I'm not hopeful that mom will be coming home from the nursing home after she broke her ankle. It looks to me like she's decided to give up and there is no heat left in her to go on. I'll be visiting her with my sister later today and hopefully, it's just her adjusting to her various meds though this wasn't the way I'd planned on getting her meds straightened out. Yes We'd been working with her doc and got her off all of the perscriptions so we could see what she needed as some of them, she's been on for over 30 years, meaning lots of changes in dosing and such or even recomendations for specific meds.

Worst case is she doesn't see the new year unless something goes drastically wrong and she doesn't make it past Christmas and at that point, I'll be a basket case though my Sister and Nephew have helped keep me going since she broke it.

Had been beating my head against the wall trying to get my Wacom One working on a Display Port with an adapter. Turns out the adapter I was using was junk so I bought a better model from StarTech. It Works fine and I'm no longer having a problem with my Wacom deciding on being the Primary Display under Windows or when booting into the firmware.

Thanks to the Stimulus Checks from the United States, I was finally able to purchase my first Wacom Tablet, which is the Wacom One. It's a budget version that resembles the Cintiq and works quite well. Very happy with it but now it's the learning curve and finding time to begin diving into more digittal works instead of my normal pen&ink sketches.

Due to changes in my Health and the AUP, I'm taking the time to clean up my watch list. Between Visits to the Docs, SoFurry, InkBunny and Stories Online/Fine Stores along with others, I don't have the time available to check FA frequently.

I haven't been checking F/A on a regular basis since about July. Other interests have been grabbing my attention and then early this month my desktop up and died on me. The power supply decided to let out it's magic smoke and my computer no longer works.

Thankfully I've got my old laptop that allows me to surf the net and such but it doesn't have much in the way of storage. Just a meager 40GB so I haven't looked at the 4k+ images that are waiting for me and I wont be doing anything about that until after I build a new system.

Now that my desktop has died, it's time to start planning on a repair or serious upgrade but the damn budget isn't going to allow for what I'd love to put together. Because of that, I'm looking at as cheap a replacement as I can get away with and that's looking to be a dual core celeron, 4GB of memory, a 1TB drive, Burner and new power supply. Budget looks to be be right on $350 for the system and I'll be getting the parts in late January. Hopefully I'll be up and running by Valentines day with a working system that performs as well as my old one did.

I've removed all of my stories since you can read them at http://storiesonline.net/auth/Fast_Turtle

Have fun and do vote for your favorite authors/stories

It's been a while but I'm finally drawing/sketching once again and have posted a new work. Overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out as it's a first for me, a combination of Pen&Ink and Water Color - even though I used one of those cheap water color kits for kids.

No I hadn't noticed since I've been too busy with other things. The biggest is working on the next installment of my story and due to all the Doctors appointments family member have had (tis the season for colds) I've gotten some drawing done that I'll be uploading to scraps and such in a few days. On the art front, I'm also experiementing with Prisma Color Art Stix and Pencils. Like the Art Stix and not to sure about the pencils. Guess I'll have to work with them more.

For those interested, I've completed the rewrite and clean up of the first part of Plague. Boyz To Furz is up and I'm now working on the next story in the universe. Hopefully I'll have the first chapter or two up by year end.

I keep going back to using Linux until something else fails and it pisses me off yet it seems to be the same failure time and time again. The one critical application that I depend on is a CD/DVD burning program as I need to backup my system fairly regularly. Yet the damn thing keeps failing at a critical time.

Due to this, I've backed up my user data to my 500GB drive and put the Win7/64-RC on my desktop. After using it for about a week now (it's on both desktops and laptops), I'm quite pleased with how it's working out. Yes I've had the occaisional BSD but I know exactly why; I'm using an open source driver to access my 500GB Linux formated drive and it's a bit flaky since it wasn't written to work with specifically with Win7 and MS is were still changing things around. Once I complete the process of backing up all of my data, I'm going to wipe the other drive and format it for Windows because I'm going to keep using this copy of Windows until January when I'll get a purchased license from Newegg.

Well today turned out to be very interesting as I found an article where they tested several CPU's and listed the results. You can find it here http://techreport.com/articles.x/17023/1 and if you spend a bit of time, check out the results of the e6300, which is what's in my system right now. About the only upgrades I need to perform are the addition of a better video card as I'm currently running a Geforce 7300GT. What I'm planning on is a Radeon 4650HD with 1GB on it. It's good enough to fill my needs without problem. Of course it also means I need a new power supply though if my calculations are correct, I should be able to get by with what I've already got, which is a quality 300 watt unit. ATI states though that the PSU needs to output at least 16 amps on the 12 volt rail or a minimum of 400 watts. Of course I can't find detailed information on how much the card draws at full load (stock only) so it probably better to get the PSU to.

The final element of my upgrades are x6 1TB drives. Yep I did say (6) 1TB drives as I feel that will give me enough storage space. Fur knows I need it with all my music as I'm finally archiving our family LP and Cassette Collections and a box full of Pre WWII Reel to Reel tapes I picked up from the swap meet. Paid $20 dollars for the thing and these are what were played on many radio stations at the time. Very happy but I need a working Teac Reel to Reel to feed them into my computer for archival purposes.

Recently had to clean out a Windows Infection on my desktop and that was no damn fun. Thankfully I'd caught it before it was able to do any damage or infect any files. Due to this, I've decided to reinstall Gentoo Linux along with a memory upgrade (8GB) and I'm finally into the last stages of tweaking the system to work the way I like.

Well it's been a very trying time figuring out what went wrong with my desktop but I was finally able to solve the problem. Simply put, it seems that my desktop decided it no longer liked all of the memory being installed (4 Gigabytes), so I simply removed one bank (half the memory) and things are working once again.

In fact, things are working much faster and I've already contacted Intel to report the problem and hopefully, it will only require a bios update to permanently fix it; otherwise, it means sending the board into them for replacement (1 year warranty).

Sometimes shit happens and this time around it's been one of those weeks.

1st) My desktop decided to puke and die (Gentoo Linux) and all efforts to revive it failed so I have to switch to Debian even though I'm not to keen on it.

2nd) Vehicle Maintenance was more then I expected. Rear Brakes cost me $300 and has set my planned maintenance back another month. That's the 60K mile service which is going to cost a full thousand dollars.

3rd) The damn rabbits/squirels/rats and other animals have decided to clean out my garden. I've been lucky up to now as they've avoided things but it looks as though they'd simply been waiting for everything to get ready. I was going to pick most of the beans along several varieties of squash this morning but when I went out to harvest, the damn critters had wiped things out.

Added new WIP that might never be finished

Slowly rewriting many scenes in Boys to Furz but it's slow going.

Well it's been annoying as hell while my muse was on vacation but she's finally back and I think I can get Plague Boys-to-Furz rewritten by the end of April. This will include a rewrite of A Pups Wish for a cleaner tie into the Main story even though it will remain a seperate story.

It was announced that Sir Arthur C. Clarke, well known and respected author, died at 13:30 Local Time on March 19 (UTC=5.:30) in Sri Lanka.

I'm sorry to note the loss of another great author who had such an impact upon my childhood with his writings. He was one of the old style Science Fiction Writers who introduced many to hard science as it was understood at the time because he actually had the degree's needed to be considered an expert in the field.

His writing though was able to introduce concepts in such a manner that as a young boy I was able to glimmers of the possibilities he introduced to us. Things like space travel and navigation in general. How to think in 3d (needed in air/space travel) and taught me that although Newton's 3 laws applied, that unless an unexpected emergency occured, you would have enough time to prepare though it might be pretty short.

Well it didn't take as long as I expected to get a diagnosis for mom. Initial was a kidney stone and that sounded very likely due to the pain she was feeling but even the doc was a bit surprised that the CT scan came up negative for that. Instead it turned out that we caught her developing pnemonia in the very early stages, meaning the treatment will be far more effective in clearing it up.

So I'm relieved and damn happy that it wasn't a stone as we'd thought originally because it means she wont be in lots of pain until it's either passed or broken up. That's been my biggest worry as I've been through that pain. It also means she can concentrate upon getting ready for Final Exams next week (she's after her Bachelor Degree).

Had to take my mother into the ER at 4 a.m this morning and as yet, we've got no idea if she will be admitted or released. One comment the doctor made that makes sense is it could be a kidney stone and my sister and I hope to hell that's what it is because they can now treat them.

I've been playing with Corel-8 3d Dream and it's not working very well. Simply put, I'm not able to develop a proper wireframe for what I'm wanting to do and this is annoying the hell out of me.

So any suggestions about free 3d tools that allow the creation of wireframe models?

Note that it has to run under either 64bit Vista or Linux (either will do)

A New toy I recently got is CorelDream 3D modeling app along with CorelDraw 8

So I'm going to begin playing with it and seeing what I can do with the 3d tools, things like my Vissions drawing will be very interesting if I can do it up in 3D. Lots of rock forms and such to create one hell of an effect.

of course I've also got CS2 Suite, though i needed that about as badly as I did another hole in my head. That includes Illustrator and Photoshop so I'm finally going to get started on learning those tools and seeing what I can start coming up with them.

Several issues with Linux going on strike. It quit burning discs for me (couldn't archive things) and the email issues just got to be to much of a problem.

The other thing is that Intel released a Bios update (firmware for my computer) that seems to have fixed the 4GB memory performance problem when running a 64bit operating system (running Vista64 Business) that I still have to test using the Gentoo64 installer (pure 64bit OS) and if it passes that test, I'll be able to start planning on upgrading the system memory this year to a full 8 Gigabytes (system maximum) and it means CS2 will finally allow me to really get some work done.

So Linux is gone, not for good but kicked out to grow up a bit more and Vista has moved back in as I know it well enough to be able to get plenty of work done.

Sometimes it seems as though my efforts to write to friends and family is as wasted as trying to get the world to hear me by shouting to the wind itself.

I sent out several letters and emails before xmas and haven't heard anything from anyone of them as yet and it makes me feel that the effort was completely wasted instead of being appreciated.

What's wrong with this picture? Are people so damn busy pursuing the mighty dollar that they can't even take the time to write a short reply? Especially email? Guess the next one I send to everyone is going to be short and to the point "You're out of my will".

Maybe that'll get a response from them but for those who can't bother to even respond to that message, I'll be removing them from my various address books instead of wasting time writing to unresponsive people.

Thanks for all the shouts and it now looks like I'll be damn busy trying to keep up with everyone

On a different front, it looks as though my Plague-Boys to Furz is going to be delayed. I've gotten involved in almost a complete rethink how things are going and decided to reformat/rewrite things to clean many of the screw ups out.

On another front, things are also going to get busy around here after the new year as the S.O. is returning to school, which means I'll be tied up 20 hours a week with the driving. Thankfully, I've got a laptop so I can at least work on the revision of Plague along with copies of PS6 and CS2 so I can deal with digital works as desired. Guess it's time for me to really start to learn how usefull CS2 can be though I'd rather simply learn how to use the GIMP which is open source.

Finally got around to looking at favorites and have now discovered many new artists who's work I'm interested in following for the time being.

Too damn many family members around for the holidays put a hell of a dent in my writing/sketching time.

My uncle called to let me know that my idiot brother is in the hospital again and this time it's looking damn serious since he's suffering from Pancreasitus (inflammation of the pancreas) and the worse case could be cancer.

Of course this has completely screwed my day up and I've not been able to get anything done, writing or even rough sketches. Damn but I hate the worries that go with hospitals and the worst is I can't just drive down the street to see him. He's halfway round the world