... and my last entry is from 2007.

I'm not lazy, rather just busy on other things and busy keeping the photos section up to date.

The useful links part is being refreshed also.

It's 2007..
[Edit] And now 2008

A friend of mine sent me this amazing Kuretake pen. It has an amazing consistency of line and a nice variable width from very thin to a couple of mm. I wasn't able to find them on Google, so I'm guessing they're not widely available?

I just discovered brush pens. Refillable ink pens with a brush tip. Generally used for line art in comic artwork. I found the Pentel GFKP in a local art shop after having a very disappointing experience with the Letraset TRIA. The Pentel is outstandingly good. The tip is just small enough to do fine detail and reasonably thick lines too.

I also got the Pentel color brush, in black. It is also very good but I found the brush was too big and I kept making globby lines with my shaky hand.

Here are the pens:

If you're bored, you can head over to the gallery and see what my first attempts at inking look like. It probably looks like I have parkinsons, given the shaky lines I draw.

These things bounce around my head like a fly trapped between venetian blinds and a closed window.

- auntie aliasing
- unswerving machine
- unfortunatelely

There are others. I might even post them if I get the urge.

I occasionally find I can't sleep at night. Rather than waste time trying to get back to sleep, I sit in front of the computer and attempt to compose some tunes.

• Quiet Earth (1.13mb)
• Dawning Mystery (650kb)

There's no talent involved here; feel free to flame these efforts. I wouldn't be surprised if you decided to rip your eyes out half way through listening.

Below is a platypus 3d model I've started recently. For the curious among you, I've been using Silo3D to build the mesh. It's a very intuitive modeling solution and definitely beats 3ds MAX hands down for speed in creating organic objects.

All this 3d malarky is only a therapeutic pass time. I add bits to models when it pleases me. I'm waiting for the Silo3D 2.0 release which includes UV mapping. It should make texturing the platypus a lot easier.

Things to add:

• Paws / Claws
• Eyes!!
• Refined details, nostrils on the beak
• Fix the proportions. I think this platypus looks slightly obese.

I recently saw a programme on channel 5 about flying saucers. Whilst the programme was largely devoid of useful information, the technical diagrams of the saucers inspired me.

There was a certain beauty to the designs. Here's a work in progress, not quite up to the standard of the ones I saw, working from memory.

It wasn't terribly easy to do, but some research led me to the following information:

** First step
- BACKUP YOUR DATABASE!!
- Run update.php 2005/1/14
That updates your database structure to accept new information used by 4.6.1

*** Fix problem with blocks

- Add the following SQL through phpMyAdmin

ALTER TABLE blocks DROP path;
ALTER TABLE blocks ADD visibility tinyint(1) NOT NULL;
ALTER TABLE blocks ADD pages text NOT NULL;

*** Fix problem with the search

- Add the following SQL through phpMyAdmin

CREATE TABLE search_total (
word varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',

I've updated my list of web reference links. It's not yet complete however it should be useful to people interested in building web sites.