Monthly Archives: Oct 2007

Empty handed

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13°C, clouds 100%

Visit Birmingham to buy clothes. No luck , could only find warm thick heavy ones; they would not be suitable for someone who works in a place heated like an old-people’s home. So I returned empty handed.
Artemesia "Powys Castle". Bought one depite the contentious link with Absinthium. I’m not at all sure how close this variety is. It smells right however. The photo below is a wild variety, Artemesia Vulgaris, "Mugwort". Wormwood still eludes me in the wild, it is said to be quite common in the Midlands, especially likes sandy soils, which are common in Birmingham.

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

Night work

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11°C, 100% cloud, light wind.

Photo: trying out colour temperature setting in my camera. Mostly I use the daylight/sun/cloudy setting. this time I set the camera to "User", which means that it calibrates the colour balance just before you take the photo. I guess the idea is to have a grey card, take a colour reading off that then use it for a single shooting session. The first picture is too green, presumably, it has tried to balance out the orange sky. The second is far closer to an equal range of colours.

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.

Cathedral

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13°C, clear, cool(ish).

3DS Max: Since I’m considering importing 3D files into Microsoft Flight Sim, I’m platying with a nice simple, non-animated object to learn how to do it. Even though the model will only be seen at a considerable distance, there needs to be a convincing texture file. that includes images of the windows and building stone blocks that the Cathedral is made of.
…quite a nice way of spending a head-cold Sunday in the holiday.

Home to roost

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16°C, warm, humid & clearing before a front.

Music (recently arrived):-

  • Joni Mitchell– Shine.Not a great first impression, bland rather muzac like in general presentation.Comes in a very nice case, not seen one like that before.
  • Robert Wyatt: Comicopera- play that next
  • Kevin Ayres– the Unfairground. Here’s a name from a long time ago, purely a wildcard purchase.

Geese flying southwest  to roost. We’re experiencing a very mild October, even so, the heating is on at work – making the atmosphere very uncomfortable. Many rooms have heat pouring out of radiators, at the same time as cooling fans running from the electricity mains.

Fungi are not plants!

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16°C, still, with some cloud.

Fungus: is not a plant, I stand corrected, but I’m left wondering what the term for a single fungus "entity " is. anyway, I suppose it’s inevitable that in a place with hundreds of people passing each day, that someone has destroyed this fungus’ mushrooms. All it would have taken is a quick kick, and then a spectacular explosion of white fleshy hyphae would be seen.There have been seen other mushrooms not far from this on the edge of the tarmac car-park, I thought it would be produced by the same plant. I have been corrected on that misconception. It’s not a plant, fungus don’t belong to the plant kingdom, they have their own kingdom (as I’ve said).