@$$hole!: Haunted Cabin 2

So let me tell you about the weekend I had. First off, something you should know: I make this comic on a 9 year old desktop computer, which I’ve had since college and built myself. This computer hasn’t been online in 5 years. It’s only used for making the comic. It has several redundant hard drives to automatically backup the pages, but the thing’s old.

So, Friday night, when I got home from work and started plugging away on the next @$$hole! book (which will be out next year), the computer shut off. Like the power went out, except all of the other electronics in my place were just fine. Strange.

So I tried turning the computer back up, thinking it may be a brown out or something, and before Windows even has a chance to load – power shuts off again.

Thinking there may be some problems with the power supply, I resign myself to several truths:

1) I’m going to have to buy a new computer (and if I want to finish the book on time, I’ll have to buy one soon)
2) I’m not going to get any book work done this weekend
3) I’m not going to get any webcomic pages done this weekend, thus eating further into the already quickly depleting buffer

Now, thankfully I’m pretty sure the hard drives aren’t corrupted, and I have been backing up the files every month or so. However, I don’t have Photoshop on my new laptop, so I can’t work on the comic pages over the weekend. This is fine, because it gives me a chance to focus on some of the other projects I have coming out next year.

However, then Beth tells me her laptop update just locked her out, and she doesn’t have access to her files either. And this frustrates her to no end.

So I make a call and my good friend Brent – bless him – offers to take a look at her computer, and to help transfer all the files off my hard drives. So Sunday Beth and I go over to Brent’s and spend the bulk of the day there trying to hack into her laptop, and then we open up my PC.

Unfortunately, Windows 7 is pretty solid in its security and doesn’t allow for anyone to change passwords without an admin (which she didn’t have), so we recover the files from her laptop and then send the rest back to factory reset. My PC, on the other hand, was another story.

Upon opening the thing up, we hear a jingling around on the inside. Turns out, the bracket that holds one of the motherboard fans to the motherboard has broken, and the fan won’t stay connected. When the fan comes off the motherboard, the computer loses power to make sure the it doesn’t overheat. So we salvage another bracket from an old PC, swap them out, and BEHOLD – the PC works once again.

Now, I’m still going to be shopping for a new PC – this is just the first in what will no doubt be a series of things breaking down with age – but now there’s not so much urgency in the shopping process. And I can keep working on the comics and the book in the meantime. So this coming weekend is going to be spent making up for lost time on the comic pages (and the book), which is going to be a pain in the butt. But, that’s part of the game. Plus, the Haunted Cabin story is a lot of fun to work on.

See you Friday!