The big change to this page and the next several (through details -16-) is the replacement of the Daedalus in the top panel. Details -17- through the end, I had page files for. For these pages, I either didn’t have the files or couldn’t find them. I wound up using the existing data as reference, eyeballing the perspective…. and doing three of the four renders in a virtual machine instead of the loaner PC I’ve been using for almost a year.
The PC, apparently, caught wind of my plans to replace it with a quad-core something or other over the next few weeks* and is now gothing out bigtime. Symptoms indicate a bad power supply or processor – the thing will run (SLOWLY) for a bit, then Stop. Not hang, not crash, not BSOD – it just powers itself off. It’s been doing this for awhile now, actually – I thought it was some kind of energy saver setting, as every time I’d go to use the machine (gaps of days or weeks), it would be off. Lately it’s been dying mid-render.
Using a VM, I can proceed – but due to system demands it’s an either/or – I can either run photoshop and work on pages, or I can run Windows and render. The loaner has a P4 2.4 (by spec, it’s been acting like a sub-gigahertz since I moved) and 2 gigs of ram; my mini is a dual 1.8 with 4 gigs of ram (3.something addressable) with the VM set to use both processors and 2g of memory. Even virtualized, I’m getting better performance. Three renders (setup work already done, so it was just position-and-render like I did originally, only keeping the files this time) in maybe forty minutes, if that.
* Buying piecemeal through newegg. Two or three shipments. If I have money in my bank account for any appreciable length of time, some disaster always manages to snarf it up. “Saving Money” is one of those “being an adult” things that’s down the list a bit, somewhere after “get re-equipped for ATC work” and “find a non-violent way to Silence my upstairs neighbor.” Going this route may cost more in shipping, but if a load of parts “disappears,” I’m only out a couple of hundred bucks instead of the full amount.
20090904 (13) – Lettered. Moved the barf bits over from the first edition. Here’s a fun fact for you: turns out Murnau vomits in Comic Sans.
