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[personal profile] kingandy
Have been coughy and sneezy all weekend.  Well, actually was sniffing a lot at work last week, but it really hit me over the weekend.  Luckily the wonders of Lemsip were at hand to sort me out.  Surprised to note that Lemsip is not in fact produced by the biochemical juggernaut that is SmithKline-Beecham - though I suppose it should not have been quite so unexpected, what with the rival "Beecham's" product.  I think I thought it was a brand loyalty thing; Boston Advance and Bausch & Lomb contact lens solutions are both made by the same people, they just put it in different boxes so people don't have to change their buying habits, and Nestle have yet to remove the "Rowntrees" logo from their products.  But apparently Lemsip is made by Reckitt Benckiser.  Well.  Can you tell I'm bored?

It being my Mum's birthday, I stayed in Ilkley to celebrate.  We went to Saltaire and watched a DVD.  Then I spent about 24 hours on my little old computer.  It's up and running Windows 2000 currently, and the wireless LAN card is being all recognised and everything.  It's even picking up the network downstairs - though it's unable to connect to the internet.  According to the bar charts, the signal quality is good, though the strength is not so hot.  Still, now that I've moved the arial around a bit, it's probably about as good as the one at Alex's house, so I suspect Telewest have some sort of programming business going to stop two computers working it at once.  Or there's something else that I need to do - I'll have a look at the software that came with Mum's broadband package, though I'm reasonably convinced it's just things like IE and Outlook Express.  Still, worth a poke.  If all else fails maybe I can convince Mum to set her computer to share internet connection ... or something.

Have scanned random encounter, and transferred it from the scanning machine up to my PC by an elaborate process involving Smart cards and digital cameras.  See - the floppy drive on my old PC doesn't work, and while I do have a spare somewhere I'm not sure where I've put it.  It's probably in Manchester.  My USB RAMdrive/MP3 player is likewise in Manchester, leaving me with a choice between burning a CD - not desirable for 300K of scanned bitmap - or murder a complex series of other USB devices.  Mum has a number of these, but the important ones here are a stand-alone memory card reader and her digital camera.

The card reader is USB2.0, which my PC does not have, so it can neither read nor write.  The camera, for some reason, does not write-enable its cards while plugged directly into a PC - though my PC is capable of reading it.

Do try and keep up.

What this means is that while I can get data from Mum's (net-enabled) PC to mine - by saving onto a smart card using the card reader and transferring the card to the camera - I currently have no way whatsoever of getting data back downstairs.  This will be resolved as soon as I can make a trip to Manchester and pick up my RAMdrive, but this won't be until Friday, from whence I shall proceed directly to Maelstrom, so any results of my endeavors will not be available until next Monday at the earliest.  If such there be - I've got exactly two evenings to continue my image processing, Monday and Wednesday.  And I've got to squeeze it in around TV viewing, don't forget.

As I say, it's been scanned, and I'm making progress with the colouring.  I've got most of the basic colours flood-filled (on a separate layer, fact-finders) and a few of the backgrounds.  In two minds about the vast areas of black in one character's costume - whether to add highlights and shadows or just have solid black blocks.  Both have plus and minus points, visually.  I think I am liking the pure black fill, though as it is the artificial antialiasing (on zoom out) makes it possible to pick out the lines, and I think they do add something.  Well, that'd the beauty of colouring in layers - I can try different things.  At least until I start full-on processing, rendering lighting and such.  The lightsaber (lightkatana?) has come out quite well; I learned from the last attempt and drew the blade apart from the handle, creating the fills and blurs in another layer and then lining it up, so as not to have to fill in the lines that the saber crossed.  Not that there are many this time.  All I have left to colour is the dioxy-ribonucleic acid, and then I can start adding shadows before moving on to filters (for which I shall likely flatten the image).

Yes, I am a tease.  No, I'm not going to give any more away.  Today.

If anyone's interested, a lot of my colouring procedure is very similar to that described in Julie Dillon's Manga Drawing Tutorial.  I think the main difference is that she's happy to work with a greyscale image, relying on Photoshop's antialias features to find the right edges and blur appropriately, but I don't like that - I find it easier to work with high resolution 1-bit black-and-white scans.  It may look nasty up close but it shrinks down real purty.  She does have a lot of good things to say on the subject of shadows - basically keep adding more until it looks good - but I think she has a lot more patience than I do.  you're lucky if you get a shadow and a highlight out of me.

Right, that's enough out of me.  Oh, except, I've noticed [livejournal.com profile] arwel's wedding invite said RSVP by last Friday.  In case you hadn't guessed from my eagerness to receive said invite: Yes, yes I will be coming.

Oh, yes, one more thing - Maelstrom is this Friday. I have offered to drive [livejournal.com profile] mrssshhh over to Manc on Thursday with a view to liftage. I have, in recent days, also mentioned that there will be room in my car for [livejournal.com profile] arwel and/or [livejournal.com profile] myki. This may present difficulty if all three require space (while Raj is large enough for four manly men, each man does come with a certain amount of luggage). Also I'm not sure on the exact status of the big-ass tent. Did Sam say he was taking all of it or just the poles? Am I having to take the canvas again? What's up with that?

Date: 2004-07-19 05:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stsquad.livejournal.com
Was you Mum's PC every diretly connected to the cable modem?

Date: 2004-07-19 06:10 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stsquad.livejournal.com
In which case I suspect the MAC address you gave to Telewest when you got your Mum's machine working was the MAC address of the router. Is there some sort of user account page you can go to to check what registered MAC addresses you have?

If you log onto the router is there a "Status" page that tells you what mode its running in. Does it mention the word "bridge" or "bridging" anywhere? Does either your Mum's Netowork settings or the router mention anything like PPPoE ot L2TP?

Date: 2004-07-19 06:18 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stsquad.livejournal.com
Of course you will need to able to access the 'net from somewhere ;-)

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