Monthly Archives: Feb 2006

Scaled vectors.

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6+°C
It’s a fixing things holiday. I break from work, supposedly for rest & recovery. My week has been filled with mending things. As soon as I’ve done here, I finish the skirting board. All the while I look forward to some cycling, finally I’m well enough to go.
Flash: Yesterday fixed up one of my animations & exported it as a Flash movie clip. It’s effective because it doesn’t matter how much you scale up the image size, it always remains smooth. The swf is just over 900KB, I will probably post it to my own website & remove something else to make room**. Flash 8 does crash sometimes, hopefully there will soon be a patch to prevent this.

Flash is still fiddly in places, and I could do with a good book on Actionscript 2.0.. This should be well worth genning-up on, I ought to learn one programming language, it’s this or Visual Basic.

**It’s annoying that Claranet won’t increase the amount of space allowed for a home page.

Happy Birthday Stuart!
See below for a few frames. Strangely, the export process has removed outlines, at least the files are small, only 11Kb each.

Right then, the flash video is uploaded. Let me know is there are any problems playing the video. If it redirects you to Macromedia’s website it’s possible that you have Flash Player 7 or older. The new version is free and is easy enough to install.

See here

Watch out though, it needs a preloader, which I haven’t done yet.

No smoke

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9°C,+light showers
Interesting news: smoking in pubs is to get banned by the Gov’t. BBC. About time too! Just what I was hoping for when I used to go to pubs more often. there are still about 25% of the population who do smoke, though that figure is still falling.
 

CSA II

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2.4°C & falling
The Child support Agency is due for a complete redesign. Here in the UK organisations normally get a new name when this happens, but if this is the USA would it just be called CSA 2?
 
Flash:During a free period today, I tried an animation with Flash 7. Here is the result:
the impressive thing is not so much the animation, but the tiny file size, this is only 4 kilobytes! If only I could figure out how to insert the swiff file here. At least the idea of the way Flash handles symbols and the libraries has sunk in. I’d really like to be able to get the flapper symbol to follow the curser around now.
Hmm…actionscript.
 
I’m trying some of these, it’s bothersome though, the first one hasn’t worked.

Umm, the second one did though. Try here

the Clogs & The Books

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Warwick Arts Centre, Gig, yesterday.
Stunning, just as remarkable as the Kodo Drummers- which I’m seeing next week.
I’m not writing a full review here, but…
I’d not heard of either before, just a reliable friend wanted to go having read a review in The Wire magazine.
Read up on the links above, the reviews seem fair without too much over-enthusiastic hysteria.
It’s rare that I clap for an encore and mean it.
 
I’m off to play the records now.

8°C, getting warmer. Is it lifting?      

Civil Partnership

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7°C, otherwise – same.
Yesterday was filled with a Civil Parnership ceremony that some friends of ours invited us to. At first the length of the planned evening seems a bit daunting (3.30 to midnight)- but it ended up passsing rather quickly. Held at the Hotel De Vin, the formal part was a Humanist Ceremony for two women who are now, in everything but name, married.
 
the Venue is a converted Eye Hospital, they’ve done a stunning job, especially in downstairs’ bar where the walls are decorated with very striking oil paintings of Lobsters. I actually felt they’d made lobsters look noble. I’m often deeply saddened when I see lobsters in French supermarkets, bound claws with rubbers bands. the compnay was fine and so was the wine. that explains why I set of cycling so late this morning, for my 56 mile constitutional.
 
more later, I’m off to a gig soon. Too busy, too busy….

Furthermore…

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-2 to 2°C;fog & ice

Ice: had a dodgy ride to work today. locking up the bike I noticed it feeling slimey. The hadnlebars and tubes were slippery feeling as if oily. Looking closer, I noticed crystals and realised it was ice. The bike’s metal parts were covered in slighthly crumbly ice and so was I . I had ice on my arms and reflective straps. At this point in time a 6th former feel on the tarmac I’d just ridden over. She was uninjured though. It’s appalling to think aout the conditions and by oblivious journey. If I’d known – then the journey would definitely have been made in the car.

Further to yesterday’s comments on the Cartoons row. I was going to put the heading "what’s wrong with Blasphemy" but I already said that yesterday. It’s interesting that it comes at a time that the UK government is chainging the law on "inciting releigous hatred".

I wonder if religous leaders could be charged with this new law if they were prompting terrorist acts in protest about some cartoons.

The BBC seems to have handled it calmly and very conservatively. A good analogy was drawn today with schoolkids. With badly behaved pupils, teachers are usually reluctant to provoke them, there’s no point setting them up to have a temper tantrum. Likewise…

I’m still struggling to find a reason why blasphemy could be a bad thing. It’s something to do with the nature of religion. Relgious leaders are power brokers, they are a kind of half hidden government. It seems that they use the language of spirituality to feed  their followers. Maybe religous beliefs are as fragile as I suggested yesterday. more thinks later…

Yes it is cold

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0°C: thin fog.
Everyone is complaining about the cold. Lots are also complaining about the inadequate heating in school. We’ve had this weather for almost three weeks now. So today I decided not to fall victim to it. I took 2 tee-shirts to wear under my school shirt+tie and slaos my thickest wolly jumper. There are others on the staff who use the tactic of wingeing. Their tactic isn’t working. It’s not getting any warmer. My tactic is better, but I’m not fighting for any "principle". "It’s the principle" is not generating any heat, so forget the principle ladies & put an extra tee-shirt on.
And pupils, do you really expect any sympathy when you complain of the cold while dressed with bare mid-rifs?

Surrealism
This is surrealism.
Read the link……the best bit is here:

In Jordan, an independent tabloid, al-Shihan, reprinted three of the cartoons on Thursday, saying people should know what they were protesting about.

In a separate article, the newspaper’s editor, Jihad Momani, urged the world’s Muslims to "be reasonable" in their response to the drawings.

The paper’s publishers sacked him hours later over the "shock" he had caused, Jordan’s official Petra news agency reported.

Has he been sacked for asking people to be reasonable?

and this bit:

There has been widespread anger over the cartoons among Muslim nations and communities.

Why? Why are they angry about "cartoons"? Is ity because they perceive them as blasphemous? What’s wrong with blasphemy? Is their relgion so fragile that it should be defended against cartoons? If so, it’s not a very substantial religion then.

Boris Johnson summed it up well:

Conservative MP Boris Johnson told the BBC the Muslim religion should not be treated with kid gloves.

He said: "If you are a Muslim and your faith is strong and you believe in God and in your prophet then I don’t think you should be remotely frightened of what some ludicrous infidel says or does about your religion or any depiction he produces.

Grow up children!