Puddles on the Lane

Wednesday, 20th October 2004
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

The rivers is up after the rain, flowing fast and drably opaque with it's load of silt and mud.

Puddles straddle the lane. A few ragwort flowers (both species, Oxford and common) and the odd hawkweed, with its flowers closed against the damp afternoon add a touch of yellow to the towpath and the yarrow, with its creamy flowerheads, is showing, as it does for most of the year. A tree mallow, Lavatera, growing in the shrub bed by the canal basin, doesn't seem to realise that summer is over. It's still dotted with pale magenta flowers.

A lone dog walker pausing by the scrubby edge of Horbury quarry looks a forlorn figure and I'm glad we don't have a dog so that we have to go out, in such dim, damp weather as this.

Black Dog

Tessa, the dog of a friend of ours, seems content to curl up by the sofa. Those ears are so expressive; a clue to her mood.

• left: 'I'm shy'
• right: What's going on outside?!

Alert: a noise in the kitchen.	Starting to relax	Even more laid back
Zzzzz . . .	Curling up	How do you draw black shadows on a black dog?

The Hind Legs of a Robot

I start up my old 3D program Bryce 3D. It seems fine and I soon get into the tutorial. I like the program but as I work it steadily becomes more and more bug-ridden. Eventually it crashes; not only that but it even crashes Dr Watson my resident script de-bugging program.

I guess my version of Bryce is never going to work in Windows XP and I now remember it didn't run any better in previous versions of Windows. It's a shame because I'm sure that it would be fun to use, once you got used to the interface. My version is old, they're onto Bryce 5 now.

This robot is from a tutorial I tried over a year ago when I was trying out the program but the legs were as far as I got before those strange bugs started making more work impossible.

So now it's back to Vue d'Espirit 3.1 (featured on the cover disk of October's PC Format magazine).

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk