10°C, clearing. Ride 65 miles

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New game: Far Cry 2, driving around in the African savannah.
Real life, cycling around Warwickshire for 65 miles. One of them makes you fit

Cold air approaching, 12°C & dropping. Smells of rain.

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Spammers are truly insane, these all claim to be from the Inland revenue. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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Education "Split" on the theme of the great divide in Education: BBC. Can't wait for some presentation on this idea in our school. My questions are ready. The problem with the article is this: We are successful in moving students from poor areas into University, they are 'improving their lot' and is it any surprise that the average IQ in those areas is decreasing. take out the bright ones, and the proportion of thick people increases in an area. that is no failure of education, quite the opposite.

Browsing an upmarket dating site I found this gem:
The writer was Russian, you'd never guess.

20°C, light clouds

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The map is from Microsoft, it is capable of showing more detail, but you have ot follow the link to see it. It appears that the recent maps are more detailed than the flight sim; both owned by Microsoft.
Eastern Siberia, just so you know. Though in the middle of the world's largest continent, there is water everywhere.

19°C, rain.

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Firefox: get version 3.5+ if you use this and a multicore processor- it now seems to multithread evenly on all four here. That is good, it means that the browser is nearly as fast as Google Chrome.
FSX-scenery: as long as they are relatively simple, making airstrips for this flight simulator doesn't take long. I got six started or done yesterday. Okay, I admit, it was a monster session on a day of pouring rain.

• UESS_Cherskiy
• UEBB Batagay
• UHMK_Keperveyem
• UEBW_Verhojansk
• UHMI Mys Schmidta (aka Moyale on Nth coast of E Siberia)
• UEST_Tiksi (finished a while ago, but includes detailed replacement for the River Lena delta)
  

Most of these strips are next to rivers, some are old cold-war bomber bases with very long runways, most are semi-derelict. Some are closed.
Siberians don't usually live far from a river (it's transport, food and somewhere to drive in the long winter months). These landacapes are obviously remote, barren and frighteningly beautiful- to use an old-fashioined word- 'sublime'.
AVsim's library is back online so there will be available there soon. I may as well use Live's Skydrive here to host them too.
Weird lands; have a look in Google-Earth.

19°C, except when it rains.

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There is no bridge connecting Pevek to the island; okay so what?
But how do you remove the erroneous bridge in FSX flight sim?

Any suggestions?

12°C, torrential with thunder

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Delta done (just about): You get to know how these oxbow lakes form around kettle-holes after doing this kind of drawing. the KML file is getting too heavy to manage now, so I need ot call a halt soon- there are 190 ponts & lakes drawn in to add onto the ones already present.

This printscreen was taken at the current time & weather, the melt is underway leading to the very short summer, but 24hr daylight.
I will probably make this file available on this site until AvSim is recovered.

14°C, & strong winds

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Journey home was hard today; that wind.
Delta building: About 75% complete I'd say, the town of Tiksi is misplaced and has the wrong shoreline- I will fix that soon.

-2:+7°C, clear.

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Slartybartfast: he won an award for designing all the crinkly bits around Norway, I'm going for one in Siberia, specifically on the delta of the River Lena in Flight Sim X. Look at this for a landscape, those ponds are a few miles across for each one.

This delta is on the Arctic circle, which makes this delta-scape look odd. Deltas don't often have kettle-holes do they?
Okay, I think it looks odd then, you are entitled to an opinion.
I bet the place smells a bit in late summer, what with the permafrost melting and all that.
Instead of worrying about that- play a game instead.

8°C, Sun then really stormy rain

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Google Chrome is another Mozilla web browser. It's fabulous, quick easy to use and unsullied by frivolous nonsense (no themes- wooo...). Some "web2.0" features don't work properly, but it's just so fast ... so what?

However, Live Space edits only in html mode, which is alright for some (you Arnaud).
Each tab in Chrome is listed separately in Task manager, also the same page open in Chrome consumes 1/2 the memory that Firefox uses. So run Chrome while you are using the computer for other things. Actually, there are some cosmetics- the start page shows a picture of pages you opened last session. Keyboard shortcuts are the same as Firefox. You don't stand a chance IE7.

 5°C, changing for the wetter.

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No interruption: to my internet connection - surprise.
A cartoon strip comes with an Ikea flat-pack stool. Excellent finale!

The comic-strip above has all the essential elements of a story, characters introduced, scene setting, the bizarre central action of a man using stools as clogs, then the dramatic finale of him doing a head-plant into a fridge-freezer. Conflict is there in the scene where we are forbidden from painting pictures of the central hero character- the foot-stool.
While in Yantar:

The cat is sleeping.

5°C, rain.

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Some UK ISPs have censored a Wikpedia article about the German rock band "The Scorpions", one album cover has caused the problem, 32 years after it was released. That's what I call slow reactions. My very own Claranet have joined in the blockage. See if yours does too: Blocked
I'd guess that this band were the inspiration for Spinal Tap's "Smell the Glove" parody. the album cover is pretty easy to find on other sites though, it's only Wikipedia that is barred.
Funnily enough, the page is not blocked in school.

9°C, light showers.

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Dual Boot: my computer runs both Windows 2000 & XP. Recently the Win 2000 (2K) was fatally damaged by a virus. But running the repair ultility also broke WinXP- it just wouldn't boot. So I gave up and installed a fresh copy of Win2K. Installing an older OS renders the newer one inaccessible. Today I am hugely relieved that there was a simple fix found on the web.

Problem: running the repair feature, (rather like installing a new OS in the wrong order) places two files in the root drive (normally C: )
NTDETECT.COM and NTDR
the Win2K version of these files is different to WinXP's version and not forwards compatible.
Solution: Copy & paste the files from the Win XP installation disc and replace the ones in your boot drive.
After: it's likely that you may need to edit the boot.ini file also.

Why be so bothered: my XP installation is not to hard to replace, nor is installing the various applications and games there. The big problem that would have takes all week is setting everything up, all those config files, plugins and the rest that make programmes work together properly.
Now, I'm off to test some of it.
This is where I got it from.

4°C, rain showers, but wintry showers are approaching.

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Winter wasteland: what an unecessary day- MS Windows is broken on this computer and it's taking all day to fix it. It has been snowing outside, slushy dull grey day.

Another milestone- 20,000 views on this blog was passed today.

It's harder to tell these days who has been visiting, it used to be really obvious., now all I have are mysteries.

19°C, light clouds, clearing later.

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Nice response to my Chernobyl scenery for FSX:
Simviation Forum, he said:
It's broken the 1000 downloads point now just on AVSim alone. There are numerous other hosts that don't detail the number of downloads. Anyway, I do intend to work out how to add in Pripyat; the current landclass poly is hardly ideal. It would be perfect if I could place the Ferris-wheel, the Polyssia Hotel and the tower blocks.
Here's the link to the v1. if any readers want it (Microsoft Flight Sim X only): ChernNPP

15°C, windy.

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First day of the summer break, in a way the best- the whole holiday is ahead of us .
Leonard Cohen, A Thousand Kisses Deep:
 
This gave me the shivers the first times I heard it.

River Angara, Siberia

Scenery for FSX: to replace a 380 miles section of this major river that drains from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the North.

From  N58° 57.191' / E101° 14.592'
to:
N58° 6.028' /  E92° 59.629'

The default section of the river are left untouched.

The default scenery shows this river empty, except for coastlines. For a waterway that is up to 3 miles wide, and a source of hydro-electric power, this is some omission. This scenery fills the gap. I have tried to set the river's shape to fit seamlessly with the default water shapes, this includes using a similar number of corner points.
As a bonus, I have placed autogen polygons to represent the some of the bigger villages/towns from Kezhma to Strelka.

To install, simply drop these files into your addon scenery folder and run FSX. Make sure, of course, that Addon scenery is listed in the Scenery manager.

The optional file VFR Bratsk R_Angara can be placed in:
My Documents>Flight Simulator X Files
It is a flight plan you can use to make finding the river easier if you are unfamiliar with Siberia.