Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tatenhill and surrounds

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8°C, light grey, dry and minimal wind.

Cycling: [retrospective post] had a long steady ride on Sunday, Foremark resevoir, Staunton Harold and Bosworth Battlefield. Total 74 miles, I had about 10-15 miles left in my legs but decided against it because of overhang tiredness at work the next day.

FSX; the title comes from another project I am working on, making scenery for the Flight Sim- FSX. Local Staffordshire is looking much better, as is another two places undergoing a facelift. I can post when more screenies are ready.

FSX_KML

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6°C, clear(mostly) but windy.

I rode home in 32 minutes today!
FSX scenery design: Currently I am having some success learning the KML program that works with Google-Earth to generate scenery for the flight sim FSX. It’s going to take quite a while to finish these. This picture uses a generic nuclear power station, but the 3D file discussed in the previous post needs to be planted in its place. apparently the KML programme can place them, but wait until the model is ready. It only lacks some of the textures and some LOD models.

Pending requests

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6°C, dull, but mostly dry. No cycling.

Every few days I find links to various womens’ Live_spaces in the pending requests. They have spaces with barely any info and of course I have never heard of them. They always look like some fading porn star, certainly no-one I recognise. This practice looks like some pointless spamming internet scam. No harm in blocking them then!
STALKER, 3rd run-through. (PC game), After a slightly lacklustre start to Bioshock, I’ve restarted a new game in STALKER. There is something particularly rewarding about this game, it must be the mixture of the  setting, atmosphere FPS genre with the RPG elements thrown in. It makes great screenshots, which isn’t that easy to do in Bioshock.

Bioshock

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13°C, warm, wet & windy. C20miles

We live on an island in the Atlantic; it’s December and we’re swept by storms- oh well.
Bioshock: I’ve gone back to STALKER for a another run through, Bioshock keeps crashing at one point in the first level and there is not yet any sign of a patch.
Perhaps tomorrow I can post pictures of the shiney things that came in the post today. They are so very shiney, you’d not believe.
 

iPoddling

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8°C, clear; stiff W winds.

Forecasts are terrible for this weekend, cycling tomorrow looks less likely than usual. If I’m housebound then I’ll just have to fiddle with that iPod.
There are a few things I don’t understand about it-

  1. iTunes makes me re-register it with Apple every time I plug it in to the computer.
  2. iTunes shop hold hardly any music that I’d like to buy- often the searches just return tribute bands and compilation albums.
  3. Some album cover pictures don’t upload to the gadget, others do.
  4. there are 3 built-in games, how do I uninstall them?
  5. Why would anybody want to watch a film on a screen the size of a camera monitor screen?

I’ve rediscovered King Crimson. It’s been years since I played any and my LP collection is pretty complete. They were a bit pretentious and flamboyant in the early albums, a reputation that they never shook off, but their later releases are far more interesting. Try "Larks tongues in aspic", " Starless and Bible black" or "Red". All use some superb bass and drum musicianship.

Bioshock

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13°C, dead-calm & clear.

Pripyat & Zones of Exclusion was delivered today. Large format photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat city. Gorgeous book.

  http://img.photobucket.com/remix/player.swf?videoURL=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v411/EssieP/STALKER/0836fa1f.pbr&hostname=streammg.photobucket.com
this could be quite a good feature to play with, the stock music is rather bland, & it’s not clear whether you can upload your own- probably not.

Take-off

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13°C, dull & grey. C=35 miles.

FS-X: fixed the Flight simulator. There was a corrupt user-log file that the main game opens on launch.Deleting it removes records of previous flights, but at least it goes now.
Back into cycling, the commuting bike is all but ready. There is  one tiny light-bracket that I can’t find. It’s stored somewhere safe, those things are fragile, but I can’t remember where. That was the last day of the holiday- a mending-things holiday.

Grounded

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10°C, still cloudy.

Suddenly, MS Flight Sim-X stops working today. No apparent reason, no error messages, just a permanent stop in the splash screen.Disappointed. Running "repair" and re-installing the service pack has made no difference.

3DS Max. Updated the Digger animation. Some new textures and a few new components. Once the render has finished, I can post a small version of it here.
http://img.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v411/EssieP/3Dgraphics/BIGdigger_n85.flv

Edukators

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13°C, Cloudy & chilly.

Edukators: Good contemporary German film. Long but worth it in the end. It’s full of almost dated idealism from the characters; plus various themes centering on the generation gap. Acting is all impeccable, as is the filming- the whole thing is vivid bar one distraction. One editing trick is the "drop-cut", it works like a few dropped frames, as if the editor wanted to speed up the scene a bit so took a few frames out here and there. the effect is a rather jarring.
Forks: collected. Rebuild soon.
Kevin Ayers album- on first listen- it sounds terrible.

inAcessible mail-merge

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16°C, 0% cloud, light SE wind.

Access 2007: is supposed to do mail-merge to email. Actually it does, but not well. Firstly, it crashes Outlook, secondly, it doesn’t really save the wizard settings which means re-usability is poor. Last job at work today involved issuing an e-mail to 711 pupils, by the time I’d given up, 200 odd had been sent two copies and another 500 got none. I expect it’s a problem with the network and Research machines appallingly unreliable security policies.

PJ Harvey LP arrived today, I’d hoped to post a picture of it on the turntable, but can’t carry the disc home until Monday.