Added 1 new A* page:That's the end of episode 12; 13 starts tomorrow, with me drawing 13's storyboards in the background.
One thing that kept me occupied in setting up this new Intuos4 drawing tablet yesterday was trying to get it working in Gimp, which I use to draw my other daily comic, Sketchy, and which I'll be using to draw the storyboards for episode 13. I found that the tablet moved the mouse pointer around just fine in Gimp, but it wasn't getting any pressure sensitivity. I'd had this problem when I first started using Gimp, under my previous tablet, an Intuos3, but I couldn't remember quite how I'd fixed it.
So, this time I'm writing it down. ;) Turns out that Gimp gets confused if there are multiple tablets registered with the system, and that will be the case if you switch from one tablet to another, even if the original one is no longer plugged in. So the solution was to remove all my Wacom tablet settings using the little "Wacom Tablet Preference File Utility" that is quietly installed along with their driver; I had to redo my configuration settings after that, but at least it got the pressure sensitivity working in Gimp.
I spent this morning and early afternoon battling another technical issue, which I mentioned briefly yesterday: a virus. Or specifically, a rootkit. I was getting a slow but steady series of advertising pop-up tabs in my browser, and when I tried poking around further, I found other troublesome problems, such as being unable to browse to the Windows Update website, and seeing a mystery svchost.exe process suddenly downloading a large amount of data in the background while the system was idle. My normal array of antivirus and antimalware utilities (Avira, CCleaner, Anti-Malware, and HijackThis) found nothing aside from a few suspicious scraps of minor things in a surprising variety of temporary internet file folders in Documents and Settings; I eliminated those, the scans were coming back clean, but the pop-up tabs continued, and sporadic system slowness--our downright unresponsiveness when trying to run certain programs--continued.
Looking up various suspicious traces on my system eventually took me by The MajorGeeks Malware Removal Guide, a frequently updated, extensive step-by-step process for removing most known malware from Windows systems using freely available utilities. I ran a couple more scans as it directed, overnight, with nothing coming up, but then this morning I noticed I'd skipped a Google Redirection/Hijacking subsection at the beginning, which sounded promising, since by then I'd realized some of the ad pop-up tabs had come from redirected Google search links. So I restarted the process and went through that checklist, and the last step, running a very quick and compact utility from Kaspersky called "TDSSKiller," found and eliminated a rootkit that had been hiding out in my system. Phew.
Haven't had any of the problems recur since then, but just to be on the safe side I'm going to finish running through the rest of the full checklist as soon as I get some free time to start running those long full file scans again--probably before bed tonight, I guess. Anyway, the people who keep that checklist up to date certainly seem to know what they're about, so thank you very much, MajorGeeks! Also, if you're in the hunt for Windows optimization or system cleanup utilities, check out that one they call on several times in the checklist, named "ATF Cleaner": a very simple, fast utility that cleared out over 2 gigabytes of junk files--stuff CCleaner for some reason wasn't catching: old temp files and the like, mostly from Documents and Settings, I think--the first time I ran it.
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And to cap it off (hopefully...), my internet has been running at a crawl for the past few hours now. Should be a good excuse to stop wasting time on the internet and finally get into the episode 13 storyboards, I suppose. What with all the technical issues I've been having since Friday, I guess I haven't really had a chance to do my usual "man this next episode is going to be awesome" pimping of it this time around, but really I do think it's going to be a lot of fun, and we'll be seeing some new sides of Selenis, and of this human society living at the galactic core. I should get a chance to talk it up a bit more tomorrow, and hopefully leak a few of the least spoilery, least scribbly storyboards to you, too.
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