Q: This is a follow up question to last Sunday’s mailbag (about computer crashes). I fix Macs, and something I hear all the time from photographers is that the glass panel on the iMacs makes it tougher to accurately edit photos.  Do you have that problem as an illustrator? Am surprised to see you’ve gone with an iMac, so I’m wondering if the glare doesn’t bother you, or if you work in a dark room.

A: I don’t have that problem for two reasons. First, my studio lighting is of the halogen track lighting variety and the fixtures themselves are almost directly above my head. Therefore it is impossible to see a reflection from the lights themselves on the screen… one of the bigger culprits with the glassy surfaces of the new Macs, also, my screen is tucked beneath a 12 inch shelf that further shields it from direct lighting. Because of the way the studio is lit, I really don’t have any glare  or reflections on my screen. The second reason is I do all my actual artwork on the Wacom Cintiq 21ux, which has it’s own screen and that has a sort of half glassy, half matte surface that reduces glare and keeps the colors truer.

I actually like the glassy screens on the new Macs. I used to have one of those 30″ Apple Cinema Displays with the matte screen and the colors on the new iMacs are much sharper and more dynamic. Maybe that isn’t so good for color proofing work, but I go by the colors on my Cintiq and know what to expect in terms of color shift from experience anyway. Other stuff looks great on that iMac screen, like video or regular computer stuff.

I was a little nervous trading in my Mac Pro for an iMac… but not because of the screen glare issue you mentioned. I don’t like having a computer where I cannot open up the case and replace or add a hard drive, dvd drive, etc. I went with it because desktop computers have reached the point with processing and graphics power and memory, available RAM and such that the work I do not longer requires a high end graphics workstation. Computers like a Mac Pro are really only necessary for CAD/CAM work, heavy duty video editing and animation/3D rendering. This iMac is actually quite a bit more powerful than my 5 plus year old Mac Pro was, and was less expensive than even a low end new Mac Pro. Plus no cables everywhere and less space utilized. Winning!

Thanks to Mike Solin for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

Q: Has your PC ever gone down in the middle of a big job\tight deadline? How do you handle this? Has travel ever affected you meeting a deadline?

Yes, I once had my hard drive melt on me in the middle of doing two big jobs. It went down on a Monday while I was working on a job due that day and had a MAD job to finish by Wednesday. The disaster happened to my formerly trusty Dell Workstation… here’s my blog post from that day:

Well, it finally happened. This morning I am coloring happily along in PhotoShop when the blue screen of death pops up on my PC monitor. For the most part Windows XP is a very stable OS and I sometimes go weeks without rebooting, but this one was bad. I instantly lost all the work I had been doing as the computer began dumping physical memory to reboot. Unfortunately it went downhill from there.

Apparently my Dell workstation uses a hard drive configuration called “RAID”, which as I understand it is for drive mirroring and server/data security. I don’t need those things, but they came with the system so I had them anyway. As it turns out, RAID drives are specially configured, and when your RAID goes south so does your drives… and all the data on them. So, my computer went from a fire-breathing graphics monster to a useless pile of crap in .5 seconds. I have to get “Grey’s Anantomy” done by Wednesday and was supposed to have a poster job done by today.

This was an emergency. I could not afford not to be working on this today. I could go to Best Buy and get a crappy PC anytime, but getting a good PC with the right hardware is not as easy. So, being down on PC’s anyway at the moment, I went to the one place in town I could walk in, buy a computer that would have the graphics firepower to do what I needed and get home in time to get back to it… yep, I went to the Apple Store.

Came home with a souped up Mac Pro with 4 GB ram, 2 x 3.0 Ghz processors and a 512 MB graphics card. I figured I’d see if those commercials about opening the box and starting to use the computer were accurate. Let’s just say that after one automatic firmware upgrade download, one firmware installation crash, one hour on the phone with tech support and a total reinstall of the system software I am still not using it and those commercials are a load of garbage. Right out of the box my ass.

Well, back to the cyber-battle. If I blow my deadlines I will be very angry with Michael Dell and Steve Jobs, in that order. This may put a damper on blog entries in the foreseeable future….

I eventually got the Mac Pro working that day, and finished both jobs on time. That happened in 2006, and just a few months ago I retired that Mac Pro and got a new 27″ iMac, so I stuck with Apple.

Dealing with deadlines when traveling is all about making sure your travel won’t be a problem for the deadlines. I usually get behind on my jobs and need to pull and all-nighter or three to get caught up, so I do my best to get that out of the way before I travel. Then if needed I bring whatever I need to keep on track with me. Hopefully that is nothing, but as I hate being totally behind after a trip I usually bring some project along to mess about with… The Lovely Anna likes to sleep in and I like to get up early on vacations, so I have some quiet time in the mornings to get stuff done.

Thanks to Leo Kelly for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

So I am working feverishly Thursday last week to wrap up a MAD job before I leave for my New England park, and I notice my Mac Pro is acting a little weird. Something is wrong with the networking as none of the other computers on the network are showing up under my “shared” folder. This is certainly not a big deal, as I am really not using any networking features at the time other than my internet connection and FTP program to upload the final art to MAD. However I am a little anal about those kinds of things, so I quit all my programs and rebooted my Mac Pro. Rebooting is the first step in any troubleshooting strategy. The familiar Mac “chime” dings and the spinning gear starts spinning….

… then all I got was a blank blue screen.

THE DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!!!

Minutes went by. No movement, little or no hard drive activity. No response. Nothing. Deadline: 14 hours away.  Hard reboot (held down the power button until it rebooted). Same results.

THE DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!

I thought that was a Windows only phenomenon, but apparently Macs also have a DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. However, in typical Apple fashion their DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH is not the harsh ultramarine blue of a PC but a well designed and pleasing pastel blue. Maybe they can make that part of their “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” commercials.

Mac: Hello I’m a Mac

PC (completely painted a dark blue): And I’m a PC

Mac: PC, what happened to you?

PC: I’m experiencing a General Kernel Fault, producing the DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH as you can see.

Mac: That’s too bad.

PC: I supposed now you’re going to say that Mac’s don’t ever have complete system failures like this, so no DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Mac (now painted a light aqua blue): No, we also have a DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, but ours is a pleasing, calming shade of periwinkle, which our designers spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars perfecting.

PC: Whatever.

Panic time. Steve Jobs received a considerable amount of verbal abuse while I tried to formulate a battle plan. After my hard drive meltdown several Octobers ago I learned my lesson and have a bulletproof backup system on a secondary hard drive. My files were in there somewhere. I just needed to get them out, onto my laptop and hook my Cintiq up to it… then my Mac Pro suddenly came to life. It took roughly 10 minutes of the DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH from my last reboot attempt, but the OS X desktop finally labored to life. I blinked at it for a few minutes and then opened PhotoShop, my file and started working on it gingerly… like a hiker who had been confidently crossing a frozen lake until his foot went through some thin ice, and then spends the rest of his trek tiptoeing along to the music for cracking ice, thinking at any second he will plunge into the deep as the far bank never seems to get any closer. Perhaps my Mac Pro, sensing it was seconds away from a beating with a hammer, resurfaced out of self preservation.

Not daring to reboot again, I copied over the files I had not yet colored to my laptop and then finished the job. My Mac tried to trick me into rebooting after it had automatically downloaded some software updates but I was too crafty for it. Nice try, Steve. I finished the job by the deadline and then rebooted the computer.

Same results. THE DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH lasted for about 12 minutes this time. Eventually everything was working. However the ice is still cracking around me, so the Mac Pro will have to go into the shop to figure out what the problem is. I supposed since it eventually worked, it can’t really be called the DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. Maybe we can go with THE DREADED BLUE SCREEN OF HEART PALPITATIONS.

They say there are three subjects you cannot discuss on a message board forum without it becoming a flame war: Religion, Politics and Mac vs. PC. I get a real kick out of the personal way some people take their computing platforms. Apple knows it and feeds the flames with their ad campaigns, which basically say “If you use a Mac, you are smart and cool. If you use a PC, you are a boring, nerdy moron.” I really hate those commercials.

I’ve used both. They are both computer systems using software that are designed and manufactured to sell to consumers to make money. Neither platforms are perfect. Both experience issues and problems. As Apple gets bigger and bigger, it is starting to lose the one thing it did have over Microsoft… it’s coffeeshop chic. Apple has been the cool, Grenwich Village cafe to Microsoft’s Starbucks for a long time, but as Apple keeps adding “stores” it’s also becoming a Starbucks, and starting to suffer from the same problems. Leopard has been more problematic for Apple than their previous versions of OS X, and I have had as many issues with my Mac as I ever had with my PC. Granted, I never used Vista, which I’ve heard has some serious issues, but the point is that software is software and nothing “just works” no matter what. It’s the need to be compatible with everything that’s been the Achille’s Heel for Windows, and the more software being written for the Mac makes for more problematic third party problems. I can almost guarantee there will be a Mac-only virus attack in the next few years that will erase the “virus proof” reputation Macs have enjoyed. My PC’s anti-virus programs were the root of many problems as they are intrusive, resource hogging monstrosities.

As my Mac Pro gets hauled off to the Apple Store this week for repair, I will still say that overall I do like the Mac better than the PC for what I need to do and accomplish. Just please do not feed me the arrogant, “Mac is sooooo superior to the PC” rhetoric. It’s not true to any appreciable extent past personal preferences and personal needs. My empty studio desktop can attest to that.

They say there are two kinds of computer users…. those who have lost data in a hard drive crash, and those who are going to lose data in a hard drive crash.

I learned that lesson the hard way, as most eventually do. In October of 2006 I was in the middle of two big projects when my Dell Precision Workstation suddenly flashed the Dreaded Blue Screen of Death at me. The entire story is here, but the end result was that in desperation I ran out to buy the only computer available on a local store shelf that had the graphic horsepower to allow me to finish the jobs I was working on by the deadlines… a Mac Pro from the Apple Store. Now I’m a happy Mac user. However that type of disaster happens to both Mac and Windows users in equal measure.

Fortunately I had all my art files backed up, as well as most of my other data and documents. I did this manually every so often, so I did lose some files. The worst was that I has neglected to back up two years worth of theme park sales spreadsheets, and while I had the hard copies they were created from it was a two day process reentering all that data. Ugh.

A few weeks ago there was a big uproar among users of the accounting software Quickbooks Pro for Mac. I use this software, and it is a great program. One of it’s features is that is constantly checks for updates, and then asks you to download the update when it finds one has been released. Most programs do that on the Mac. On this particular occasion the new Quickbooks Pro update had a serious glitch in it. When it tried to install there was an error message about not having enough hard drive space, and then once the install was cancelled the user found the update had somehow deleted their desktop folder. DELETED. Poof. Gone. (more…)