Shopping Thoughts

Went up town today (big surprise). I find that strange thoughts come to me as I wander round the shops.

We bought some shampoo for the guinea pigs. They have long hair (don't ask) and we have to keep it shiny clean. I was wondering if it had been tested on animals.

Then I went past the Early Learning Centre, where you can now buy a "Castle of Doom" for your tiny tots to play with. Only seventy quid. What kind message does this send to our newest citizens?

Scene : Christmas Morn

(FX : Sound of frantic unwrapping)

Child : "Oh daddy, it is just what I've always wanted. A dank place of total despair where all who enter can suffer torture and and a lingering death."
Father:  "Well, son, I just hope you'll play nicely with it."

Foggy Morning

A bit foggy this morning. But sunny. Fortunately I had the camera with me....

A view across the sports field

A walk through the woods....

The back of our large lecture theatre

Just some trees

The back of our building

I love autumn.

Spell with flickr

You might not have seen this before. Seldom has Rob Miles looked better.

Confused of Hull

I'm confused. This is why. Say we lived in an age where restaurants are new and fangled. People have just discovered the option of eating out and they like it. So I decide to open a new restaurant. Only mine is special. It gives the food away.

Not surprisingly, once word gets out my little restaurant is going great guns. Queues around the block. At this point things get a bit weird. One of the other restaurants in the neighborhood (it doesn't serve food quite like mine, and it is making quite a good profit at the moment) decides to buy me out for a huge sum of money, and then let me keep going giving my food away.

I get given a huuge wad of cash for starting a food business with no obvious means of support. The other restaurant gets something which may never be profitable, but at least somebody else hasn't got their hands on it.

In case you hadn't spotted it, I'm really talking about YouTube and Google. I use both of them. Google quite a bit. YouTube now and then.

I just can't think of a way in which I could ever be persuaded to pay for what YouTube has to offer. Even if they only charged me mini-bucks to watch the videos I'd find something else which was free to do in my lunch hour. In my opinion the only business plan which could possibly have worked for the YouTube folks was to get famous and hope that somebody rich bought them up before their money ran out. Which, fortunately for them, was just what happened.

Google have just spent literally billions getting their hands on YouTube, and I'm baffled as to why they have done this.

(for some reason the Microsoft LiveWriter spell checker suggests Outnumber as a replacement for YouTube - this just confuses me even more)

Code Monkey

Brian put me on to this video. It is very good, although I don't like the name of his boss....

Man Flu

I'm ill. My nose is not running. It is sprinting. I'm surrounded by tissues. My head feels as if someone has inflated a balloon full of porridge inside it. (not sure how I know this, but it does) 

I told number one wife that I was ill. Then I told her again as she brought me a cup of tea. She looked at me appraisingly. Apparently I have what is called "man flu". This is an illness which reduces a man to a useless, moaning wimp but has no effect whatsoever on women, who manage to just shrug off such minor afflictions and carry on regardless.

I was going to disagree. I was going to tell her never mind "Man Flu", that I was only keeping going at this restricted level thanks to my incredible mental strength and resilience. I was going to tell her that if she had what I've got she too would be laid out on the sofa and moaning.

But I didn't feel up to it. I just sipped my tea and asked for a chocolate biscuit.

I'm ill.

(but not too ill to write. I've just posted the latest episode of Trip Hazard. Book now for the movie..)

Busy Busy

Had a fairly quiet Sunday. Managed to mow the lawns (not sure why, every time I cut the grass the darned stuff grows back) and finished off the Moosaic program (I actually got my free samples from Moo last week and they are quite neat - next I'm going to make a 100 picture mosaic and see what it looks like). The program is working OK and I've got an installer too, but I have a rule that I play with my programs on a bunch of different machines before I send them out into the outside world, so it will be a couple of days before you can have a go at making your own Flickr mosaics...

Oh, and I've been dealing with a steady stream of emails from people who came to see us yesterday. Thank you for all the kind words, and if you haven't had a reply from me yet, I will get around to you tomorrow. We will also post out all the C# books then too.

Open Daze

We had an open day at the university today. Before hand we went up town to buy a few bits and bobs (I got two DVD collections - one six pounds and the other four - quality stuff). The light was good and I took the camera.

This is a view of the Hammonds Department Store. Impressive architecture when you notice it...

Then it was up to the university to give an open day talk. Before the talk Jon showed me this which was in a recent Develop magazine.

Quite cheering really, the quote is from a Microsoft XNA person.

Then we had a huuge turnout for people who want to see what we do. So many that they were sharing the glasses in the Hive (Hull Immersive Visual Environment). I took a picture of the audience with their 3D specs on...

Those shades really suit you.....

Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the presentations. Remember, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Cars and Horses

A car is a device which will take you from A to B. You turn a wheel and the machinery in it makes the car go in the desired direction. A horse is an animal which will let you sit on its back and might take you where you want to go. If you pull the reigns on a horse, and it agrees with that direction, it will go there. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, a horse will just take off. Or refuse to move.

I used to use a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. This computer is a car. It does what I ask, when I ask. It just works. Lovely. Emboldened by this I then move on to a Toshiba M400 device. This computer is a horse. When it works, and you have the wind in your hair (metaphorically speaking) it is wonderful.

But every now and then it misbehaves. The screen goes dark and refuses to light up again. It freezes (usually in the middle of a presentation) and needs to be rebooted. Sometimes it slows down for no good reason. Some bits just don't work. At the moment it is just useful enough for me to live with the foibles. But if it locks up in the middle of a Software Engineering lecture again I may have to rethink its place in my life.....

Party Masters

After Thursday's party for the first year, tonight it was the turn of the Masters students to sample our beer tokens. We followed the same pattern as last time, although this time I varied the presentation a bit by having the tablet PC battery go flat just as we were going through the quiz answers. Note to self, don't leave home without the power supply.

These are the quiz winners, note the slightly larger prize this time.

After the quiz, and a lot of dicussion about the answer to the last question (it is on the screen above - can you figure out what the question actually was?) we went on to more Guitar Hero and other silly stuff.

We had a guy turn up who was awesome on this. He played some of the tracks on "expert" mode. What a performance.

Then we tried to find out how far you could get from an XBOX 360 and still play Geometry Wars. (the answer is a very impressive 75 feet - then you lose sight of the screen and crash). Those remote controllers let you get pretty remote..

Hi for Collectormania

And so it was another Sunday of rising at 4:30 am and the zooming off down the motorway to mingle with the stars and buy silly bits of overpriced plastic at the Collectormania in Milton Keynes. We've been going to these for a while, initially to meet up with hobbits and the like, but now more likely to have a drift around the many stands selling all sorts of stuff. Of course I took a camera (or two)

..of course it is cool - I'm there

Maggie Grace signs her name

Amber Benson tries to get us to sign it for her

They have Krispy Kreme donuts at Milton Keynes now. "A heart attack with a hole in it". And free samples. Yay!

It was very tempting, but it wouldn't fit in our toilet and 60 quid is a bit expensive. I've no idea what the thing on the right is.

Then it was back into the car to trundle back to Hull.

To Durham. And Back.

Took number one son to Durham today for him to resume his studies. Then brought him back to Hull. All rather complicated. Tomorrow we are heading off for Collectormania (one of my dafter pursuits) and as he would like to go too, we are performing this rather strange shuffling of student and stuff.

Means a fair bit of driving though. I reckon that my average speed over the entire weekend will be around 20 miles per hour....

Shiny Doncaster

Went to Doncaster today for a presentation. The university has a relationship with Doncaster College, where we accredit two of their degree courses. The students are based and taught at Doncaster but we award the degree.

Anyhoo, I went down to say hello to the Business Computing crew and give a presentation about final year projects. They are a nice bunch and the talk seemed to go OK, although I may have spoiled the atmosphere a little by telling the undertaker joke right at the end.

The brand new Doncaster campus is very shiny - and this is just the back of the college

Jane Eyre vs Aeon Flux

Tonight in the Miles household, for your viewing pleasure:

• Downstairs number one wife was watching improving cultural content based on literary classic : Jane Eyre
• Upstairs I was watching brain rotting science fiction tosh : Aeon Flux

I've seen Jane Eyre a few times. Once you have worked out that her surname is actually pronounced "Air" and reached the four magic words "Reader, I married him" (hope this doesn't give to much away folks) you have taken pretty much everything away from the story that you need.

Although, having said that, and sat through Aeon Flux (which also has its pronunciation problems) I have noticed some similarities between the two:

Male Lead : both of them have a male protagonist who may/may not be a baddie (you guess). Both males have equally dodgy hairstyles and stupid names. Rochester sounds like something from a sixties heist movie ("Tonight we steal the Rochester Diamonds...") and don't get me started about having an evil overload with the first name Trevor. Both of them looked like they were thinking of getting sideburns too.

Plot : Actually there isn't that much in common here. However, they do both have big explosions now and then. And both of the male leads have crazy people trying to kill them.

Female Lead : OK, so Jane Eyre doesn't have skin tight leather clothing and access to futuristic weaponry. But she does wear those dresses that reach all the way to the floor and let her move about like a Dalek with no obvious means of propulsion. I just hope that she can climb stairs. Of course Aeon Flux doesn't actually climb stairs at all, she would use a double somersault flip with a half twist up the banister rail in case the stairs vanished when she was half way up them.

Happy Ending : (plot spoiler alert - though if you read the bold bit it is probably too late) Both have a happy ending. Despite being shot a great deal (but missed an improbably huge number of times) Aeon ends up in a happy clinch with her man. In Jane Eyre something equally unlikely happens, when her new husband mysteriously regains his sight after having married her.

So there you are. Stay tuned for more cultural insights. Once I've finished watching the Simpsons.

Evil Jag Drivers

Boy did it rain this afternoon. Heavy stuff. The little dimple in the road near our house filled up with water to make a mini-ford. There was a Fiesta parked in it. A Ford in a ford. How poetic. Not that that poetry was really on my mind as I trudged up the road to the chip shop to fetch Friday tea.

As I was walking along the pavement, trying to avoid the puddles that actually went over my shoes, I noticed a big Jaguar car approaching. The driver wasn't slowing down for the dimple in the road, in fact he was speeding up. Just as he reached me the awful truth dawned. He was heading for a pool of water in the gutter that I was just passing. He went past at speed and with the evident intention of soaking me to the skin.

Which he nearly succeeded in doing. Fortunately, thanks to some fancy footwork on my part, he only managed to drench my trousers. The only good thing that came out of this was that he then drove at speed into our little ford, sending a jet into the air reminiscent of the water splash at Disney world. Unfortunately his car kept going, but I hope it was a nasty shock for him.

Moosaic Takes Shape

One of "Robert's Rules" is:

Any software development takes longer than you think, even if you allow for this.

Of course, having a day job as well has kind of hampered development...

So I've not finished the Moosaic program just yet. But it is looking quite tidy:

Coming to a setup program near you....

I've got the image download and the grid selection just about sorted, Now I just need to get the tile output done and we will be in business.

At it again

Came in tonight with an urge to write some code. Just as soon as I'd finished watching "Harvey". Wonderful old film staring James Stewart. Anyhoo, I'm going to write another Flickr program, this time to create lots of little images from a single Flickr picture. The idea is that you can make mosaics to have printed out on little cards.  I've called it my "Moosaic" program (not my idea I'm afraid).

I've got so far and run out of steam for tonight(must be my age). Should have it going tomorrow.....

Time Travel

I'm slowly going back through the days last week and posting what we did and some pictures. I've no real idea why I do this, but for the sake of completeness I just like to have an entry for each day. Anyhoo, feel free to browse backwards into my holiday past.

Speed Meeting

We had a staff meeting today. Over in fifty minutes. Amazing. Kudos to the chairman, and the idea of sending out all the reports electronically in advance. I'd taken the Tablet PC in so that I could even have the notes on the screen (and doodle on them, just like in the old days with paper). I thought I was being high tech and kewl.

So much for being ahead of the game. I counted four other tablets and laptops in use during the meeting. At least I'd turned the sound down on mine, heh.

Return of the Rob

Well, I'm back from my holidays. Went loads of places, took lots of pictures, a good time was had. And now I'm back. And raring to go.