13°C, dead-calm & clear.

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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.

13°C, dull & grey. C=35 miles.

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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.

10°C, still cloudy.

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Suddenly, MS Flight Sim-X stops working today. No apparent reason, no error messages, just a permanent stop in the splash screen.. 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

13°C, Cloudy & chilly.

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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.

16°C, 0% cloud, light SE wind.

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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.

15°C, no wind, 90% cloud.

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Much better- feel much better now.

Office 2007 includes nice new features, apart from the contentious new interface, there are actually some changes under the bonnet. For the sake of one of my Y11s, I discovered that Access will now do bulk email forms, useful for surveys that are automatically appended to a table on their return. I could use that for sending notices to a class en masse. Now I’m figuring out how to send marked homework back merging from my spreadsheet markbook.

20°C, WNW Winds strong, 60 to 25% cloud C=61 miles.

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Flight Sim for the masses: Did you know that GoogleEarth has a flight sim built in? Start GE in normal earth mode, and press Ctrl+Win+A and a dialogue box opens:

If you want to know the Keyboard shortcuts, press Ctrl+H

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Photo: shot a little late, it only took a few minutes for the full effect to be lost. Moments before, shen I decided to stop the bike there was a clear cross in the sky, those high altitude cirrus clouds had a swathe cut through by a flane, it’s vapour trail was the cross and the wake was clearly visible too. The plane itself was long gone, but the effect was quite striking- take my word for it!