So as deadlines draw near, students everywhere begin to mess up their body clocks by pulling an all nighter. The works due in, there’s no time for sleep! You sit down to work, and before you know it, the sun is rising again. But, oh no! What’s this? You’ve spent 9 hours playing pacman? DAMN!

Dissertation is in on Monday, so hopefully the late updates might stop, but, what with exams two weeks later…

Come on! I mean seriously guys, it’s the 21st Century here. I’m not asking for yet packs, though that would be totally sweet. But a clapper? I swear they had them when I was a kid, I thought that they were going to be the future. And now that it is the future there’s not a clapper in sight. I have to go to all the effort of flipping a switch. Pfft. What technologies were you promised as a kid that haven’t made it into the mainstream yet?

Oh, and sorry about the brief downtime today, the host had some mysql problem or other, but it seems all cleared up.

There has to be a sock monster somewhere. Why else would my sock go missing. I put 10 pairs in the wash, and I swear I end up with odds socks… The only conclusion is that the sock monster is living in my washing machine.

And I win the bet. Ok, let me explain. It’s just gone two in the morning. I realised about 20 minutes ago that I hadn’t done a comic. My friend found this hilarious and bet I couldn’t do on in less than 15 minutes. 13 and a half SUCKER. If only we had bet money. Seriously, apologies for the poor quality of the comic, I really am rushed off my feet at the moment, my dissertation is due in soon, and almost immediately after that there’s exams. SIGH. But would I leave you without a comic? Not if I can help it. Even if you may wish I had… See y’all Thursday.

Oh, and for all you grammar Nazis out there, check out this sweet (well drawn) comic by Spenser. Go on; let your inner Nazi out for some fun. The Grammar Nazi that is, not the Jew hating kind. Keep that one locked away.

Oof, why can’t all computer troubles be that simple to fix?

I’ve had troubles with computers before, but nothing as bad as this last week. Now on my third install of Vista, countless days, no really, days, have been spent trying to get everything working. I’ve had a stable system for quite a few days, but getting adobe to work with Vista was for some reason incredibly difficult, and what with a serious amount of University work to get done, the essays were my first priority. Hence the missed comics. I really am sorry for that, and I’ve only just gotten the ability to check and hence reply to emails. And with the damaged hard drives went a lot of passwords, so I couldn’t even login into the site. Trust me, rocvering information from a formatted drive is a lot of hassle, so big thanks to my brother for helping out with that. And thanks to the emails that some of you sent, and the comments that were left. I have no intention of stopping the comic just yet, but I assure you, if I ever had to give it up for more than a sort period, I wouldn’t just leave you guys hanging. So, thanks to all of you who stuck around, to those that sent words of encouragement, and those who offered help. I’ll try and get a new wallpaper (it’s been ages since the last one!) or something up as a way of saying thanks. So check back with the blog sometime on the weekend for that.

Sometimes I wish life was more like dig. You know, some conversations you just don’t want to have, just like there are some articles on dig you don’t want to read. You’ve either heard it all before, they’re trying to be funny/ clever/ original and failing, or they’re full of crap. I should be able to vote on which conversations I want to take part in. It worked for the interwebs…

So here we are, almost 6am, and, shocked though we both maybe, there is a comic. Yes, since it’s 6 am, so technically it’s late, but come on, give me a break! I’ve had to boot up an old machine with corrupted hard drives, draw the comic, go through numerous crashes and blue screens, redraw parts of the comic several times due to the aforementioned crashes. And that was the last resort; first I tried using GIMP (eurgh) and inscape (yuck). Then my internet tripped out so I figured I’d risk it and boot up crapbot that I used to call my computer. Basically, what I’m trying to say is, comic. Enjoy.

I got a letter from a ‘fan’ telling me how “Doctor- ‘omg u has cancer’ jokes are lame” – I say fan, I guess the tone and profanity suggests otherwise, but I like to pretend I have fans. But just to show I can take a hint, and even joke about myself, voila, today’s comic.

For those of you that have been following me on Twitter (you should, it’s cool) you’ll know that I have been serious issues with my computer, largely due to failing hard drives, I have actually pretty much had to start from scratch, the only things left over are the peripherals and the computer case. That meant transferring lots of files, installing lots of programs. The good news is, I’ve pretty much got most of what I need transferred, in total terms I lost about 10% of the files, but most of it was replaceable. The bad news is, for some reason, I can’t install Adobe CS3, the program I use to make the comicy goodness. I have tried several times today to get it working, but to no avail. So, a day late, I present you with a half finished comic. I drew it last week whilst a friend and I had some spare time, I like the joke, but the art is a copy and paste job, sorry about that. But it’s the best I can offer ye. God only knows what I’ll do for tomorrows comic, probably install GIMP or something for a one off.

This also explains why I might not have replied to your comment, email, or in the forums. I’ll try to get on to that ASAP, but what with the upgrade the coursework, the dissertation, the getting ready to go back to university, it probably won’t happen till this weekend.

To be sure, if it’s better for you, it costs more. Not really an incentive is it? A few hundred years ago, it was the rich that were overweight; they had so much money all they did was sit on their arses all day and eat food. Now, the rich people eat organic and pay lots of money to run on the spot indoors, whilst the poor people live on the cheap junk food and sit in front of the TV. Oh how things change, hey?

Ok, so the comic is super late, blame that on the copious amounts of coursework being done. And I managed to cram in an intsweeny bit of socialising in there as well. But, oh ehm gee! Look. Proper shading, a background and what not. Not just some half arsed piece of crap thrown together like normal! I drew the entire comic in flash today, instead of drawing half in flash and half in illustrator like I normally do. It took a lot longer as I’m not used to doing it this way, but overall it went smoothly, except for the text, the default font editor in flash is basic to say the least, and leaving it on default settings made the text unreadable. After a lot of alias tweaking it’s just about the same as normal. So, what do you guys think? Worth the wait? Nah, didn’t think so.

I love April Fools day. It’s full of fun. Ranging from the fun little pranks that we play on our friends, the over the top office pranks, or the pranks from people you wouldn’t expect, such as this BBC video. This year was fairly good in terms of surprising internet pranks, with the guys from QC, QWANTZ and XKCD all swapping sites for the day, Google announcing its plans for Mars colonisation and youtube rickrolling its users. Did you get up to any pranks today?

The link for today is Steve and Bob. I met Mike the artist at the UK thing a few weeks back, and I mentioned his comic in the blog post about it. If you guys haven’t already done so, the comic is definitely worth checking out.

Everywhere I go there are kids zooming in front of me, this way and that, on wheels. And quite frankly it pisses me off. They get in my way, they don’t look where they’re going. I’ve lost count of the times a child has crashed into my leg. It’s dangerous and it’s stupid. And I want them. Pfft, for children 5-12 my arse. Look at them, gliding along, so happy. That could be me. The bastards.

Sorry for the late updates (Tuesday’s went up today as well, go check it out), my hard drives are currently failing, resulting in a lot of errors, a lot of programs shutting half way through without warning, which itself has resulted in a lot of swearing and general animosity towards my computer. It looks like I’m going to have to shell out a couple of hundred quid to replace the parts. Just what I needed.

You just know that even though on paper the job sounds great, a challenge, fun, interesting, give it two weeks and all you will have done is type up people’s reports and fill in data sheets. All the stuff people don’t want to do. Oh well, I guess it’ll look good on the CV.

I went to the Webcomix Thing in London last weekend; check out the blog post I wrote about it. Oh, and come and keep me company in the forums.