (the model Ron's currently having issues with, actually), so I may be able to coerce it into helping me along for a bit. I didn't actually lose *that* much, despite never backing up my hard drive (more on that in a bit) - the entire run of Five Bucks to Friday is, obviously, stored on the internet, save for the strip that was *supposed* to run today and the one that was *supposed* to run tomorrow (word up for me not having worked too far ahead this week, holla!). The one bummer is that I've only got all of the drawings from September of '05 to now in .gif instead of Illustrator format, so that's more or less eradicated any possibility of putting together a decent-looking book at any point in the future, but, honestly, that was never really in the plans. And now if I *do* ever do that, I'll be forced to re-draw and streamline everything, which, really, will be a blessing.

Anyway, I don't actually know the extent of the damage yet. I said I'd talk to the Dell support line last night - this was a lie. I listened to Beck with 2.0 and had some wine and then wasted fools in San Andreas to work out some frustration, instead. So I'll be chatting with Dell on my lunch hour and will have a sitrep for y'all at noon. I'll also be posting some links and shit during the day, the *intended* post for today.

To start things off in that regard, here is what's actually killing me about all this.. I stopped by Lifehacker yesterday, which I think I'll be shouting-out to a lot in the future, and found this. The irony of it all is fucking murdering me, honestly.

bullfrog

Oh no! What a bummer, this is awful...

I do like the strip for today, however!

Computer people can do amazing things with recovering data. so all is not (yet) lost! Best of Luck!

Bright note: The Irish seem to have learned how to play defense admirably and managed to win vs. WVA last night despite not running anything resembling an organized offense. 2-1 in the Big East! Cheers!

Alright, here's the first of my throughout-the-day blog post constructions (apparently my bid to be acquired by the Gawker Media Empire). This is also from Lifehacker, but it's something they found from someone else, so I'm hat-tipping the someone else, instead. A pretty sweet DIY oragami-ish CD case for the givin'. If you're like me and burn a lot of CDs for gifts/illegal distribution throughout the year (suck it, RIAA), you never have enough jewel cases on hand, and get tired of buying the effing things. So here's a handy way around that.

http://www.curbly.com/DIY-Maven/posts/680-How-to-Make-a-Folded-Paper-CD-Case

After you do it once or twice, it's an easy enough matter of marking where the margins would be, so instead of just white paper, you can print out awesome liner notes and everything, too. I'm pretty jazzed about this one.

Nice little tidbit from Slate on Thomas Jefferson's religious views these days. I didn't know about the old tradition of giving every newly elected Congressman getting a copy of his edition of the Gospel back in the day.

http://www.slate.com/id/2157314/?nav=tap3

Should I be coming up with ridiculous, snarky titles for these, like the Media Empire does?

For as much as I pimp Threadless, they actually haven't had a new design on these that I've really been "Like, damn," over for quite a while. 'Til yesterday:

http://www.threadless.com/product/722/Enmity_Gardens

That is a pretty slick t-shirt.

Ha-ha, I am invincible! We're back in business with my laptop. I guess I just need to pull and re-insert the RAM. That was unexpected. Alright, going to back up the hard drive tonight. I've already got the rest of the week's strips drawn and not enough time (I don't think) tonight to do a new one for tomorrow, so, everyone, don't be surprised if this is the last you hear about Ron's computer malfunction until Monday.

Also burning that backup DVD-ROM on all of your illustrator source files, right? We'd all forgive you if the blog suffers for a day.

That'll take place when I get home, aye. Tomorrow: A comic not drawn on the back of some printer paper in exactly three minutes! (Honestly, although you'll find no evidence of it anywhere on this site, I *can* draw reasonably well by hand. I, uh, just choose not to.)

I just thought it was going to be a "very special Five Bucks" with some flashback to earlier times between the gents.

Ugh, that made me think of "Blossom" or "For Better or For Worse." Both make me ill.

Later, y'all.