6°C.
Snow due soon. Not well enough to cycle anyway. Pah!
Hrmpff
1
Author Archives: essiep
Poodles- skinny
9°C, showers, heavy some of them
Poodles clipped: this morning they looked as if wearing a joke gorilla suit, now they look like greyhounds. They seem uncomfortable with their angular bony limbs- especially when finding somewhere to sit. Now they are hyperactive.
Dishwasher taken away: after ten weeks of complaints & 34 phone calls, they have finaly taken the faulty machine. I haven’t relaxed about it yet, with a criminal organisation like Currys Online, it may take some time befor egetting the money back that they promised would be in our account on the 29th of January.
Virus : is still lingering with some after-effects. Sleep is always attractive and eyes prickly. Done very little painting over the last week or two.
Ivor Cutler
springing
5.4°C, more changable.Spring is approaching, I can hear birdsong as I write, frosts should dissappear soon so we can stop skidding around.
Started two pictures yesterday.
First: a crowd of faces, just for some mindless practice.
Second: a violininst.
If you’re lucky and very very good I may just post a picture later.
EH Shepherd: hated his drawing of Winnie the Pooh
See here:BBC
Poser 6
5.4°C
Poser 6: experimenting with the new version today. It boasts OpenGL viewport, and various tweeks to make it easier to use. Firstly the bad news:
- It still crashes- even with service pack 2
- No improvements to the timeline, or keyframe editing
- No feedback on rendering, the progress box locks up, and no time estimate.
- Rendering is still v–e–r–y s..l..o..w
- There are fewer body morphs for ther new figures ( though those present are easier to use)
But, on the other hand:
- The interface is slightly better
- hair simulations are quicker
- the new figures are really rather good, and not too much of a resource hog.
Blair and God.
3.5°C. bright
Tony Blair’s gettinga grilling form something he didn’t say today. BBC. The whole story is full of misquotes and wanton ignorance. He said:
"If you believe in God (the judgement) is made by God."
when talking about the decision to go to war in Iraq; said on the Parkinson show.
This is where it gets silly:
"Are we really seeing over 100 coffins coming back (to the UK) because God told him (Mr Blair) to go to war?"
And:
Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, said: "A good Christian wouldn’t be for this war.
No Christian can be infavour of any war- it’s built into their religion (see the 10 Commandments). They are by definition- pacifists.
But anyway, TB didn’t say his descision was swayed by God, it was a reference to judgement afterwards. Well, you’ve had our judgement, that hasn’t changed since before the war- Tony you are a liar and were judged so at the time.
The strangest part of this story is the time spent on misunderstanding what he actually did say.
Back to life.
0.1°C, sun & snow
Not only is my outside thermometer alive again, so am I. I have returned from the timeless world of half-living, eruptive coughs, cold sweats and sleeping with 2 tee-shirts and a thick wolly jumper on ( still shivering). I was so ill I watched TV! There was a program about a deep-sea squid that lights up in the dark, has rusty red skin and can turn inside out. Called "Vampyroteuthis".
I want a new digital camera. We are going to Cephalonia (Kefalonia) in May and I want it by then, so I dropped in on Jessops camera shop today.
Photography is plagued with the same problem that Hifi is: Marketing by numbers. I want a lens that is equivalent to 28mm to about 180mm, so the shopkeeper shows me all these cameras with 10x zoom! But none of them go wider than 35mm equiv. so what’s the point. I don’t care that they sport a massive zoom range if they don’t cover the one I want. The zoom at the long range is wasted because you can’t take a picture more than about 150mm zoom without a tripod. All that fuss made over a wide zoom range is a waste. The other problem is "megapixels".4 megapixels is enough to print out onto A4 paper, there is therefore no need to get any higher resolution CCD than that. In practice, if the CCD is small but high res then there are going to be noise problems and colour distortion. Small cameras have small CCDs.
I want a good quality camera, all the numbers used in marketing the different models are no guide to the potential quality of the pictures it creates. Buying a camera has to be made from a bewildering range of choices, the marketing people are making it more confusing than ever.
These are on my list:
Man-flu
2°C,+ice
+ice
I have manflu. Two people have used that term today when they saw how full of snot I am. The second, in the Cafe was funny.
I was dithering about getting milk & a tray while getting my drink, and said I was in a fog ‘cus I have a cold.
She said" so you have ‘man-flu’""Yeah" I replied, " but at least it’s not bird-flu".Her reply: "so you had no trouble parking the car then".
That was gooood! What a quick witted reply! Cheered me up no end.
Where’s all the bankrupcy?
2°C, wind + sun
Economics: this to me is the most mysterious thing. How does the UK stay in business? We don’t make anything, there seems to be nothing supporting our wealth and yet there is plenty going around. We all have more food, more transport than we need, and heat our homes hotter than we need. Where does the money come from to fund this? We have enough money to spend on extras- things that benefit no-one: lots of people are employed generating and manipulating needless and useless statistics. I work in an industry that uses "target setting" like a drug. It can’t seem to stop setting targets for everything, no-one knows why they do it, but plenty of money is spent on this activity. There is clearly more money here than we need. A poor nation could not afford such decadent luxuries, it seems to spread like a disease
Our school has recently failed it’s target for the number of pupil attendances, we had ( for a week or so) 12% absence due to illness and so Walsall has failed some kind of target. Someone was paid to dream up that target. No-one told all the kids suffering with influenza viruses though. There is no link between the target and any solution to the cold though.
Viruses: I have one. It makes my nose fizz and my joints ache.
Apostrophes:
"We had to use a range of formulae’s in Excel"
Y9 wrote in coursework today. That brightened up my day.
remarkable
2°C, grey
Funny way to start a day: I forgot to set the alarm for this morning so didn’t wake up until 40 mins late. the rush wasn’t especially mad, and got to work ontime. Maybe I’m wasting much time in the mornings. It actually meant I wasn’t tired & achey liek Mondays normally find me.
Flash: to follow on from yesterday’s post, it is indeed possible to use templates in Flash, now I have one with my pre-loader and scene navigation buttons ready. Can you tell I’m getting to like this program, what a turn-around.
BBC are making natural history footage available online. You can download it to use in projects as long as you give them credit. The films are of remarkable quality- see here
Bush: more George W Bush tomfoolery. READ. they really should make a West-end musical on this guy.
thanks BBC for the picture.
thanks BBC for the picture.
Micycle 