New Laptops and Dead Captains

Lately I've been getting back into the art scene a little. The past few weeks have been spent with a lot of sketching, looking at other peoples art to get together a style and asking for peoples help. It's amazing what you can do to your own skills with just a few weeks of practice. What took me ages to get right a few weeks ago is now something I do in an instant without any trouble.
So now that I got sketching somewhat handled, I wanted to take it up a notch and start perfecting my skills in the Photoshopping department. I already have a Wacom tablet which I have used with a lot of my digital drawings, but I felt that wasn't enough. You're still very focused on two things; the screen in front of you and the pen in your hand. It requires some patience to make the two work together and even then it just feels unnatural.

For the past six years I've also occasionally worked on a laptop which, at that time, was awsome because it was an Acer lappy with half a gig of RAM (OMG! ) and a 60GB harddisk (OMG AGAIN! ) and only cost a thousand euros which, at that time, was a bargain. But I also have a desktop computer which has seen some large upgrades over the years and I even rebuild it a year ago to fit my needs completely. My desktop has a good 3GB of memory and the disk space recently exceeded 1000GB (1TB ^_^). And believe it or not, I'm using a good 60% of it right now.

So needless to say, whenever I got behind my lappy I went from ZOMGSUPERFAST to OHDEARGODFUCKINGSLOW... and since my desktop desk is always cluttered with stuff and not very usefull for having a tablet laying around I decided to do all my art in my bedroom, since I have a desk there too. I would just put old lappy there, throw XP on it, throw Photoshop on there, install the tablet and by the time I'm 30 Photoshop will have finished loading and I can start doing my picture. Obviously old lappy would die under the strain of present day Photoshop versions, it already struggled with Photoshop 6 and later 7. I did not dare install 8 on there, let alone CS2.
Simple solution: Buy a new lappy. Of course I could just have gotten a decent lappy of any make, but as I wanted a new one I thought I might as well get a lappy that would fulfill my artistic needs as well. And that meant getting a Tablet PC. A tablet PC is basically a laptop in every aspect, except that it has a rotatable, pressure sensitive screen which you can then click back as if you closed it, only with the screen facing up. The result you then get is something that resembles a very oversized PDA. It is however ideal for artists as it lets you draw directly on the screen as you would on paper. It eliminates scanning sketches, faded out lines, erasing wrong things and all that crap. I can now sketch on my lappy, color on my lappy and save it on my lappy. It's that awsome.

About a week ago I ordered the Asus R1E, because I <3 Asus and it was one of the few Tablet PC's that had a pressure sensitive screen that implemented Wacom technology instead of 'just a touchscreen'. For it's class it was also fairly priced in my opinion so that was nice as well.
Yesterday I finally got the package in the mail and at first sight I thought it was something else because the box was freaking huge. I really did order just a 13" screen laptop, it's not THAT big. The box was big enough to fit my 19" monitor O_o. But after unpacking it became clear why the box was so big. Next to getting a shitload of manuals, driver CD's, modules (oh yea, this laptop has a modular bay for the CD drive or a second battery), wires and a carrying bag that looked like it came straight from the 70's. On top of that, the laptop itself was packed in 5(!!!) layers of material: The outside box, the inside box, another box, another carrying bag (O_o) and a thin layer of protective coating. Eventually I got it out though and was very pleased with the results.

Next to the regular crap like ten thousand useless programs that are installed on a new lappy and the first startup which took ages, there's another fancy thing about this lappy. It has a fingerprint scanner which allows you to log in to Windows, applications and websites by a simple swipe of your finger. After your print has been accepted the program fills in your username and password and hits enter for you too.
While at first I thought the fingerprint scanner was just another one of those fancy gadgets, I overlooked a very obvious reason for it being there. When you're in tablet mode you have no keyboard. The only way of input is your pen which you can write stuff with on the screen and hope the computer translates your crappy handwriting to the right letters. But filling in a user name and password doing this is quite tedious after you've done it for 5 times and any more just gets annoying. Asus made a very wise choice to put that scanner there because it makes logging in so much easier once it's set up. Even if I do have my laptop in normal mode, a quick swipe of the finger is often faster or more convenient then typing the password manually. If you're really a security freak you can even set it up to ONLY accept fingerprint scans but that's just overkill for a simple home user like me.

In the end it's a very awesome laptop and I look forward to using it more and producing my art on there when I start getting used to the on screen drawing. It might feel more natural then a tablet but it's still a bit different.


The Flying Dutchman
Those remotely interested in sea, sailing and navy history will no doubt know the myth of the Flying Dutchman. Those not so keen on naval history will no doubt know it from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3.
The tale is about a Dutch captain in the time of the VOC (The East Indian Trading Company, on of Holland's most glorious times) who sails the fastest trading ship in the fleet. His success and fortune eventually go to his head and during his trading trips he starts pirating other vessels, only to keep the loot from those ships for him and his crew.
One day, when he and his crew want to set out for another pirating trip, they are prohibited to leave the harbor. No ships are to leave the harbor on easter and on top of that a violent storm was raging over the sea. The captain ignored these rules however and set sail for open sea.

"Storm or not, easter or not, prohibited or not, I will set sail, even to eternity!"

That same night, according to the myth, something terrible happened on board of the ship. Some stories say a plague broke out and the ship was not allowed to dock anywhere. Other stories say they were dragged to the bottom of the ocean by the devil himself, where he doomed the ship to sail until the end of time.
Several sightings of the old 17th century ship have been reported, some dating back as close as 1880. When the unknown ship is hailed, it tries to send messages to persons or ships long since dead and a sighting of The Flying Dutchman is generally believed to be a sign of bad luck, even to this day (although no-one ever saw the ship again after 1880).

I've always been a big 'fan' of the Flying Dutchman myth and was excited to see the myth in Pirates of the Caribbean. But I was even more excited when I learned that the biggest theme park here in Holland was building a ride based on the myth. I recently got to ride in it and I have to say it's very awesome. They fleshed out the story perfectly. They gave it their own little twist to fill in some of the missing details, but overall they did an awesome job bringing this myth to life. Check out some pictures and the onride video.

Thanks to everyone involved in building De Vliegende Hollander at De Efteling! You did an awsome job!