The relevance of tonight’s post to this tired dribbling is the HMS Dauntless, currently (as I type this) sitting on Great Yarmouth docks but due to leave some time Sunday morning.

Shes one of the Royal Navy’s newest destroyers and we had the privilege to have a guided tour around her today from one of her Lieutenants who is her navigation officer so quite a distinguished tour guide for a bunch of civvies. Due to a tie with work, we had the offer to visit her and I managed to drag the better half and our daughter along for the visit which involved getting up at a rather nasty hour and driving for nearly two hours to get from Ipswich to the dock in Yarmouth.

Shes huge. At over 150m long, you could see her from quite a long way in the distance with her rather unusual profile which is designed to give a profile similar to a fishing vessel and I would hate to see what kind of fish she pulls up from the sea.

After being met on the dock by one of her young officers (damn did I feel old next this guy) and being taken past a couple of gentlemen armed with large rifles and casual arms resting on the large rifles (i would have bet good money on them being fully loaded), we had a tour around the flightdeck/helicopter pad at the back, launchs, operations, officers mess (nasty looking chairs in there), and some of the techy areas.


The best part was of course going on the bridge and here we come back to our post title. I sat in the captains chair and grinned like a loon the whole time. OK so the little un got to do it as well along with her stuffin’ puffin Puffpuff. I couldn’t hog the fun all by myself. I resisted many urges to ask someone to take us to warp speed mainly because I would have looked a right prat infront of the crew members on the bridge but for the first time ever I can say I felt something. It was either the spirit of my uncle slapping me round the back of the head for disrespecting his old service or the fact I was sitting in the chair of a man who is in charge of a ship costing over £1billion GBP. Either way it was a jolt. I didn’t linger too long in the chair as I honestly felt it was wrong somehow. The lieutenant told us a story about a couple of chaps on the bridge who dared each other to sit in the chair only for the Captain to walk in while one was sitting in it. I can’t imagine his fate but the fact the Captain is the ultimate authority on his ship, who am I to sully his chair?


Lets play ‘spot which launch door was the the missile fired from’


And finally, just to prove that the Navy has a sense of humour it had these posters scattered around the ship. I honestly thought it was a typo until I looked at the picture and it clicked that FOD stands for Foreign Object Damage. Har har har.

I should be updating on the UFO project but i’ve only done little dribs and drabs over the last couple of weeks so i’m waiting until i get a bit further on that. What did capture my tiny mind today was the new PC I just picked up. I feel kind of dirty for buying one from Staples but its a tiny little Intel Atom machine which has 1 gig of RAM and is a perfect little web machine. The added bonus is that it has a DVD drive in which is one thing I hate about netbooks. Optical media drives are important to me so there.
The price was what sold it to me though. The first PC I had was around £1000 and that was an old 386 with 2gig RAM and a 40mb HD. The second PC was around £1000. After that its been Mac and sufice to say the price tag has been well over £1000 for all three. Now I buy a little web machine for less than £170. Admittedly its not for me (a new family Windows PC laptop is on the cards at somepoint though) but this thing far outstrips the stats of even the clunking desktop which cost 5 times this one.
It kind of hits me where it hurts the most when i think about how much i’ve spent on upgrades for PCs and thats probably more than this thing cost.

Bah (again)

On the plus side, i’ve been enjoying working on some texturing work in c4d the last few nights. The project i’m working on at the moment may even be finished by the end of the weekend, which is good because i’ve really got to finish my Chrimbo card. I have an idea for an animated one this year but, yet again, i’m cutting it to fine.

Tomorrow (being a Friday and Children in need day) is a ‘wear your hobby to work’ day. Now how the hell does one express 3d animation as an outfit? I’ve left it too late but yesterday night I stumbled across a site with some photos on which could only begin to be called incredible.

http://testroete.com/index.php?location=head

The guy has made a giant head from a 3d model and then exported the 3d model a textured file into a Japanese app which then converts the file into a papercraft jobbie. The prospect of wearing a two foor big giant heeeeead was just too damn pant wettingly flamboyant to turn down. I had a load of reference photos of my noggin so set to in c4d. The result (at 1:30am) was a not too shabby, low poly model of myself and a rather knackered pair of eyes. At lunch time I belted out to buy some stiff card which would fit though my printer and have managed to print several pages until the point the printer realised I was actually asking to do something other than have stuff sit on top of it and has now given up after making a very loud groaning noise. There was a clunk at one point but it seems to have been the groan which killed it. I am also under the suspicion that A4 would be big enough as the eye which came out of the printer was only slightly larger than my own.

Given enough time (AKA not at the last minute) I would have taken it to a local printers have have it done at A1 or A0 size.
So I’m left with three options for my dress up day tomorrow. A Fantastic Four tshirt, lugging my camera gear in or smearing my naked body in paint… See…. its a body covered in paint… you know… Bodypaint… like the Maxon app?

Sodding please yourselves.

I still have plenty of old cinema gear from back in the day, but the prospect of wrapping myself in a roll of trailer film just isn’t appealing right now so I think I’m going to travel the road more geeky. Pity I don’t have a white lab coat and some grey hair dye to go with the FF logo, I would make a great overweight Reed.

Damn me and my hard to translate into fashion hobbies.

*cough*geek*cough*

Stone me, I only stuck the damn thing in as an afterthought instead of a handkerchief.

3Dworld hit the door mat this morning and after a non-eventful morning swimming, i went for a walk around Hipswich with my camera and the daughter of danger to photograph so of the iconic buildings we seem to have around the place. (new idea for a project coming up) and while slumming it in a playground I had a good old read.

Out with the scores (good), BIG c4d animation tutorial (very good), some non 3d related software which could fit into a 3d workflow (Flow looks like an interesting thing, must get more info for work) but the biggest change (are you sitting down Hermit?) A DVD!

Fek me, the day has finally arrived.

Bang goes my cataloging system as its in a rather nice slimline DVD case so it won’t fit in my DJ disc case. Other than that i can’t comment as i’ve not cracked open the box. Too shocked.