I’m a comic book geek, and I couldn’t resist tying in today’s conclusion with Marvel’s recent mega-crossover series, Secret Invasion. Thank you for indulging in my geekiness…

Oh, and before I forget…

There’s a special Mother’s Day PCW comic planned for this Sunday. Toon Mailer subscribers will receive it in their InBox today. To join the PCW Mailing List (aka The Toon Mailer), just drop me a note and I’ll be happy to add you on. You’ll receive new comics 3 times a week (or the next one’s free.)

Also, if you’re around this weekend, please join me on PCW TV, where you can hang out in the chat room and see me create the strips for the coming week.

stay ‘tooned,

-Krishna

Parallels is a virtualization app that lets you run other OSes in a self-contained bubble. I purchased my copy of Parallels, along with a slew of other software, via the recently-expired MacUpdate promo.

Using Parallels to set up my Ubuntu virtual machine was a breeze, so with my confidence up, I decided to do the same thing with my Boot Camp’d Vista SP1 partition.

Big mistake, it turns out.

In preparing the Boot Camp’d Vista partition, Parallels installs a few little bits of software within Vista. The short of it is that after Parallels did its business on my Vista partition, (installing God-knows-what), my Vista copy became deauthorized.

Not what I was expecting.

In a panic, I attempted to boot Vista from its Boot Camp partition. Same problem. After logging in, Vista would throw up an empty screen with a small dialog box in the middle saying my copy was no longer authorized. Frustratingly, the only form of “help” Vista could provide was to take me to a website that explained how to reauthorize Vista. “Follow these steps to reauthorize your copy…” said the website. Easier said than done. With no Start menu, icons, or anything else, reauthorizing Vista was next-to-impossible.

After some Googling, and with a few measures of sysadmin voodoo thrown in, the solution for me was a four-step process.

1. Use Parallels to uninstall whatever it had installed on my Windows partition previously.
2. Enter Windows in Safe Mode (F8) with networking.
3. Manually delete all references to Parallels in the Program Files directory within Vista.
4. Follow the directions to reauthorize my copy.

Happily, Vista’s back in working order again. I fully blame Parallels in this case. As of this writing, Parallels has yet to offer a solution, so if you value a working Boot Camp Vista partition, keep it far, far away from this program.

-Krishna

Another new high-rez wallpaper for your desktop viewing pleasure…

Enjoy!

-Krishna

Update: added a black vertical strip along the right side for Mac OS X users so you can see your icons a bit clearer. Let me know if you want a Windows version and I can alter it accordingly.

First, I’d like to welcome the new readers visiting for the first time from Sheldon and Starslip Crisis. A little birdie (duckie?) told me that it was time for me to finally start with some advertising, and I hope it will help me get the word out about my labor of love - this webcomic.

It’s been a few weeks, but I wanted to share a few thoughts I’ve had going around in the back of my head. The first is, that I am getting serious about making a book (finally) collecting the best of the best strips from the first few years of the comic.

I want to do the book right, and I want to be happy with what I create (it will be my FIRST book, after all).So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to retool the art.

Why?

The short of the answer is, I don’t feel comfortable with the art in many of my older strips I hate the old art in my older strips. There are other reasons for this decision, namely:

1. No high rez images for many of the older strips exist
2. The older strips need a lot of work done to make them presentable,
   and it would be easier for me to simply redraw it instead of mucking about with the old versions.
3. Did I mention that I hate the old art?

That takes me to pcweenies.org - now, my original plan was to feature daily updates to repopulate the nearly 9 year catalog of strips. I’m not sure how effective this has been from a resource perspective. I’m splitting my time between 3 sites now (Uncubed, pcweenies.org (V1), and this site - and it’s starting to wear me down.

So, what I’m proposing is to shelve pcweenies.org and use the extra time to focus on making the book. It feels like the right thing to do, and I’m one to follow my gut.

You can see a teaser of what the Before and After images for the book will be like. Thoughts appreciated.

-Krishna

I snapped some photos of my desktop Macs (foreground: Mac Pro, background Dual 2GHz G5) and my desk this evening. And what’s that book sitting on the far left, I wonder?

-Krishna

New Uncubed has been posted, and if you jump over to sister site PC Weenies.org, you’ll see a ‘toon revamp I drew for PCW #29 that serves as a teaser for the art that’ll be represented in the book I’m making.

-Krishna