Please don't read this while you're eating.

Posted by Steve (steve at screenfreeze dot net) on February 9, 2006: This is Bob's (apparently true) story, and as such I'll leave the details to him. A small side note though. I'm not sure how graphic Bob drew things, as I haven't seen the comic yet as of this writing, but since I've got kind of a weak stomach for this kind of thing, I figured I'd give everyone a heads up that you might want finish your meal first before reading this one, just in case.

So, for reasons I don't quite understand, against every conservative computer geek instinct I have, I upgraded to Vista. I really don't have any good reason to, other than it was there, and my computer is still fairly new enough to run it, so I figured "what the hell?" Can you believe that? Who upgrades their operating system on a fucking impulse buy?

At any rate, what I've seen so far is pretty good. There's a lot of OS X stuff in there, and I don't have the energy to debate who showed what first, nor do I really care. (Nor do I have the energy to find the Bill Gates article where he claims to have shown stuff first.) Anyway, there's a dasboard/widget clone, but since it's as useless as that always sounded to me on the windows side, it was the first thing I closed down. There's all kinds of eye candy, like minimized windows that show a mini thumbnail of the window when you hover over them, and a neat, if not quite as cool, expose clone where you hit a button and pictures of all your active windows spread out across the screen.

Hardware issues weren't as bad as I expected, though the sound card situation is a bit hosed all around at the moment for anything but onboard sound, from what I can see. Creative only has beta drivers (at best) for most of their cards, and the competitor's websites didn't seem to be doing much better. I'm afraid that's as technical as I can get, as I haven't had much time to mess around with things. Overall I'd agree with the general consensus. If your computer can run it, give it a month or so for drivers to catch up, and go for it. But from the little I've seen so far, it's not anything I'd drop a ton of cash on hardware upgrades for. For now at least.

Oh! Students, I'd like to point out that, despite the fact that it's not really talked about on any of the main Vista site pages that I can see, there is a student version for about 70 bucks less than the regular ugprade version. This is information that would have been handy before I opened, installed, and activated my copy.

Posted by Bob (bob at screenfreeze dot net) on February 9, 2006: Today's comic is very much based on a true story. Granted, it didn't happen to me, but the real Joe Armstrong was involved. Just substitute his woman in place of Bob, and you've got what really happened. I wrote this comic, but I changed the ending from the originally written one. Then, I was laying in bed and I had a better idea on the last two panels, and thought "I should write that down. Nah, I'm already in bed. I'll remember." Woke up-didn't remember. Of course. So I made one with the new idea. Then I made another with another idea. Then I made one that was kind of a combination of both ideas. And since I am doing another overnight at work tonight, I have no idea which comic is actually going to be posted along with this newspost. I left it up to Steve. We'll see which he chooses.

Oh, and speaking of Joe, (as I did at the very beginning of this post,) you may notice his hair has grown out. Again. In the entire run of this comic, I don't think I've changed the look of any one character more than Joe. His last appearance in a comic (minus the job application one,) was about two months ago, so I figured he can have longer hair again.

As far as characters go, I think the only one who really hasn't changed is Steve. In the run of the comic, he's gotten a haircut, and changed from a grey shirt to a green one. Steve is very much against change. He didn't want to change from the grey to the green. Although, there's much less grey in the store now than in the beginning of the comic, I probably could switch him back...

Okay, here's a really good article via Gizmodo about why movie downloading sucks, and why people prefer to watch them on their dvd players and tvs. It's got a great line in there that I've never heard before: "the total number of movies sold as downloads is less than the first day's sales of the DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. " That's insane. I was going to download a movie from iTunes when it started offering them for curiosity's sake, but then I thought if I'm gonna spend 15 bucks on a movie I'll buy the damn dvd.

Woo, it looks like Guitar Hero is coming to the Wii! I'm a little worried about that game's future though. Neversoft is now behind it. I really really hope they don't go the Tony Hawk route with it. Although, all you really need to do is change the songs. The gameplay really doesn't need any changes. Just new songs. Please let them do this the right way!

Is it super nerdy of me to like a site like this? Yeah, it probably is, but I'm comfortable with it. My favorite anagram for my name was "Art bombs hold." I don't know what it means, but I like the sound of it.

Ever heard Orson Welles' radio reading of War of the Worlds? Me either, but now's our chance. I downloaded it, but god only knows how long it'll take me to actually listen to it, heh.

Looks like the employees at Relentless Records are safe. (Remember? ) Where do I stand on the issue? Still don't give a shit. I'm old enough to buy M rated games, and I don't work at a video game store. And on that, we cue the music. Back in a week folks.