welcome to camp telophase

Before the vacation, I talked here about my future plans for a new computing rig, which hinged on my saving up the money from my art and covers. Well, my iMac decided to take matters into its own hands and blew its graphics card two days before we left. Because of the position of the card, they have to basically disassemble the whole thing to replace it, which would cost over $500 for a computer currently considered vintage, which we'd been planning on replacing in a few months anyway. Hooking an external monitor up is not an option due to the way the computer boots, which means the card has to be working for the machine to fully boot (WHY).

The original plan, thought up Sunday when we were both sleep-deprived, was to go ahead and get the monitor and hook it up to my Cintiq until I saved up enough for the MacBook, but I realized today (a) we HAVE the money in our general savings account*, which we have for precisely this sort of reason, and (b) the Cintiq is total pants at making fine selections, which I have to do in the course of creating ebook covers. So the MacBook and external monitor are now ordered (the dock I want isn't out yet) and the plan is for me to pay the money back into savings as I earn it.

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Wasn’t looking forward to spending several days recreating my setup, but it’s got to be done.

*Not a state of affairs I'm used to, which is why it took me two days and a trip to our online banking stuff before I realized that. Being financially solvent is such a weird feeling.

Toby just set up my new iMac and it is fucking huge.

Cannot wait until we get the virtual machine set up and running so I can install Photoshop back on it and start painting ON THIS HUGE SCREEN.

(Er, did I mention this here? Old computer thoroughly died, although not without us able to get a backup of everything, so it's a hassle rather than a tragedy, and I decided to make the switch back to Mac now instead of buying another PC. I'll be slower on converting the software over, probably waiting for CS 6 or CS 6.5 on the Adobe stuff, because we can set up the machine to boot into Windows and I can install the old stuff there for now.)