fire effect

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6°C, dank
28 miles under grey cold skies. The roads are slimey, brown with mud and scattered with decaying foliage. I kept the milage down because the sore throat seems a little worse today. Still not a real  problem though.
Back to video capture duties again. I’m adding fire effects as well as sparks/lightning to a pop video spoof. The footage is already shot, captured onto my PC and ready to load into 3ds max.
Now in 3DS Max, I’m trying two ways of doing this;
    • either lightning strike- using a renderable spline that glows and jiggles about,
    • or Particle-flow that emits long cylinders lke sparks which are attracted to the bunsen.

The second seems the most promising, both are quite a bit of setting up to render a scene of only about 4 seconds. Partcle flow is the most entertaining to use, it makes you think in a logical way rather than a visual one.

cycling: finally got those wretched gears working properly. The gear change is now quite good, earnly up to Campagnolo standards.

To derrailleur

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-1 to 3°C.
Surprised: I was expecting a struggle when I decided to remove the broken off thread from a bolt-hole. especially when it’s been in there for a few years, and used through a winter. Amazing when it came out easily with a gentle twist of the pliars. Conditioning has let me not to expect that.
Anyway, I have so far fitted a Campagnolo AND a Shimano rear derrailleur to each of my bikes. The Campag one works perfectly, but the shimano is…typical shimano.
 
Both bikes have acquired shininess.
Talking of shine- I’m beginning to think that it’s a myth that magpies like shiney things. They are supposed to collect metal-foil, but in my 40+ years I have never seen this happen.
 
throat: why is it sore? There is no associated ill feeling, my mother says she has the same thing, it’s just there, sore but stable. Better keep a cap in the cycing tomorrow…

First of 41

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all change: +9 to -1°C

I wish I knew what the weather would do. It’s been indecisive today- tomorrow coul dbe uncycleable, the ride home tonight warned me of that. The Shire Oak decent buffeted by NW sidewinds, holding a trakc was tricky & uncertain. Pudles are now glazing over outside so there is likely to be black ice around tomorrow. Bus?

Maybe.

The funny bit is the way that gangs of tumbling bronze leaves surge out from between trees, as if fleeing some feared predator. They prey on the instinct to swerve- I’d hate to run something over.

I killed a squirrel last year while driving, we were in a single-file road-works, it dived out from the hedge, and I couldn’t do anything. The roadspeed was only about 20mph, but when I looked in the mirror, it was lying on it’s back- legs in ther air. A grim memory.

 

Last day of 40

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1 to 4°C, cloudy, NW wind developing
All domestic today. We have a new central heating system. the new boiler that is of a type that can heat the water tap as well as the radiators. It’s part of some new extension with new radiators to churm out heat to parts of the house that we don’t spend much time in. It seems wasteful to me.
It’s abit late in the day to pick up that painting, and I have some report grades to process..
Anyway, this is a bit boring so I am going.

It’s unsafe

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6°C, patches of dense fog
The roads I mean, so commuting by car. the roads are slimey, and in places patches that look like black ice.
 
Here’s a useful site if you have the time & patience to fiddle with Windows ( if indeed you use Windows). Good if you have any networking problems, or features don’t do what you want- it’s surprising how much you can change.
The picture below shows a closeup of the most recent painting in it’s finished state. The is updates the previous picture that is a full frame view. It took some fiddling with in photoshop to get rid of various blemishes in the picture but it’s ok now to show here.

On exercise addiction

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-1 to 7°C,, some ice
Someone suggested last week that I’m addicted to exercise. This is why I think I am not:
  • exercise is a physical need like drinking water or breathing, those who don’t get it tend to develop long chronic phyisical illnesses. 
  • Exercise is natural, we are evolved to do it
  • I exercise less than people who have physical jobs, farm labourers, builders etc. No-one accuses them of being addicated to work.
  • Lack of physical exercise is a health risk, it has to be balanced with the risk of injury,
  • Talking of balance, it’s an aspect of life that should be in balance with the rest,
  • It seems that only sedentary people would suggest such a thing
  • when I am out cycling: I see fields of blokes playing footaball; wind surfers; canoists; runners;
  • exercise makes everyone feel better

No specific cause

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-2 to +2°C &

There seems to be a  "repairing" theme in the last week’s entries. Breakage and loss. I lost my USB memory plug this week. Today, I took a wheel hub to built up at a cycle shop. The computer is running better even though one of the new componants can’t be used. the car needs a few things. New derrailleur has arrived along with brakes.
 
Updated yesterday’s entry converting the results of RAM tribulations into a table. It doesn’t narrow down into a specific componant, basic incompatibility looks most likely now. I give up for now, pending expert advice.
 
Look below for my car this morning in close-up.
What a day- full of colour, atmosphere & space. And all this with no time for painting.
Hats off to the lady in Tamworth who had a poodle wearing a coat- on it was written " Take no notice of this dog". I didn’t tho’, it was such a nice dog, not pulling on the lead like mine do. I did notice it. sorry…

Another mystery…

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That RAM!
the replacement for the faulty RAM (see previous) is not problem free.
It’s like this- there are 4 RAM slots to plug it in. To run the faster Dual Pipe mode, you need to install the first 2 cards into slot 1 & 3 & that has given 1024MB RAM:
DIMM slots (Double-sided in BOLD)
Slot 1
Slot 2
Slot 3
Slot 4
Equals (POST)
512
0
512
0
1024
Original
512
512
512
0
1572
Ok for now
512
512
512
512
512
No use
512
512
0
0
1048
No dual pipe
512
512
512
0
fail
 boot failure
512
512
512
512
2048
Ideal, but unstable
2nd try: re-ordered the Single-sided & double-sided  DIMMs in the slots.
It was DS+SS+DS+SS, but this one worked:
DS+DS+SS+SS. Only for a few minutes, then blue-screen & warning bleeps. Now I think maybe one of the new RAM cards is also faulty.
 
For a bigger picture look
There’s no "em" dash in this blog! Oh well, at least I worked out how to insert a table.
 

Things arriving through the door

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+4°C,
There are things that appear in the house that weren’t here before. They arrive through the door in the mornings. They were put there by a man I don’t know. Today, it was two sticks of 512Mb RAM for this computer. The letter enclosed said the last pair of chips I was sent were both faulty. Tomorrow I can try these out instead. If they are virtuous- then this machine will have 2GB of RAM. that is a good thing.
Other things: the silvery rear derraileur that is so well illustrated a few entries ago. It’s even more shiney in real life. A bulb too, so I can cycle in the dark safely, and know what I am about to hit. It makes a lot of light. These new roads are very black with a slight lustre. CDs come through the door often too. Now I await a book.
 
Things.
No painting for a week now. oh!

-4 and still cycling

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-4 to 6°C +
Very cold, compared to what we’ve got used to. The temperature has dropped 20° in the last month. However there is no ice about because it’s so dry, there’s no water to freeze. I decided to cycle the 10 miles to work as usual, with a little trepidation, today. Tomorrow may be worse- the fog will be freezing, leaving a glassy layer of invisible ice on the road. On two wheels that is a bad thing, sometimes the wheels decide to try going in different directions. When they do that- I get dumped onto the road.
So, therefore, I will drive tomorrow. I don’t want to be dropping on the road in front of some driver who’s on their mobile, or like I saw this morning- peering through frosted windows unable to see. Mobile phone drivers are the biggest killers on the road today, worse than drunk drivers, maybe worse than teenage boy-racers even. They don’t seem to value their own lives.
 
It’s been a beautiful day though.
Important stuff in the news: Uzbekistan and; Andijon. It’s that forgotten massacre I talked of some time back. a worryingly underreported story.