Waiting for paint to dry

[altivo]

Quite literally. Cleaned up the sketch of barn and horses for the color study, and started painting. Because we are limited to only three pigments, there is more time spent mixing than actually applying paint. And because I am cautiously building up the colors in layers, a lot of drying time between washes.

Managed to get a decent approximation of burnt sienna out of the palette. Not a bad gray either, almost Payne's but not quite (a bit too bluish due to lack of any real black.) Now if I can create a burnt umber color I'll be in good shape. Yellow ochre wasn't so difficult. Doing what is essentially a landscape, earth tones are essential.

Gary is busy projecting our farm buildings onto Google Earth. It seems far too fiddly to be worthwhile, but that's the assignment. He's been at it for days, and still has to do the house roof line.

Got a fair amount done at work today in spite of a lot of distraction trying to get audiobook files loaded onto my boss's new player. She bought a Sansa Fuze (marketed by Sandisk) and all I have to say about it is don't get one. Documentation stinks, support is non-existent. They don't supply drivers with it, you can't download them from their web site either. You have to install Windows Media Player 11 or else iTunes, and the actual needed drivers come with those. Incredibly stupid. She really wanted Audible files, which will play on it if you can manage to get them loaded, but Audible doesn't warn you that when they install their manager, they assume that you already have the drivers in place from WMP or iTunes. Once we figured that out, which took several hours worth of downloading and rebooting repeatedly to satisfy Windows Update, then Audible complains of "an error" when it tries to install the audio onto the player. No explanation of what the error is, just "an error." Oddly enough, the files were actually there when she looked and they are apparently playable in spite of "an error," so she was satisfied. But it wasn't worth the effort in my opinion. I tried plugging the player into Linux and, amusingly enough, without any special driver, I could see the files on it and could have copied MP3 files directly to it. Windows, however, has to be really obtuse about requiring special drivers and only letting you use iTunes, WMP, or the Audible Manager to get files onto the thing. Windows Media Player is the most obtuse, badly designed user interface I have ever seen. (And that's saying a lot, because I've seen some real nightmares on the Macintosh in the past. Anyone remember Kai's Photo Soap?)

The temperature broke 60F today, probably the first time this year. Birds are going bonkers singing and squawking at each other. Still no crocuses, but the daffodil shoots doubled in height. We did see snowdrops blooming in Woodstock over the weekend.

OK, time to go brush the salt off that painting I think.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Kai's Photo Soap... I had Kai's Photo Goo for a while on a PC years ago. It was kinda goofy, really, and I didn't have a lot of use for it. Certainly not any kind of a standard interface compared to other Windows programs.

We got to 60 today too, I think for the first time this spring. I saw blooming snowdrops in my back yard tonight. D'aww they're so cute.

[altivo]

We have snowdrops blooming in our yard today as well. I didn't remember planting them, but they're going. Scylla, those little bright blue star shapes, are my favorite early spring flower. The bulbs are so small you could mistake them for a pea. They spread into a great mat of blue flowers under the right conditions. We have a few scattered ones here, but I suspect our soil is too alkaline for them to really do well. Crocus opened this morning too.

Kai's was by far the weirdest user interface I've ever seen. Totally incomprehensible, and supposedly so "easy to use" that they didn't provide any manual or help file. *snicker*

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

You have to install Windows Media Player 11 or else iTunes,

You can almost smell the product lock in.

[altivo]

Yep. Especially after I found out that Linux can treat the player as an ordinary USB flash drive to get files in and out of it.

[moonhare]

My Sansa worked very well, until WMP11, or EZone's latest downloader, not sure which. Rips come out all wrong, some disks having logical numbering like 01-01, 01-02, or 02-01, 02-02 and so forth. Others rip only as 01, 02, or worse, 1, 2... and the Sansa can't tell which disk to play in which order: 01, 11, 12... or 01, 01, 01, etc. And, when the planets align just so, Disk 01 may just end up in a separate file, or at the end of the selection somewhere....

Get that? ;o) Anyway, I figure it's the Windows Media Player 11 at this point, because I never this many problems with earlier versions. So I just live with it by renumbering all the tracks after each disk is ripped. I also quit using Ezone and went back to ripping the cd's.

(Audiobooks from Ezone, in wmp format, tend to drop out of the Sansa's memory so that when I go to resume a track it starts at the beginning. Not a prob except that the tracks have no markers, and each 'disk' is one track: sucks when you're ten minutes from the end of that 1 hour+ track and it starts over because the Sansa doesn't FF or RW well.)

Long winded, and I have to get to work! Good luck with the painting!

(edited, badly...)

[altivo]

Whatever you are using to rip disks with is configured improperly. Rippers always have a configuration setup that lets you specify how the files are to be named. We use a numbering system for audiobooks that names files ddtt.mp3 where dd is the disc number and tt is the track number. Haven't yet hit any kind of player that won't get those in the right order.

Ripping to .WMA files is really not a good idea for audiobooks, and one of the reasons I say that is what you've already found: there really is no facility for bookmarking or remembering your last location in a .WMA file. Most players take you back to the beginning of the track that was last playing. If the book has two or three minute tracks, that's not so bad. When the whole book is one giant file, the way NetLibrary does them, it's utterly worthless.

[hrrunka]

Kai had a most peculiar approach to UIs. A few folks seemed to think they were wonderful. The rest of us struggled...

[altivo]

I found it particularly ironic that they thought they were so "intuitive" that no manual or help files were needed. The interface was completely incomprehensible to me.

[hrrunka]

The watercolour came out very well.

As for positioning things in Google Earth... I'm someties a bit suspicios of the exact registration of the images, and there's often perpective distotion on tall objects, especially if you're unlucky enough to be working near the corner of one of the incorporated aerial photos. I need to do some garden measuring to get some idea where I can put an HF antenna. A long tape and some good old-fashioned triangulation will probably work best... when the weather's a little warmer and less damp.

[altivo]

Thanks. That one was fun to do.

Yes, a long tape is usually good enough for an estimate. If you have a survey plat of the property, that helps.

For a simple antenna that performs really well in my experience, I recommend the G5RV design created by one of your countrymen. The full size one is about 40 meters long, but if you don't have that much space, there's a reduced size version that works well on 7 MHz and above and needs only about 20 meters. I've used one for years now and the performance both receiving and transmitting is excellent. Limitations are that you will require a good transmatch (antenna tuner) between a transmitter and the antenna, and the feed point of the antenna is in the center. Consequently you might have problems if your house is at one end of the ideal space to hold that length.

[hrrunka]

I've got about 25 metres in the back garden if I use a chimney as one anchour point. I could probably get to 40 metres if I used the front garden as well, but as there's no convenient tree out front I'd have to put up a mast, and that would complicate matters considerably. Arranging a centre feed is going to take a little thought, but a transmatch is on my shopping list.

[altivo]

Sounds good then. You can probably get the smaller version up just using the back garden all right.

You can make a center feed work, but may have some tricks needed to route the feed line without it being too ugly or at risk of people tripping or hanging themselves. ;p Height above ground is another consideration, and I think the minimum recommended height for the G5RV is about 11 or 12 meters. You can get by with less, but may need to suspend part of the feed line parallel to the ground and at 90 degrees (or as near that as possible) to the antenna wire.

It's really worth the finagling, though. I spent years trying to work with inadequate antennas, and was utterly amazed at the difference when this one went up.