Monthly Archives: Jul 2007

Llandanwg

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23°C, clear, C=29 miles.

The downpour has broken, summer is here. We caught the first of this in Wales, on Cardigan bay. Rosie & Bess are enjoying it too – as you can see from the picture.

2nd Picture: is of a brand new house built here in tthis town, it’s so new that no-one lives there yet. My question is this:

Why build a house with bricked up windows?

The Walrus afloat

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 it’s getting heavier!

  3ds max: this animation is more a test of my new computer setup- to see how long rendering to video takes. The clip below was about 75 minutes in all with both cores running at 85 to 100%. We can only imagine how well the quad-core chips will do for slightly more that the cost of the Core 2 Duo.
Setting up a rendering node wouldn’t coast as much as a normal computer, many components can be quite cheap ones.
 http://img.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v411/EssieP/3Dgraphics/f0e4d3d9.flv

the world is going to be alright

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17°C, heavy rain (again)

Wormwood: I’m getting a strong feeling that the world will be alright- once the human race is gone. In Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, there are feral horses, mainly in two herds, each led by a dominant stallion. In one story from Wormwood forest, one of the stallions broke into a farm full of confidence and at the peak of his physical strength, breaking down fences and rounded up mares to add to his herd. Wildlife is thriving in the zone, the damage caused by radiation is greatly offset by the lack of interference by the human race.It’s only been just over twenty years since the event, and already rare or endangered species are well established and indeed thriving.

This blog: the edit link is well hidden on the new-look blog, the page furnature is very Vista, but ease of use has been overlooked. It now has a very poor user interface. Worse, many functions no longer work- uploading photos only works with Firefox, MS IE6 fails on this nad buttons don’t have obvious functions: where it was labelled "Edit your space" now it says "Your space" follwed by a further two clicks, each held up with a long delay as it loads.

Summer holiday

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 14°C, rain, non-stop & heavy.

Wormwood Forest: a book on the natural history of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
It’s the first day of our long summer holiday- and this is my summer read. Time will tell how good it is, the book is not well illustrated, but there’s more to life than pictures.
Waterstones weren’t of much use today; all I wanted to do was browse books on the Chernobyl disaster, but they are proving very scarce.
Here is a good idea; an offline test editor for making blog entries:
Unfortunately, it is not a valid win32 application- does that mean Vista 64 only?
Windows have updated this blog interface, it looks all Vistalich now- but it takes longer to load.

Purity ring.

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24°C, looks like summer is here (for now)

BBC news: schoolgirl looses courtcase after appealing against her school uniform rule:
A 16-year-old girl was not discriminated against when she was banned from wearing a "purity ring" in school, the High Court has ruled.
Lydia Playfoot was told by Millais School in Horsham, West Sussex, to remove her ring – which symbolises chastity – or face expulsion.
 
She said the ruling would "mean that slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith".
 
Playfoot) was under no obligation, by reason of her belief, to "Whatever the ring is intended to symbolise, it is a piece of jewellery," he said. "…she voluntarily accepted the uniform policy of the school and there are other means open to her to practise her belief without undue hardship or inconvenience."    
 
Miss Playfoot was one of a group of 11 girls at her school who joined a movement called the Silver Ring Thing. 
 
The judge ordered Miss Playfoot’s father to pay £12,000 towards the school’s legal costs.
See bbc
 
If she was serious about her chastity, then a ring won’t do- she’d wear a belt!

Make a girl-noise here

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22°C, showers, some electrical bumps & flashes.

Fight: In the staffroom we heard a loud girl-noise at lunchtime yesterday. It lasted longer than the girl-noises we often hear, so had a look out the window. Much to our amazement was the sight of a girl-fight. The girls in the fight, as well as those spectating were all contributing to that girl-noise so that it sounded like a large flock of seagulls. Apparently, lots of kids have been squabbling recently, which if it gets out of hand, turns into that distinctive girl-noise. It seems more likely to escalate in this humid, thundery weater.
 
In other circumstances, there are other less gull-like girl-noises, like the ones that they make in normal social interactions. This appears to include a group of friends all shouting at each other as a "normal" part of conversation. They all do it simultaniously, no talk-listen cycle, taking it in turns, it’s all at once and loud as a shout. They are all keen to express themselves, but no listening goes on, just a very loud cacophony of girl-noise.
 
Their throats must be sore by the time they get home. I wonder if they have tinnitus too.
 

RAM- with trepidation

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20°C, sunny spells & dramatic clouds:

Will it or won’t it?: Just fitted in the replacement RAM, which marks the third return but a different brand this time.
Just about to boot it up – concerned that it won’t work again.
Success!: it works, Dual channel the lot. …almost. Programmes load faster, and more noticably, unload very fast- just a split second. There is, more importantly, no waiting while programmes run. Now I can get on with the video project started a month ago.
Still feel ill though.