I've had problems (both hardware and customer service) with it before, but it looks like it's finally ready for the grave. It's only two an a half years old, which sucks. I buy what I believe are really nice machines with the hope that they'll last many years without suffering too much in the performance department. For example, my last Dell lasted nearly four years before it crapped out on me and was a perfectly good machine right up until it died. This HP already has a small crack in the screen so I was going to be lucky to make it to three years with this one. And now there's some sort of hardware/driver Armageddon going on under the hood causing it to do, well, nothing.

So, I'm going to tinker for a couple of days with this HP to see if I can get it to boot up long enough to salvage and if not, I'll be getting on the Windows 7 train sooner than I thought with a shiny new laptop. With either a new Dell or a Lenovo. I've had two Dells and I've loved them (including the Mini 9 which I still have) and my new work laptop (which I'm typing on now) is a really impressive Lenovo.

The moral of this story is that I might not be able to post sketchbook stuff for a while. Which is a bummer because I'd been on such a phenomenal roll with that over the past few months. The good news is, I'm still drawing so when I do get set back up with a scanner I'll be able to flood the universe with new sketchy goodness.

MLK's I Have a Dream [auto-tuned]

To make up for it, here's the "Rap Chop" a brilliant Slap Chop remix

Much to digest, and I haven't even downloaded it yet, so the best thing I've seen so far is this viral ad they're running to support the launch:

They've got a whole youtube channel set up. It's funny stuff.

Beyond that, as I announced on Twitter today, I'm no longer supporting IE6 for future development. Obviously at work I'll have to support whatever I'll have to support, but on my own projects I'll be ignoring IE6 completely from here on in and I couldn't be happier.

Congrats to the IE team.

A LOT of people leech my images for blog posts, forum posts and social networking profiles. When it's a one-off and it isn't too much of a bandwidth hog, I chalk it up as a cost of doing business. Honestly, the face that 15 year olds think my work is cool enough for their purposes pleases me to no end. Still, I do put a stop to it under several circumstances- with high traffic sites, when people use large images (over 50k) for message board avatars or signatures and when people basically redistribute a leeched image as part of a theme.

Such is the case with this MySpace theme.

At least it was the case. For a while that theme used the top edge of one of my black book images as an accent. Since I moved the original source image as part of the site reorganization over at robreact.com, it was generating a lot of 404s. Investigating the 404s and seeing how often it was being used, I decided to use the leeching to my advantage with a little bit of an advertisement.

I guess they should be happy I'm so nice. There are a lot of less savory variations I could have chosen….