Monthly Archives: Mar 2007

Sprung, starting today

Posted on by
Reply
13°C, sun & light clouds. C=52 miles

It’s now spring. I know you’re thinking "equinox " but today I swallowed the first fly of the year- that makes it spring now.
 
Little camera: cycling has come full circle so to speak. In the mid-ninties, I started cycling to take my camera places out of town, beyond my normal range. Now I have bought a camera to take out cycling in case I see something. For today, checking out the camera’s functions and quality was the aim. For 70 quid it is ok, all I expected really. But in absolute terms; there is colour bleeding, the image is over-sharpened and it lacks detail in textures. It could be more user-friendly; there is no direct control over shutter speed/aperture, the power switch is tricky to use – especially with cold hands and it sufferes the problem all digital compacts seem to have these days- automation.
 
Cycling: a shorter ride today, but the first of the year on the racing bike. That is significant. Note a picture of cows with their calves. They all stood up when I pulled over ant took the camera out. Cows have a keen sense of curiosity.

Caught by the thought police

Posted on by
Reply
9°C,

Army speak: this story looks like a guy has been sacked for commiting thought-crime. It pays not to state the obvious sometimes.
 
Decadent consumerism– this time, me! It’s about a 2 weeks until I place that order for the new computer. The CPU choice is settled (Intel P.IV E6600), starting with 2GB of corsair RAM @ 800Mhz and Asus or Freecom motherboard plus 1 or maybe 2 Seagate barracauda hard drives. I really don’t want to make the same mistake as last time and buy RAM of inadequate quality. That causes occasional crashes and lockups, preventing the addition of more RAM due to timing mis-matches. The headline componant is a 640mb Geforce 8800 GTS. Possibly more onboard RAM than I really need, but there is furture-proofing to consider.
Other choices are mitigated by upgradability. I can’t do the step-by-step componant change as I have in the past because so many hardware standards have changed. Graphics card uses a new kind of connector as does the hard-drives.
Trouble is- I hate spending money, I’m inherantly mean.

Hearing

Posted on by
Reply
9°C, showers and very windy.

1/ Tall trees make the most fascinating sound against the stronger winds. A soft, deep roar, with smaller flutters, bows and groans. Looking up at the dark orange sky, there are long branches springing with the gusts, their ends waving frantically on the top end of majestic boughs. those slender branches were twice my height, and must have weighed as much as I do- but to see them flung around…
That sound really did stop me during the dog-walk, enough to keep me there until the cold took a bite.
 
2/ Headphones: been thinking about this after reading: Trashing Modernity by Colin McDowell in the Sunday Times. he’s been called a luddite – which I suppose is inevitable, but he did say one thing that stood out for me. After a passage debunking the mobile phone, he went on:
"The iPod is just as bad….
…How anyone of sane mind can think that having music shot through your lughole at close quaters can equate with listening to music, I can’t imagine"
It’s a shame he didn’t go further with that thought. Over 10 years ago I spend £75 on a pair of headphones because I’d moved in with a family who ate into my precious listening time. that turned out to be a notable waste of money. They were a carefully chosen pair, plugged into a much better than average hifi. there is something fundmentally wrong with listening to music on phones. It just doesn’t work as a way of communicating music. The sounds are clearer, textures more explicitly portrayed, but something was so wrong that these qualities were offset. I still can’t put my finger on what it is that phones do that change the hifi’s output into something that sounds like music but just is not.
I’m considering buying an iPod clone, also giving serious consideration to not buying one. It will be used to shut out the distractions while marking, sitting on a train or similar. There’s no point pretending that the sound those machines make is music- it simply isn’t. the magic of music doesn’t some out, partly to do with headphones and the rest is the effect of mp3 conversion (or wma) removing the spirit of performance. All is left is a shadow, a reminder of what it might sound like.
 
Open the window so you can listen to the gales.

Fusty, me?

Posted on by
Reply
0-9°C, , light wind

Car-alarm birds

Riding to work just out from town, I could hear a car alarm. There were no cars in that direction, only fields of sheep. getting closer to a leafless tree, the sound got clearer- but still no cars. My ears told me I was looking straight at it, but all I could see was a bare tree and one bird about the size of a starling. Has the car alarm sound entered into the song-birds’ repetoir?
 
Excellent site found on with lots of tips on the use of good english, AskOxford.
 
Here is a quote from a forum linking to my website:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Saffy
I have a copy of 3d max and, I think I said this before, I’m interested in modeling for FC. Trouble is, I am a complete noob with graphic design. I mean, I don’t know even the most basic elements of building models for FC.

What I’m looking for is a somewhat comprehesive guide, be it online or even a bit of mentoring from a more experienced designer … something that pertains as closely as possible to modeling for FC. I’m also looking for the tutorial files for 3d max, i.e. building a chess set, since I can’t seem to locate them anywhere.

Thanks.

heh, don’t worry, everyone has to start somewhere. i’ve only built about 6-7 models myself. i didn’t really have any sort of training, just one day figured it’d be fun to do – so i bugged one of more knowledgeable friends to death with questions, and looked up lots of tutorials on the net – they’re not hard to find, just google. it’s hard to find one that describes how to build a ship, plane or something really close to what you want to build, but that really shouldn’t matter – as long as you can understand how 3dsmax (and modeling) works, you can build anything you want.

when i was getting the hang of 3ds, i was building aircraft – this tutorial helped me out pretty well:

http://www.mdalgleish.clara.net/tut…uilder-tut1.htm

though the terminolgy may seem a bit advanced, it covers a lot of the basics (like welding, shaping, mirroring, etc.) fairly well, and has lots of images and animated .gifs to help you.

start on building something basic (a squarish building or a flat-deck aircraft carrier, for example) to get used to everything. usually the first few models wont be good (i still need to work on my first ones to get them to a running FC standard) but once you get the hang of things, it’s pretty easy. just remember to stick within the guidelines that are in the documents on the forum, and just go with it.