Zub Tales

Snow’s rapidly falling outside and I’m struck by the fact that winter is most definitely here again. It always looks so much better through a window or when you have no where in particular to go. Trudging through the weather for work will be annoying, as always.

I came down with a horrendous cold and missed three days of work while I fought it off. It was torture as it crept from my sinuses through to my lungs. Although it wasn’t as bad as when I nearly came down with pneumonia around Easter, it was still pretty ugly. The worst part was the cold sores that followed the cold. Probably the worst I’ve ever had them…really sore, swollen and painful. Not fun.

Once I got over that, I had a lot of catching up to do at work. Luckily, my new class is quite decent and stayed on task while I was battling sickness. Except for the stack of marking I have to catch up on, things are back up to speed.

The webcomic is going incredibly well, if you’ve been following along. I’m getting a lot more confidence with Photoshop and the newest crop of pages (which won’t be on the site for 3 weeks) are looking pretty nice. I want to keep pushing myself, try different approaches and coloring techniques as I go. I don’t want it to get stagnant for me. If you’ve been reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed what’s there so far. It’s even easier to tell people where it is, as I picked up the .com address this week. Tell them all

www.makeshiftmiracle.com

The readership is quite solid, and rising each week. I’ve already crossed 75,000 page views and the word is spreading further as I’ve gotten an e-mail from Australia and one from France about it.

I did a lot of reading about Windows XP with the release this week. There was the odd bad press, but a lot of overwhelmingly good press about its stability and control. Even the registration that everyone was complaining about seems less stringent than what was initially thought it would be. It intrigued me enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

If you know anything about installing computer components, you know the hell of reinstalling your OS. Driver conflicts, installing each piece one at a time, reboot after reboot and praying for hours everything works properly. I will proudly say that installing XP was easily the simplest and most enjoyable process I’ve ever had on a computer. With all my components hooked up fully (video card, sound card, network card, router, scanner, digital camera, Wacom tablet, Cd-Burner and DVD-Rom drive…) XP recognized all of it without me having to put in any other CDs or disks or anything! I never even opened up me computer box once. I had the all my old software installed along with XP and everything up to speed within about an hour and a half.

Instant recognition and perfect compatibility, it was freakish. Things like the scanner would have taken me longer to open the drawer to my CD-Rom drive then the time it took for it to recognize it and have it running flawlessly. I have been unable to crash it (even though I’ve tried) and it runs my machine faster than ever before. Unbelievable. Microsoft making a kick ass product like this seems like I’m in the Twilight Zone. No complaints.

This weekend’s been good. Working away on pages for Makeshift Miracle and relaxing. I received a call from Cary Nord this week and we got together today, which was very cool. Cary’s a comic book artist that I met last year and he’s a really nice guy. We’d always met with groups of people, but he’d recently moved and called me up out the blue to hang out. He came over today and he brought a bunch of his Marvel and DC comics pages. It’s strange seeing the published artwork right in front of you like that. It was a good way of seeing how much further I could go on my drawings if I spent 8-10 hours on a page instead of the 45 minutes to an hour I currently use in my spare time to draw out the Makeshift Miracle stuff. I scanned in one of his sketches of the Incredible Hulk and colored it up in Photoshop, which was quite fun and a good challenge for me. Considering it only took me about an hour to color, I’m pretty proud of it.

Anyways, that’s the report for this time. Next time I’ll have digital photos and more news on the happenings of late October and early November.