Monthly Archives: Jul 2006

Live®Messenger

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27°C, +wind & showers.

Live messenger: do I need it, is there any advantage from new features. It should work with Win 2000, but does that mean a bigger memory footprint? Does anyone know?

Follow up: well, that did exactly nothing. I downloaded live messenger and installed it, all it has done is reinstall MSN Messenger 7.

Today Friday, WOMAD

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27°C, last hot day for a while

Back home before the main act came on stage, and I live 100 miles away!  We nearly came home much earlier.
 
Best bits: music on the BBC Radio 3 stage. Good musicians, clear PA
Hardest bits: the heat 
Strangest bits: Not much from the far east. It was all either; African, South Central Asia or Latin America. I saw nothing of Japan, Thailand or China or any "oriental" places.
Worst Bit: too hot for the minimal amount of shade available there. We spent a large chunk of time outside the venue sitting under trees by the river.
Most annoying bit: when you’re sitting in a café next to a venue, why are the café’s speakers blearing out some crap when there is quality live music there. If you were in the cinema watching a film would anyone ever set up a bunch of TV sets around loudly playing ITV or some Sky channel?
Most beautiful bits: the flags. Silken, themed, and just like the ones at The Eden project.
Nicest bits: food
Most Dubious bit: the mineral and fossil stall that offered what they called "Tektites" for £13 each. I don’t think so, they were pieces of partly eroded Obsidian if you ask me. They did, howerver offer a small piece of meteoric metal that appeared to show Widmanstatten patterns, this I was more intrigued by.
Harshest bits: PA systems on the big mainline stages. They made a row that sounded like a mass of Kazoos. In all three cases the PAs got in the way of the music and we were listending not to a band, or solo, but the noise Peavy/Marshall makes. This is not good enough.
 
I shalln’t go again. And… Hannah has decided to sell her ticket to V2006.

Gibbons

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27°C, cloud & sun

Twycross: cycled past from the west, the sound of the primates could be heard from near to Orton-on-the-hill, which must be nearly two miles away. There were chimps, howler monkeys as well as other sounds that I didn’t recognise. The sound was less obvious near the zoo so I turned around to go back for another listen. That kept me fascinated for quite a while, enough to vow to make a proper visit there next week. From over the hedge it was clear that there were few people there;  dissappointingly I could see no Elephants either.

Quality

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24°C, +easterly.

mp3 degradation: BBC written about a group of self confessed HiFi geeks
"He said many people did not realise what a compromise they were making when ripping CDs into formats such as MP3.

"People have not been trained. MP3s are stuff you listen to at the gym. Audiophiles do not see digital music as throwaway music – which is what digital music has become to some people."

Hear hear! Nice to see I’m not the only one unhappy with the poor sound quality from mp3/WMAs.
 
Turpentine: the ground is laid on the swimmer painting.

Heatwave: it’s the hottest July since 1911. That means it was hotter back then, so how does that fit into global-warming-journalism?

Computer: fixed MS Outlook . It was ZoneAlarm ( my firewall) that was stopping the home-page loading.

Peak District: it’s all dry and sandy looking. there is no green grass there now, never seen it like that before.

Putting the windows back in

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27°C, hot

Re-installation is tiring: It takes ages to put windows back on, the OS is the easy bit, but it’s all the fiddling with different software. MS Outlook is still generating errors, possibly due to this version of ZoneAlarm. The whole idea is to make space for things, Win 2000 needs at least 10 Gb to hold all the files for 3 users and leave room for defrag to work properly.
Aand, I want a separate OS to run 3D animation and video editing software. That one should be without firewall or anti-virus software so it runs faster. That means no internet access with it ( WinXP). I shold have warned you that this bit isn’t very interesting. It has taken most of the afternoon to do , and taken away some paitning time.
 
Turpentine: started submarine swimmer picture. More tomorrow, it’s drying right now.

get rolling

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20°C, clearing

Hit the road: why such a slow start today? Get-up-&-go stayed in bed today – though I didn’t. Quite why eludes me right now.
One of the Ladies has peed on the kitchen floor.
Oh well, the bike is ready out there.
…later..54 miles done with ease. Funny how the outbreak of some sunshine can change everything.

Reena, who are you?

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24°C, humid & feels no cooler.

End of term: it quite a busy thing. It has throw wet sponges at the teacher ( on a very hot day really was fun); a staff "do" for all the staff who are leaving. The rest is more mundane but relaxed after submitting the threshodlapplication. It doesn’t even matter if the the appl gets turned down, it being done and no longer looming is the relief
.
Oh, and the girl who brought me a bottle of Champagne, signed  Reena.
The tag says "your’re* really safe"! ( Eek- that means I let her get away with something). Reena– who are you, I teach two Reenas, but you put no surname so I don’t know  to whom my gratitude goes!
 
* I’ve returned the gift of an apostrophe 😉

Hottest day

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34°C, blimey

Hottest day yet, possibly record breaking

My legs are sore from yesterday, it makes my gait wobbly.

Linseed: Shoulder painting is now finished, later when it’s dark I can shoot a photo or two. TIt will be going of course in the Finished gallery.
So wait just there…

the next one will be somewhat nautical.

Getting fed-up with computer games, going back to do some animation over the holidays- only two days to go!

 

Legs not working

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33°C , low humidity etc…

Threshold application is in. If you don’t know, we teachers have to apply for a pay rise, and I submitted mine today. Big hurray to that.
 
Run: School did the charity mile event thing today. Most of Britain did it on Saturday, but we did it this afternoon, at the hottest time of the day. There was plenty of bottled water to keep us fresh, also lots of big trees for shade. The boss asked for some to run, so I went into town at luch to get some running shoes. Runners were set of first & I found myself on the front. It turend out to be better than I thought- running. I never run. On reaching the finish and collecting my water bottle I decided to go again.
The second mile was also ok, though leg-ache was becoming noticable.
 
the ride home was a bit wobbly in places, my legs aren’t working properly and that meant sliding forwards on the saddle. An unexpected effect.
 
The sports shop was a curious place. I asked an assistant who soon gave the impression of knowing nothing about the products sold. With annoyance I went elsewhere.
 
It’s very hot now.
Linseed: detail, wrinkles around the eyes, work up the tunic, eyes, glaze layers. I’ll do a photo later, but getting the colour balance is tricky in this light.

Blazing Sunday

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32°C, hot sun, low humidity

Sunday run: Leave for cycling early before it gets too hot. It was only in the last 20 miles or so of seventy that the heat became noticable.
 
Beethoven: I’ve discovered Beethoven as of yesterday. At the Cathederal was a performance by the BBC philharmonic of Mozart ( non-plussed as usual), Beethoven with some stunning violin solos, and lastly Prokoviev (who made a great entry only to get quickly boring).
 
Linseed: just quickly added another more opaque layer to the shoulder, titanium white covers much better than the zinc does. Notice all the colour banding has gone, the blends are much more integrated now. Colour balance is all wrong on this photo, but it doesn’t really matter until the final shot is uploaded.