Pterodaktyl…

Yesterday I finally proposed to Lil, who I’ve known for 2.5 years and loved since the moment I met her! We were planning to do it on the commons, which are one of the most beautiful areas of East Devon and our favourite place to spend a weekend, but the weather was rather unpredictable so instead it happened in the bird hide overlooking the Otter Estuary (luckily the rain had scared all the other birdwatchers away, and it was just us, a Kingfisher, a Raven and a Mandarin duck!).

I’ve very glad to say that she said “yes”, so now I feel like the luckiest guy in the world! We are so very much made for each other, and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together!

Grounded off Branscombe, about 7 miles from here, after being damaged in the storms of January 18th.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6283455.stm

We’ve just been away for the weekend - Lil wanted to go home for a friend’s birthday party, and there were a couple of events at the NEC that I wanted to visit (strictly for business purposes of course…).

My dad drove us up country Friday night after Lil finished work (her new TomTom proved very handy for finding her office in the middle of rush hour) and stayed overnight with my aunt and uncle near Gloucester. Saturday morning we headed up to the NEC, dropping Lil off at her parent’s house on the way.

The first event we visited was the Warley MRC show. It’s years since I touched a model railway, but in today’s digital world the simulation companies have a presence at these events, and as several stands were selling our stuff it seemed worth going along. We arrived at 10:00, not long after the show opened, and the exhibition hall was already busy. Within an hour or so some parts of the floor were pretty much packed solid. According to the organisers over 18,500 people visited during the two days of the exhibition. It’s interesting to see how the hobby has changed. The model railway I had as a child had a simple controller with a dial for speed and a switch for direction. If you wanted to run more than one train at once you had to do very complicated wiring to isolate sections of the track. Now a lot of the controllers are digital, and can control dozens of trains at once - they can even be programmed to replay pre-recorded commands, so you can set a whole layout up to run automatically - although I can’t help feeling that’s rather missing the point about what makes a model railway fun in the first place!

The second hall we visited was housing the International Flightsim Convention. Although flight sims are more of a personal hobby than our main business, we have worked on a flight sim project in the past, and it’s a very interesting, highly competitive field. It’s interesting to note that the attendance for the IFC was 2,600 - so the people who complain that computers are killing off traditional hobbies such as model railways should maybe think again.

It was very interesting to see some of the evolving hardware products that are appearing on the flight sim market. While they’re still a long way out of my price range, full-scale instrument simulators which can be hooked up to a computer flight simulator are now available as off-the-shelf products. I had a chance to try a few of these, and the level of immersion they give is quite incredible. This was probably the largest one on display:

Using real switches and buttons is far more fun that clicking on a computer screen! I also drooled over this, but sadly it won’t be out until after Christmas, so Santa won’t be bringing one.

On Saturday night we headed over to Lil’s friends house for the party, which was a lot of fun - I have videos, but I’d like to be invited to another one sometime so I won’t make them public!

On Sunday Lil’s parents drove us back to Gloucester, and then after a good lunch we headed home - all in all, a good weekend!

This arrived in our mailbox this morning - I’ve been somewhat distracted all day!

On Saturday we went on a photography trip to Paignton Zoo with our new Powershot S3. Some of the photos from the day are on Flickr here!

It was warm and sunny this morning¹ so I took the opportunity to go out and try out my new camera. Click the collage above to go to the set on Flickr where I’ve uploaded a few of the photos.

1. Apparently due to the remains of Hurricane Gordon heading this way [↩]

For several months now I’ve been considering getting a super-zoom digital camera. We already have a Nikon D70 SLR, which is a superb camera, but the lens that came with it is a fairly average 28-80mm zoom. This is fine for landscape shots, but since we both like wildlife photography a lot of our subjects are either very far away or very close up, putting you into macro or telephoto territory.

Since our budget at the moment won’t stretch to a pair of decent Nikon lenses, a compact with a super-zoom lens seemed like a reasonable stop-gap. It’s also smaller and lighter for when you don’t fancy lugging around a full-size SLR!

I was planning to wait another month or so before getting one, but while on a visit to Bristol last Friday I spotted a camera shop selling the Canon Powershot S3 for £280, only a few £ over the Amazon price. Since it’s always nicer to physically walk into a shop and buy something rather than order online, I decided to go for it. I’d settled on the S3 partly on the basis of reviews and partly because the Powershot G2 I bought way back in 2002 is still going strong.

I haven’t yet had a chance to take the camera out in the field and test it properly, but after playing around with it at home I’m very pleased. Obviously when you’re used to a £600 SLR there are going to be some things about a compact that aren’t up to the same standard - the noise at high ISO settings and the overall build quality definitely don’t match up to the Nikon - but being able to go from super-macro to 12x zoom in a second is more than enough to keep me happy. It also has image stabilisation which makes the zoom usable without a tripod and enables you to shoot in lower light conditions without needing the flash.

One other feature which I didn’t even know about until I was reading through the manual is an on-board stereo sound recorder. With sound effects forming a significant part of the work my business does, I often find myself carrying a minidisc recorder and microphone on the off-chance that I’ll want to record some sounds. Again, I’m still waiting to carry out a field test, but I have a feeling that the camera’s recording quality will be more than enough for the odd bit of sound effect capturing.

The only not-so-good thing is that the unit I bought makes a clearly audible buzzing noise when you power it up. This changes pitch as you move it around, making me suspect it’s connected to the image stabiliser, but stops when you zoom the lens. It’s a fairly minor issue, but luckily we’re going to be in Bristol on business next week so I can pop into the shop and get it checked over.

I’ve just heard that I should finally be getting my hands on an upgrade to 3ds Max 8 tomorrow evening. I’ve been using Max 5 since I started doing serious 3d work back in 2002, and while it’s been a brilliant, if intimidatingly complex piece of software (I reckon I use about 10% of the features, and every now and then I discover a completely new way of doing something that I never knew existed), it does have some serious compatibility problems with XP SP2.

Once I’ve had a chance to try it out I’ll try and post some of my opinions here.

Just watched the shuttle Discovery lifting off on a mission to the International Space Station - the first mission in almost a year and only the second since the loss of Columbia in 2003.

I always find watching shuttle launches a fairly nail-biting experience, but I’ve barely missed one since NASA started streaming the footage over the Internet. It’s amazing how things have moved on - I remember watching a video window somewhat smaller than a business card which froze every 10 seconds or so - now I can watch it full screen without interruption!

I’m afraid it’s been rather quiet around here for the last month - but after a period when business was worrying slack, it’s suddenly become incredibly busy!

We’re currently working on three projects, including some flight simulation modelling, which is a whole new area for me. It’s taken some getting used to, but it’s interesting to be building planes instead of trains. They’re certainly much more complicated shapes! I really need to get my 3ds max skills up to scratch - these pictures show the standard of modelling that’s going to be set over the next few months. Unfortunately, the version of max that we use throws its toys out the cot if you try and render to texture under XP SP2. This technique is essential for getting the shadow effects that make those shots of the cab look so real, so we’re looking at a fairly expensive upgrade to the latest version. Discreet produce great software, but their tendency to cease producing patches for superseded versions tends to make me grind my teeth…
Tomorrow we’re flying up to Glasgow, then Wednesday we have a business meeting in London.¹ I’ll be checking e-mails when I get the chance. I’ll also try and do a few mobile updates, as I’ve finally got the post-by-email feature working on Wordpress.

On the subject of mobile internet access, I recently switched from Orange Pay Monthly to Pay-As-You-Go - I wasn’t using the phone enough to justfy spending £24 a month on a contract. I was worried that I’d lose the £3 for 4MB GPRS deal I got on contract, but in fact there’s an equivalent deal on PAYG. There’s also the option to buy a single day’s unlimited access for £1 - which for occasional heavy use works out pretty well.²

Well, that’s about it for tonight, I’ll try and update from Glasgow - it’ll be the first time I’ve been to Scotland, so that should be fun!

Oh yes, and I’ve installed a footnotes plugin for Wordpress³

1. 7am train from Honiton, the joy [↩]
2. I tend to go for weeks without using GPRS, then want to upload a load of cameraphone pics at once [↩]
3. Which I promise not to use this much in future [↩]