Dre-Artwork

Sorry for the lack of updates. I cant believe how much time has passed! The last few of months I've been in college completing my first year welding course. I am happy to say I passed with excellent marks. Completing this training is very important to me. Once I become a Journeyman welder I will make a very good living. Given the state of the worlds economy I can't past up an opportunity like this, especially when my company is paying for my training.

About December, 21, 2012

So the date has finally arrived. In the story Post-Nuke the Nuclear war broke out in 2012. Way back in 2003 when I started Post-Nuke very few people actually heard about 2012. Little did I know at the time that it would become one of the most mistranslated, blown out of proportion dates of all time. No where in the Mayan texts does it actually say on this day the world ends. The truth is the Mayans never predicted the world was going to end on December 21 2012. It was the date on which their long count calender ends. But their calendar system is a set of gears. When it reaches the end it just continue as a new cycle. It is a very important date as far as astronomy is concerned. It is the winter solstice. There is a number of planetary alinements and the sun is now eclipsing the center of our galaxy. They had their reasons for picking this date, but its not because the world will end. So sleep well tonight because nothing is going to happen. (knock on wood)

Now I know I added to the whole 2012 doomsday thing with post-nuke. At the time I didn't know what I know now. I will most likely remove the date and leave it up to the readers imagination when the world ends.

As for Post-Nuke, I am working on it when I get the chance. I haven't given up on Post-Nuke yet, I have been busy. Updates will come sometime in the future, I'm not exactly sure when. So please hang in there a little longer. Thanks.

Its been a while but I do have great news! The last 6 months I've been working at my new job as a first year welders apprentice. The company I work for makes large oil field storage tanks. I love working there and I work with some great co-workers. I also enjoy welding. I see it as a form of art, but instead off a pencil I have a rod shooting out sparks and intense ultraviolet radiation. I have 2 and a half years left of my training and schooling to become a Journeyman welder. Then I'll make a very nice living. It's my back up career if my Art career doesn't work out.

The great news is, I finally got a great weekend position I've been waiting for all this time. I work 3days Friday to Sunday and get the other 4 days off! I work 12hr days, which gives me 36hrs in 3 days. They give 4 bonus hours free to bring it up to 40hrs needed for full time. The 4 extra hours is also an incentive to get people working weekends. Most people don't want to work weekends, but for me this is fantastic! I can work 3 or even 4 days giving me an extra day overtime and have 3 to 4 days off through the week to work on my comic! Now I'm finally able to blow the dust off my Wacom tablet and get back to work. So thank you everyone for your patience. Updates will be coming soon!

Hello everyone! Yes I am still alive and well, very well actually. First I want to apologize for my long hiatus. I certainly didn't expect it to last this long. There was a lot going on in my life this past year. I was focused on my full time job and saving money. I also bought a nice little house! I was renting a small bed room that barely had enough room for my computer, let alone elbow space to draw. It is very nice to have one room set aside just for my art studio. There was quit a bit of paper worked involved buying a house. Setting up all the services also took sometime. I had to wait a month just for my internet to be hooked up. Ridiculous wait time if you ask me. But I am now all set-up and settled in.

As for post-nuke comics, its not over yet. I have been working on new comic pages when I have the chance. I had hoped I'd be done the story by now, but my full time job interferes a lot. I only have a few hours a night to work on it. So its been very slow going. However I do have more time to work on it now and I also got my hands on a 17inch LCD Wacom tablet. WOW I really love my new tablet! It allows me to do things I never could have done before. I can't say for sure when new comic page updates will start again. Hopefully very soon, so please hang in there.

I finally had time to put my new computer together. I turned it on last week and everything works! Everything just came together and worked with no problems. This was one of the easiest computer builds I've done. I really enjoyed this computer build. There is just nothing more gratifying then picking out all your own computer parts, putting it all together and watching it come to life. But building your own computer is not for the faint of heart. You really should know what your doing. My heart was actually starting to pound when it finally came time to push the power button. I was just concerned that something may be faulty. Warranty would cover it, (well unless I brake it) but to get a replacement part could delay everything for weeks! So I was very ecstatic when it fired up and everything worked. The Bios detected all the hardware and my mobo on board diagnostic display said everything is working as it should. All I need to do is finish installing some software and transferring my data over from my old computer.

I am very happy with the performance of this computer, it is fast. Very fast! From the time I push the power-on button to when Windows 7 is fully operational is less then 40 seconds. That time probably could be faster but it seems the high-end hardware takes a few seconds to power up. But window 7 itself will load up in less then 15 seconds. So I am very happy with that. When I click on a program it opens instantaneous, big programs like adobe Photoshop opens in about a second. Literally in a blink of an eye. The first game I installed was fallout 3. I finally got around to playing it, and it is very cool game! I love it so far. With the GTX480 I have the graphics set to ultra-high. Everything is at maximum setting and the game runs beautifully. One thing that surprised me is how quiet this new computer is. The noisiest thing is the RAM fan. But everything else including the GTX480 fan is very quiet, much more quite then my old computer which has a lot of high-speed fans. It sounds like an old refrigerator!

The Cooler Master 932 case was excellent to work with. It gives lots of room to work and makes my big E-ATX motherboard look small inside it. Only problem I had was the CPU replacement hole was slightly off or too small. I had to put the water cooler CPU bracket on first before placing the mobo into the case, which I only realized after I installed the motherboard. So I had to remove the mobo, add the bracket and reinstall it. Not a big deal really. I found installing the water cooler to be very easy. Corsair even made a video how to install it on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUxoFi… . The mobo they used in the example is in fact my X58 Classified motherboard. So that was helpful. They give a lot of good information in that video if you're interested in learning more about it. I removed the factory thermal Compound on the cooling block and used OCZ Freeze Extreme Thermal Compound. I've read good reviews about it so I gave it a try.  

The water cooler seems to work well. So far I get 45C on idle and 80C on high load. So it is doing its job of keeping the CPU cool. Performance wise I was somewhat disappointed. While it does keep the CPU cool and it does run very quite. Its not keeping the cpu much cooler then a high-end air cooler. In fact a high-end air cooler would probably perform much better. One thing I can do is replace the 120mm corsair radiator fan with a faster RPM fan, the increased air flow through the radiator would cool it down more. I read people tried this and it helped bring down the temperature, but will it also increases the fan noise. A lot of people ask me what would happen if my pump stops working. In the Bios you can set the PC to automatically shut down if the CPU temperature gets to hot. This should prevent the CPU from being damaged. So I'm not to worried about that. I think the worst-case scenario would be if it leaks cooling fluid all over my mobo and graphic card shorting it out. That would be really bad. But the H50 seems to be very well build and I hope something like that would never happen. Anyway, I'll keep using this water cooler for now and see how it performs. It is doing its job and does look kind of cool.

Just to recap, here what is inside my new computer.

Case.................Cooler Master HAF 932 computer tower
MotherBoard..... EVGA X58 Classified
CPU...................Intel core i7 920
CPU cooler........Corsair hydro H50 CPU Cooler
RAM...................Corsair Core i7 Dominator 6GB DDR3 1866MHz
OS Drive............Intel's X25-M G2 160Gb(solid state drive)
Power Supply....Kingwin Mach 1 1220Watt
Graphics card....EVGA GeForce GTX 480

So after 4 months of hard work saving up my money and buy the parts piece by piece, I finally have it up and running. I couldn't be happier. This computer will allow me to do things my old computer could never do. It was seriously getting out dated and worn out. Just the other day my power supply died on my old computer. Luckily I had some old spare computers around and was able to remove an old power supply and use it to get my old computer going again. Looks like I got my new computer up and running just in time. I have big plans for this new computer, so expect to see more artwork and comics in the very near future.

I'm finally back. Sorry for the lack of updates. I have been very busy these last few weeks at my full job. Had to deal with some BS at my work, nearly quit my job. But the problem has been solved and things are going better now.

I also had some major problems with my wireless Internet. It was getting very unstable. The problem got worse and worse until it stopped working. The tech guy came out and fix it. It turns out when they installed the antenna it was winter and there were no leaves on the trees. Now that its summer the leaves came out and blocked the signal. They added a dish to the antenna to amplify the signal. Now my Internet works great again.

Back to my computer build. I finally received all my parts last week, but I haven't had time to put it all together yet. I have three days off this weekend, so I hope to finally get it up and running. Here is an image of my newest parts.

I decided to get an SSD (Solid State Drive) for my operating system. I got the Intel's X25-M 160Gb. It wasn't an easy choice. There are a lot of fast SSD's to choose from. To be honest there was no other component on my new computer that had me hesitating, researching and debating as much as I did with this SSD. It wasn't so much deciding whether or not I should get one. But which one? There is a lot out there, but some are still glitchy. The fastest SSD according to MaximumPC is the 128GB Patriot Torqx. But I heard horror stories that there is a bad batch and they could die in a few weeks or month. After spending some time researching I narrowed my choice down to two SSD's, The OCZ VERTEX SERIES 120GB and Intel's X25-M 160Gb. Back and forth I went with these two. Both are very good SSD's. OCZ VERTEX is somewhat faster, the Intel X25-M has 40Gb more space and is the most stable, and it is also rated as one of the best SSD to get. So I settled on stability over speed.

I also got a 5.25" 7-in-1 Media Dashboard. It displays my computer temperatures and can control some of the case fans. It also reads various flash cards, which is handy to download images from digital cameras.

With all this hardware in this computer and future plans to run triple SLI I need some serious power. So I went with Kingwin Mach 1 1220Watt power supply. I love the design of this PSU and the aircraft cable connectors are also what sold me on it.

Last but certainly not least, I decided to go for EVGA GeForce GTX 480. This is one big nasty graphics card. This card has more computing power then my entire old computer just to do graphics work! The scary thing is I can put three of these on my motherboard! I was trying to get EVGA GTX 285 2GBx version. But it is nearly impossible to find now. The GTX 480 is much faster and as a lot of new technology that I can use with my CGI software, so I decided to spend a little extra cash and go for the newest graphic card.

So there we go, I finally have everything I need now to put it all together. I do not make a lot of money so it took awhile to save up for all the computer parts. I'm not building this computer just to show off or play games with. This is a business investment that will allow me to make my comics much more quickly and at a professional level I couldn't do before. I have big plans for this computer. I will keep you all updated on the progress of this build and future projects.