4 Things

Err... I've been tagged by Ian which is a bit like a chain letter but for blogs Unfortunately, being the anti-social git that I am, I don't actually personally know anybody else with a blog to pass the "tag you're it" onto never mind another 4 people. So this branch will die with me, sorry about that. Anyhoo on with my list of "4 things".

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Four jobs that I've had

Toolmaker -happy days, I was very, very good. (Norn Iron)
Production Engineer -unhappy days (England, 'nuff said)
Design Engineer -there's a possibility I'm a genius (Scotland)
R&D Technology Engineer -genius confirmed! (Scotland, lucky to have me:-)

Four movies I can watch over and over

The Godfather -a masterclass in script writing, cinematography, casting, acting, directing you name it this has it all.
As Good as It Gets -Jack Nicholson is Melvin Udal is Ricky Dee. Any woman who's pants don't fall off when told "You make me want to be a better man" is a lemon.
Excalibur -"a nal nath rack, uth vas beth hood, dock yel tren vey". For I am Arthur, the once and future King.
Pulp Fiction - sadly, Tarantino will never better it.

Four places I have lived

Donaghadee, Norn Iron, from whence I came, the place I call home.
Argyle Street, Glasgow (happy student days)
Braunchsweig, Germany (I was very, happily, drunk at the time)
Angus, Scotland (can't think of any reason that would make me leave (until I return "home" upon my death of course).

Four TV shows I like to watch

Columbo
Scrapheap Heap Challenge
The Apprentice
Fitba

Four foods that I like (before the Doctor told me I would die soon if I didn't lose the weight).

Chicken and Sweetcorn Pizza... hmmm Pizza.
Chips
Lesley's Lasange
Tunnock's Teacakes (by the box, the 10 off not the 6 off)

and after

Quiche with baked potato, loads of cottage cheese and a ton of salad
Chicken salad sandwiches (no butter, wholemeal bread)
Lesley's homemade vegetable soup
Fruit- Apples, Grapes (white seedless) Stawberries.

Four websites I visit daily

bbc.co.uk
elysiun forums
ebay
theregister

Four things I want to do before I die

Become financially independant from my mortgage bank and employer
Live a little
Outlaw all organized religion
Ensure that mankind never populates the stars (we are evil, the battle for the planet is lost, we must ensure the rest of the universe is safe from us).

Four places I would rather be right now

Thatcher's funeral (with a big smile, I hate that bitch!)
In my bed (I love my bed)
On the sofa, cuddling Bonnie and Clyde (I love my sofa, and daddy's little soldiers) and Lesley (phew)
In a cosy little house with Lesley, Bonnie and Clyde, while baby sitting Ellie, watching the telly with a take-away for tea, on my own private island in the middle of a lake with a big storm raging outside somewhere in Scotland or Norn Iron without a care in the world.

Four people I'm tagging

If you want to be my friend, leave a comment and I'll tag you otherwise, Feck off!

Category:

• 4things
• Meme
• Blog
• Personal

Blog Update

I've been quietly working away on implementing the much needed improvements to my site that I mentioned in this post.

First up I created a "Mind Map" to lay down the content required on each page of the blog. I have a licence for Mindjet's MindManager software on my work machine and another licence on my home workstation courtesy of a magazine give-away. It can be particularly useful for projects like this (click image above to enlarge).

Now that the content is defined I can concentrate on creating a template with the correct Blogger tags to implement the layout. Once that's complete I can begin applying the Cascading Style Sheet elements to the content. Graphically, the template is finished and looking very smart even if I say so myself. Wait and see.

As you've probably noticed I've finally settled on a solution to the Blogger "category" problem. The categories listed will take you to a "Digital-Air" del.icio.us account where all the tagged posts from this blog can be found (well, the dozen or so of the hundreds of posts that I've got around to tagging). Interestingly these "categories" double up as Technorati tags, smart eh?

Category:

• Blog
• Blogger
• Template
• MindManager

Blender 2.41

Good grief, I haven't even scratched the surface of the new features introduced in 2.40 just over a month ago and now they go and release 2.41.

This release focuses on the much overlooked Blender Game Engine. See that picture above? That's a realtime animated model with materials utilising OpenGL GLSL shaders, stunning. I had a quick play with 2.41 at work this afternoon and was gob smacked at the improvements made, a real jump forward. Expect a new demo of a realtime interactive environment when I get the time to knock something up.

Category:

• 3D
• Blender

Health Update 46

Time for a quick update on the health front methinks. As of the last weigh-in on Sunday I've lost 2 stone, oh yes, 28lbs of lard are gone. Well chuffed. Onwards and downwards.

Cutting out as much of the useless fat from my diet and the weight is, very slowly, shifting. Lots of real, whole food, no take-aways (well, I've had two in the past 4 months) biscuits and crisps have been replaced with low fat alternatives and the number of Twix and Marathons consumed in that time-frame can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Unfortunately my January appointment with the Consultant to discuss the ME/CFS and NASH (Liver disease) was cancelled and rescheduled for April !??! hmmmm. Hopefully by then I'll have lost another stone and the affect on my Blood tests will be even more favourable.

Category:

• Health
• NASH
• Weight

Testing

Just testing Firefox 1.5 with GreaseMonkey 0.6.4 and a Blogger/del.icio.us/Technorati tagging script.

Category:

• Test

Sky Broadband

Bwahaha, this post was supposed to be about my experience with Sky's latest wheeze, providing Movies and Sport for download and viewing on your computer, but, as you will see, it didn't really turn out as planned.

You can read all about this new service (free to Sky Cinema and Sport premium channel subscribers) here but you may be better reading the full post first (it may change your mind about investigating it).

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Basically, you sign up for an account, Sky check the details and confirm if you're eligible and to what content you can receive. Your computer must run WindowsXP and have Media Player 10 installed and a 1Mb minimum connection is recommended. You then install Sky's software (P2P downloading application) weighing in at a 49.6Mb download. During the install Microsoft's .NET Framework 1.1 will be installed if required. Once you've rebooted the software should be ready for use.

Enter your newly created username and password and begin the journey into the future of entertainment content delivered directly to your computer on demand... unless you get an error message saying there's a problem with your DRM licensing... I did.

Obviously Sky don't want you copying the delivered films and sport clips. They've utilised Microsoft's Digital Right Management software with Media Player 10. You can only view the files on that one computer with Media Player 10 and a DRM license. The license lasts for 30 days before the file is then rendered unplayable requiring a new download. All very well and understandable (obviously there are ways to strip the DRM protection, that's illegal... but you knew that ;-).

Sky's software kindly pointed me to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article detailing the steps required to resolve the issue. There then followed some high end geek info involving backing up hidden system files, hacking the registry, downloading various files etc etc. Best of all was the warning that I may need to repurchase existing DRM licenses for any previously downloaded content... hahaha, as if. Needless to say it didn't solve the issue. Borked, this install is.

A little further digging around the depths of Microsoft's "knowledge" base and it appears that WindowsXP has deliberately prevented me from installing and playing any (legally) DRM encoded files because of numerous changes to the hardware configuration of my machine. They helpfully point out that this behaviour is "as expected" but the page detailing how to fix this is broken, hahaha... shambles. I'm quite proud of the fact my machine can't run DRM protected files.

So, what to do? Uninstall Sky's software of course, and Windows Media Player 10 and .net framework and be happy. It's just not worth the hassle. Thankfully I only wanted to see how the service worked, what was available, how long the downloads were, video compression quality etc. I refuse to take Microsoft's advice of rolling WindowsXP back to a point before any hardware changes. What a load of pish. I'll stick to renting my DVDs, and recording TV to my hard disk. DRM, the future?... bwahaha. Let it die.

Category:

• Sky
• TV
• Broadband

This Blog

The truth of the matter is that this blog has been drifting aimlessly for months (ever since August in fact). I love my blog, I really do but I've not been updating it as much as I'd like and that's pretty poor. The purpose of the blog is mainly personal, I blog for no particular reason. A bit of aide-mémoir, keeping in touch with friends and family, some thoughts, some gripes, moans and whinges... the usual stuff. Somewhere in the archives of the site there are a few gems of wisdom that are popular and have been of benefit to interested readers who may stumble upon this (my) corner of the interweb but I'm unhappy with it at the moment, can't put my finger on it... it's just no good.

I want to try and concentrate on the blog and make it a bit more interesting, useful... I don't know... better. So how do I plan to improve things, and to what end?

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1. Firstly, the look... I hate it! I know I've threatened to create my own template in the past but I just can't seem to get around to seeing it though to a successful conclusion. The template must change but I don't know when that will be. Gawd, not a good start eh? LOL.

2. Navigation, currently poor, a direct result of the template, and the fact that Blogger doesn't provide a "category" function for posts. I'm sure Blogger/ Google will eventually sort that one out but I'm trying to implement my own solution based on a "saved search" strategy. This has one drawback in that it relies on Google crawling the posts before it works (you will begin seeing it popping up at the end of posts but probably won't work fully for a while ;-).

Also need to add a more noticeable "Home" link for those that may arrive at a post from a search engine. I've already added a robots.txt file to remove the Archive directory from searches as they just confused the results so searching "digital-air" for individual posts should be better.

3. Content. The usual rubbish will continue but I want to post regularly and include more detailed subject matter in the odd post. Things like tutorials for Blender, samples of content created in Blender, reviews of hardware, software, gadgets etc that I've bought or researched. Make the content a bit more useful to those searching for information on things that I actually know something about or things that I want to know more about.

So, hopefully you'll notice the difference soon and I can get a lot more satisfaction from my blog and maybe even give something worthwhile back to the interweb in general. We shall see.

Category:

• Blog

New Year 2006

Yep, it's that time of the year again. One final wave to 2005 and a cheery hello to 2006. The world is still full of the usual war, terrorism, poverty, injustice etc. when was it any different?

Personally this year marked my lowest point health wise when I hit rock bottom in August. It's been on the up (slowly) ever since then so that's something to look forward to. I have an appointment with my Consultant near the end of this month to check on the state of my liver. Fingers crossed it'll show an improvement.

Was 2005 a good year or a bad one? Some good things, some bad... can't complain.

Highlights:
The birth of Lesley's first grand-child, Ellie.
Roger taking his rightful place as head of Pink Floyd once again.
London 2012
Glasgow Rangers winning the SPL (still makes me smile to think about it).

Lowlights:
Glasgow Rangers, gawd we're mince.
Bonnie's accident (now fully recovered).
London 07/07/05

So, I hope for you and your family that 2005 was a good one and all the best for 2006.

Category:

• Personal