Today’s little sketch was inspired by twitter. I did a quick search for “fatty” and saw Casie90′s tweet:

r u sure a fatty hasn’t snuck into ur home?!

Twitter. Good for what ails you.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. I know lots of you will be saying it’s just a way for the greetings cards companies to make a bunch more money, but for me it’s just an excuse to keep showing my fiancée that I love her.  Because I do. Because she’s awesome.

Sorry. I forgot to blog.

[Pencil sketch, covered with sharpie and felt tip.]

I’m feeling a bit under the weather this weekend, so the fabulous Colin Gourlay stepped in with a wonderful guest strip.  Here’s what he had to say about it:

As everyone knows, CERN devotes its time and resources to unlocking the secrets of our universe.  After years of tireless research, they have discovered the one particle required to utterly obliterate Naked Fatty.

I’m thinking I might have to go over to CERN and destroy that research.  Thanks Colin!

I went to the wonderful (javascript themed) Full Frontal on friday. It was a no brainer what I’d draw for Naked Fatty this week.

I’ll be writing up a full report of the day over on The Code Train over the next couple of days.

On thursday I went to the pub for a couple of drinks, since a friend was in town.  When I got home, I found my music hard drive was playing up. Again.

It’s been playing up for a couple of months now, and even though it’s the only place my 40,000 songs are stored I kept on putting off buying a new hard drive and transferring the data over. Big mistake.

But why had I been putting off buying a new drive? Well, the drive I was using was a two disk RAID 1 (mirrored) array with an effective 1Tb capacity. The fact that the drives were mirrored and the enclosure was designed to be able to have new drives dropped in gave me the confidence that when one of the drives failed then all would still be well. Yeah…

Thursday evening came, and I stumbled in from the pub.  The drive was playing up again (it kept on going to sleep and refusing to wake up). A quick search on the internets told me that this was something peculiar to the old MyBooks and a quick firmware upgrade would fix that. You can tell where this is going, can’t you? So, I did the firmware upgrade (which was apparently successful), and low and behold everything stopped working.  No more booting RAID enclosure.

Bollocks.

At this point, the WD RAID checking software was telling me that both the disks in the enclosure were dead, but that it was trying to perform a rebuild. I panicked, removed power, and ran onto amazon to buy a new bare 1Tb drive, and a drop-in SATA enclosure with delivery for saturday morning.

Saturday came, and I dropped the first of the two original disks into the new enclosure to see if I could see any data. Lo and behold it was there. Happy day! The fact that I dropped almost £400 on the RAID array back in 2007 had finally paid for itself – I hadn’t lost my music!

Long story short, the other drive in the array was properly dead, but for whatever reason the array wouldn’t rebuild from the working drive. So, eight hours later I’ve copied all the data off the working drive and now have copies on a further two drives.

Clearly the original enclosure is no longer happy, so I’m going to have to source a new one to drop a few drives into.  I’m not caring about it being a NAS – I’m expecting to attach it directly to my MacMini. This means it’ll have to either connect via USB or Firewire800 – no eSATA for me I’m afraid. So, any ideas internet chaps?

Oh, and whatever you do – don’t forget to back up your lovely precious data.

This one is Mazz‘s fault.  A couple of weeks ago she had a bit of a “Grr, arrrgh” day at work, mentioned it, and I remembered that the Mutant Enemy was naked.  I was trying to come up with a costume that Naked Fatty could wear for halloween, as this just fitted nicely.  So, blame Mazz.

Better than the capture above is the video below though. Yup, I draw it all up by hand for this one, and then made a little video. Just like the original Mutant Enemy card.  It’s silly, but it amuses me.

It might just amuse a few people from my past life too.

Last thursday, Apple announced the new MacBook Air, alongside a bunch of other stuff. It seemed like an appropriate thing to draw.

I like what I did with Fatty’s hair.

Last week, I went to Board Game Camp in London (which is part of the reason things have been so quiet around here).  The first part of the day involved a chance to take part in a competition to design the back of the 2012 Cadbury’s Medium Sized Selection Box.  The prize? To have your winning game put onto the back of the 2012 Cadbury’s Medium Sized Selection Box, which sells in the region of 9 million units a year.

Over the course of an hour or two, Ryan Alexander, Catherine Wooley, Herm Baskerville and I set to work designing a game suitable for 5-12 year olds, that was incredibly simple, fun to play and could make use of the Cadbury’s Spots vs Stripes campaign.  This is what we came up with.  It didn’t win.

We’re still pretty happy with it as a game though.  Sure, it might not have been quite as innovative as some of the other games, but it did play really nicely (and was balanced too, which was nice), and had a really short turnaround per game, which we thought was important.  We may not have won, but we sure did have a lot of fun getting there.

For those of you who are interested, the original art we drew for the contest is up on flickr.

UPDATE!

I’ve just been reminded by Herm to mention that the game plays well with two, three or four players because of the requirement that all members on a team having to finish for that team to win.  We also had an optional rule for the game that allowed you to use chocolate bars to stop the other team using their special powers against you. All chocolate bars played during the game would then get divided up amongst the winning team at the end.  Yummy.

This last weekend I went down to BarCamp Brighton 5. For those of you not in the know, a BarCamp is an UnConference, where all the content is provided on the day by the attendees.  No “names”, no buying overly expensive tickets, just a bunch of people who want to learn something.

One of the things that I learned this weekend was how to play Munchkin. Unfortunately, I had to leave for my last train home before the game actually ended, but it was a lot of fun.  So much fun, in fact that I used it as the inspiration for this week’s Naked Fatty.

I’ve been a long time fan of John Kovalic‘s, so getting to try and ape his style a bit was fun. I don’t think I’ve done too terrible a job with the centre card.