Sorry. I forgot to blog.
[Pencil sketch, covered with sharpie and felt tip.]
”Comment
Posts Tagged ‘colour’
10 results.
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.
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.
Sorry for the lateness of this post, but I had a busy weekend full of birthdayness.
The reason for the sketchbookiness of this post is due to Eva-Lotta Lamm, that most wonderful of friends who gave a talk on friday at WebExpo in Prague about “Sketch Noting”. One of my favourite things to do at conferences isn’t to listen to the talks themselves, but to watch Ms Lamm sketch away in the seat next to me. I’m a very jealous bunny.
Anyway, the crux of the talk was that drawing isn’t difficult, and anyone can do it. So, I bought myself a new sketch book, a learning to draw book for children, some coloured pens and I was away! Thanks Eva 
Yarr; ye be right – it be Talk Like a Pirate Day. But then ye be knowing thar already.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist doing something piratey today. And look – I even attempted a joke! Will wonders never cease? Of course, the comic shouldn’t really be rated R – nudity shouldn’t be a bad thing, and Fatty will almost certainly never do anything lewd. He just doesn’t like wearing clothes.
Oh and you probably know this already as well, but Naked Fatty is on twitter too. You should go follow him.
I’m off in Sunny Aberystwyth this weekend for a Uni reunion, so I put the word out to all the lovely people on twitter that I was wanting a guest strip for the week. Thankfully, Adrian stepped in with “The Evolution of Naked Fatty”.
Poor Naked Fatty though – he seems to have lost his genitalia! And worse than that, he’s having to suffer the indignity of wearing clothing. At least he hasn’t turned into a thin man in a suit
I asked Adrian to say a couple of words about the strip, and here’s what he had to say:
I’m sure you can come up with something witty. I spent so much time worrying about his hat, I forgot his penis! AS-level biology failed me.
Seriously though, I’m very grateful to Adrian for helping me out in a bind. If any of the rest of you reckon you can draw a picture of a fat naked man, I’d love to hear from you – guest strips are always more than welcome.
Yup, today you’ve got a Yakov Smirnoff snowclone.
I’m pretty happy with this. Even though Naked Fatty is not based on me or my life, I was disgusted enough at the ridiculous amount of pizza I ate tonight to use it as the fuel for this week’s sketch.
Bad, bad pizza.
Transcript: English
In Soviet Russia, pizza eat you - Do your duty, eat a pizza
Naked Fatty stands in green fields looking out at a giant pizza that's taken the form of the sun in the sky.
Paid for by the Naked Fatty Against Pizzas Campaign 2010.Written by 
Neil Crosby
Neil Crosby
It’s saturday, so it’s time for another silly drawing. Today, you get to learn how to become a naked fatty yourself. As you can see, it’s gruelling regimen but with a little work you’ll be able to pull it off. I’m still working on step three.
Transcript: English
Step 1
Get naked
Step 2
Eat chips
Step 3
Profit
Written by Neil Crosby
Neil Crosby