It’s a work morning so the weather’s far more photogenic. Typical!

At last we’re having traditional November weather. So to celebrate the fact I went out this morning with my trusty D70 and took advantage of it. (It’s a slight pity that the fog wasn’t less thick as some sunlight could have spruced things up a bit.

The full set of pictures can be found here at medium and full resolutions but below I’ve included a selection of thumbnails.

Have I ever mentioned that the theme tune to Stargate Atlantis sounds awfully like that of the old BBC children’s story programme Jackanory [MP3 of an iffy cover version]?

This weekend’s been unusual, for me anyway. It’s been social, at least on one day, and on the other something I’ve been planning to do for some time.
The details…

For the last few years I’ve always saved money on my games PC by being about 2 generations behind the gee-wiz, super-dooper exhorbitantly expensive graphics cards which have come on the market. You know the ones, costing about £300 and getting a few more frames per second than ones costing half as much but with one extra feature which you can live without.

With this in mind, at the beginning of the year I bought an nVidia GeForce FX5700LE card as games were starting to outstrip my previous card, a GeForce 4 Ti4200, with the idea that it’d be another two years or more before I’d have to upgrade again. This was before PCI Express appeared and caused a change in the rules.

When I changed my motherboard and processor in the spring I couldn’t afford the exhorbitant prices for reasonably high spec video cards so had to go for an AGP based board. I expected that because of the large installed base of AGP and the way that they usually trickle down old chipsets to the cheaper end of the market with age that I’d still be safe to think that in a year to 18 months time the FX6800 series would be cheap and readily available as an AGP card.

Anyway, time passed. This weekend the Half Life 2 technology demonstration “Lost Coast” level became available so I downloaded it. i knew that my video card couldn’t demonstrate the new technology bit but it should play the game segment ok. Indeed it did. However, I thought I’d see how the prices on the older 6800 series cards was getting on. It was at this point I got a shock.

The prices for the 6800 series cards on offer had come down as the new 7000 series was available (for PCI-E only), however, there were very few on the market, mostly the crippled LE version. Manufacturers were dropping production of the old AGP versions entirely.

So, on Monday I decided it was time to jump. If I didn’t buy now I’d have to replace my very nice and newish motherboard at the same time as a new graphics card, and the otherall price would be more than the 6800XT (slightly cut down version) which was the only one I could find in stock and for sale anywhere. Luckily it was on Scan’s “Today Only” promotion so I got about £4 off. The total, £120 including P&P.

Anyway, I now have in my machine this new card. And the best bit is? Well, the AGP version of the 6800 series are all one chip. The lower models are just those which failed quality control for the higher specification. For example, the XT version has 8 graphics pipelines and two pixel shaders, the plain 6800 has 12 graphics pipelines and 4 pixel shaders and the GT version has 16 pipelines and 4 pixel shaders. The faulty or unused units are merely masked out in a register in the BIOS. Even better, there’s a utility called Rivatuner which will allow you to enable these disabled units and unlock the extra power available. Even better is that the changes aren’t made on the card, they merely tweek the driver settings within Windows.

So, after some testing I’ve found that 4 of the pipelines and one of the shaders are truely faulty. This means that I almost have a standard version of the card for the price of the XT version.

I would have still preferred to have waited another year and got a GT version for the same price, but they will never exist and there will be no AGP versions available by then.

Last night was the first episode of a new comedy series on BBC2, Broken News.

It’s a satire on the current state of television news made in the form of a channel surfer switching from one news channel to another. It includes a BBC regional programme, a BBC News 24’a like, ITN, entertainment channel, sports channel and an american TV station (with the anchor woman played by Claudia Christian, best known as Commander Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5).

Yes, it was very funny. However, I can see the format going stale extremely quickly as after you’ve made the same jokes about how content is presented in news programmes once you can do nothing but repeat it and then it becomes unfunny. The only way I can see that they could keep it fresh is to take a leaf out of “Drop the Dead Donkey” and satire current news stories using the Broken News format as a vehicle.

Of course, whether the news producers see this programme and react to change their output so that it’s less full of pointless, stupid, dumbed down content is another matter.

Today was a mixed day.

The weather was sunny and unusually warm at 21C. A lovely day to be outside. However, due to work I saw very little of it. Usually I would have time to sit outside in such weather at lunchtime, however, today I had to attend a lunchtime meeting. At least I got to cycle into work and back again in my t-shirt.

I think I managed to see the sunshine outside for about 10 minutes in the whole day. What a waste.

One good thing, though. A number of months ago, when OpenSolaris was initially released, I signed up for a free t-shirt. I had thought that as it hadn’t arrived by June that Sun had lost my order. Today it arrived! It only took about 40 days in the postage to get over from the ‘states. I might wear it tomorrow.

Because there was nothing else on the box this evening I just had the Sunday repeat of “Top of the Pops” on and it seemed like it was stuck in some kind of late 70’s/early 80’s time frame.

In the top ten there are two early punk sounding songs, including the no.1 from Artic Monkeys which sounds very like early The Clash. Add to this a song from Goldfrapp with analogue synths in the same vein as early 80’s electro-pop, such as Depeche Mode (who are also back, apparently) and the Sugar Babes sounding more and more like a group from the Kim Wilde school and I think you get the picture.

Oh, and another surprise… McFly can actually play their instruments… and sing.. live. OK, their songs aren’t much cop (though far better than many at the moment and far better than Robbie Williams’ curent song writer), but hey, when they grow up they may even fix this. 🙂

A posting in the dpreview D50/D70 forum inspired me to return to Didcot Railway Centre to take more pictures after my original shoot in July 2002.

As it happens, today was a steam day and in addition the Flying Scotsman visited as part of an excursion it was pulling from Birmingham.

The resulting photos can be found here.

[Update]

OK, I think I should include one of the pictures as a taster…