Irksome, and then not

So I'm now, finally, rendering the frames of my short film that I've been posting stills from here every so often, and unfortunately, due to reasons I won't bore you with, I am having to render it in my second choice piece of software for the purpose. The reason why it is not my first choice should become obvious when I tell you that I've had to write a small piece of software of my own in Python to check the output of the renders and get the renderer to retry any broken frames (of which it is generating many - not my fault) or kickstart it again when it crashes, which it does frequently. I shouldn't have to do this dagnabbit. I paid a lot of money for this application and frankly it should be able to render a glass (non-raytraced) box and some coloured cubes, but apparently not. Grrr. I hate it when technology that should work and is expensive just doesn't.

But software and hardware that just DOES work comes in the shape of my Miglia TV Mini which I purchased for my PowerBook to enable me to watch the World Cup any time, any place, any where. It's a tiny USB connecting stick with an aerial and after a bit of software installage, boom, there's all the Freeview TV channels on my pooter. And I can record them and encode them to play on my iPod too. Fabulous.

And so on balance I'm still happy with technology this morning.